Is exercise more important than diet?

Why exercise and not diet, should be your focus.

Whether your goal is to lose weight, look better, be happier or to be healthier, two of the most important lifestyle factors you should focus on are diet and exercise. Some people prefer to focus on diet while others like to eat more or less what they want but instead train hard to reach their goals. Obviously, focusing on both would be ideal.

But when it comes to which is best, exercise or diet, research suggest a clear winner. And it is not diet.

Keep on reading, because it is important that you know exactly how powerful exercising is. Ever since my own believes and observations built through personal experiences with thousands of clients were affirmed by doing a course in Exercise is Medicine, I have dived deeper into studying the effects of exercise on health and longevity.

I will explain:

1. Why the jury is still out on many aspects of diet
2. Why exercising is the best way to reach all your goals
3. How often you should exercise, and what type of exercise is optimal.

 

1. Experts can’t agree on the best diet.

Experts and the general public alike have good reason to mistrust any recommendations by institutions such as the USDA. Their nutrition guides have always been surrounded by controversy. As soon as they release a new guide, experts with different views will heavily criticize some of their findings.

Claims have been made that the USDA do not always act in the best interest of the public, for example- experts in 1992 featured fruits and vegetables as the biggest group, not breads. According to some this chart was overturned at the hand of special interests in the grain, meat, and dairy industries, all of which are heavily subsidized by the USDA.

“USDA censored that research-based version of the food guide and altered it to include more refined grains, meat, commercial snacks and fast foods”- Luise Light, MS, Ed.D. (Former  USDA Director of Dietary Guidance and Nutrition Education Research)

Personally, I think the nutrition guides have come a long way since 1992. Probably because it gets harder to hide the truth from the public!

Look, it is easy to criticize governments, but you have to see the whole picture. They are  responsible to keep on providing food for everybody, everyday. Food that are affordable and sustainable. Farmers need subsidies. With an ever increasing population, it is just not reasonable to expect that we can all live off grass-fed meat and organic vegetables.

First of all, the economics of it all just won’t work. How many families can afford grass-fed meat? Unless there is a complete overhaul of the world economy, governments are forced to try and find ways to feed the nations in an affordable way.

I am not one for deceiving the public, but I can see why it has happened and why it will continue to happen.

Researchers can’t agree on the best way to eat.

Before I move on, I want to provide you with the biggest reason why diet should not be your main focus.

Bodybuilders and fitness models like to tell us that looking good is 90% diet and 10% working out. Just about every bodybuilder follows a diet that would consist of eating a surplus of calories while building muscle before switching to a calorie deficit during the horrible cutting phase.

A typical cut diet would be very high in protein and very low in fat. Yep, chicken breast and broccoli. That is why bodybuilders are considered by some to be professional dieters, and I agree. Not many people can or want to be as diligent in dieting as they are.

Now, before I get back to my point, the bodybuilding diet is backed by research that it will indeed reduce your body fat. And bodybuilders have been using it for many decades to get competition ready. It works. So why don’t we all just follow a bodybuilding diet and get lean?

It only works for a short while. Bodybuilders are typically only lean for a day. They do their contest and get their photos. But then they need to recover. It is not uncommon for them to have stomach issues, fatigue, skin and even hair loss problems for weeks after they return to normal eating. Remember, for them it is a contest, a sport. It is not about being healthy or even looking good. In fact, many bodybuilders are fat most of the time and it doesn’t bother them. They only need to look good once or twice a year.

Like I said, I don’t think you should consider getting your dream body the bodybuilding way. It will not work for most of us because we simply won’t be as diligent. Eating precise calories in precise macros measured to the gram at precise intervals is far from natural. And I haven’t even mentioned steroids.

The most widely accepted popular diets for weight loss all have one thing in common- it restricts the amount of calories you consume. That is the one thing that researches tend to agree on, or at least don’t disagree about.

So, it is pretty simple. Eat less. Get lean. Nothing to it. Only thing is, we all know it is not that simple.

I am not going into all the different diets in this post. All I can do is confirm what you probably already know: that just about every weight loss diet is painful.

On the one hand you have your high fat type of diets like Atkins and Keto. As soon as you run out of stored glycogen, you will feel terrible. Proponents claim you will feel better after a period of “fat adoption”. I have tried it many years ago and it never felt good. It worked okay for weight loss, at least while suffering through the diet, but what it did to my state of mind and my hormones, I would not like to repeat. It left me unable to perform on a high level during running. Even after two months of eating mostly fat I never managed to train with the same intensity as before.

On the other hand you have your more dietitian accepted type of diets, which are mostly low fat and high carb, and always low calorie. These are the diets that make you feel hungry and tired all the time. You are almost guaranteed to cheat during them by gorging yourself on something specific. Cravings are intense and hard to resist.

If you are still unsure what the biggest reason is why diet is not the best way to focus on then here it is:

“Restricting calories deliberately is against the very core of your survival instincts, which are hardwired in your biology.”

Doesn’t matter if is through counting calories or through cutting out whole food groups or macros like the Keto diet or Low fat diets. The more restrictive and unbalanced they are, the higher the risk to your health and well being.

The second biggest reason why diet is not the best way to focus on for health, is that there are just too much conflicting advice out there. Research seems to contradict recommendations.

If you spend a lot of time online you will get bombarded with articles on why low fat is best, or why high fat is best, or why high protein is best. Or why intermittent fasting is best, or carb cycling…

So what does the research say? Well apparently anything you want it to say:

“Research suggest low carbohydrate is best for fat loss”

and

“Research suggest low fat is best for fat loss”

and

“Research suggest high protein is the key to weight loss”

or on health you are just as likely to come across headlines like “Red meat is good for you” than “Meat is bad for you”. Same goes for grains. Some say it is a very important part of eating healthy while others say it is the cause of all disease and everything that is wrong with our health.

Yep, we humans definitely know what is good and bad for us:

Saturated fat is bad, or no it is actually good. Or maybe not. Or maybe it is.

Humans need saturated fats because we are warm blooded- Western Price foundation.

Your body doesn’t actually need saturated fat.- Weareladder.com

I could go on and on.

Look at this snippet from a Google search:

 

Okay, so the fact that we can’t agree on the best way to eat doesn’t mean we should ignore diet. The topic of the article is about which is best: diet or exercise. Where should your focus be? As you can see there are just too many unreliable and contradictory advice on diet. How could you focus on something that you don’t believe?

I believe most people fail at diets because firstly, they feel horrible while doing them, and secondly because there is always the option of trying another diet. “If the intermittent fasting doesn’t work, I’ll try going keto.”

While dieting, you are always fighting your instincts. Your whole existence depends on food. You need food to survive. Plenty of it and, if you want to thrive, a huge variety of food, frequently.

“You can take the person out of the Stone Age, not the Stone Age out of the person”

There isn’t consensus at this stage as to which diet is optimal, but I think it is pretty safe to say that a balanced diet comprising of mostly real, unrefined food is best for health. There is no reason to believe otherwise.

Focus on eating for health, not for weight

I will go into detail into what I consider the best diet is in another article. With “best diet”, I mean healthiest way to eat, both in the long and in the short run: providing boundless, consistent energy, without making you fat. I am busy with research and analyses of my own collected data from working with thousands of clients. As soon as I have put it all together, I will share the article.

The last thing I want to say about diet and why it may not be the best thing to do for you to focus on, when compared with exercise is this: Going against your biology is a fight you will ultimately lose.

Deliberately eating less than you should is going against everything your body and mind is programmed for. So is not eating any carbohydrate or not eating any meat or any fat.

So does this mean you should listen to your hunger pangs when you see an ad for pizza or KFC? Isn’t that your biology telling you what it wants? Or that cake at the coffee shop? Or that ice cream? Or that craving for chocolate? No.

But you shouldn’t need to resist it. You should be able to not want it. Your cravings for these “foods” should be almost non-existent or at least few and far in between. If your focus on the right stuff for long enough, these fattening, health compromising foods will become a non-issue.

Humans can survive on an extremely wide variety of foods and diets. Your body can handle “unhealthy” foods pretty well. But if you expect to stay healthy, lean and without any serious diseases on a diet of fast foods or processed foods, you are going to be very disappointed. Like I said, you shouldn’t even want to have these so-called foods.

So what is the solution?

Focus on exercise.

In part 2 I will explain why your focus should be on exercise, rather than diet. And how exercise can change you in every way. You will learn that-

Exercise is the most reliable and measurable thing you can do for health.

Getting fit will change how your body handles what you eat and your relationship with food.

Exercising the prescribed way will result in countless positive changes at cellular level.

Like I have said many times:

“Always focus on health first, the rest will follow.”

That is why exercise is the only starting point you should consider. In short, exercise keeps your body alive. If you stop moving, you start fading away.

Obviously certain types of exercise is better than others to achieve different goals.Fortunately, the research is pretty clear on the effects of different types of activities and strong evidence exist on the optimal frequencies of training. I have spent many years using the best of researched protocols and methods to arrive at the way I train, and the way I train my clients. Online and in real life.

Sign up today to receive part 2 of this article in which I’ll show you why research on the health benefits are clear and also, I’ll provide you with where and how you should start.

You have the power to change.

Focus on exercise