Have you ever wondered which is more important for weight loss between eating healthy and exercising?
It’s a great question that I love to address, because both healthy eating and exercising are extremely powerful and healthy methods for burning fat. What’s more exciting is that the combination of the two can raise your rate of fat loss up to an incredible level!
A lot of people want to know whether they should diet or exercise to lose weight, and so we are going to dig deep into evaluating the effectiveness of healthy diet vs exercise for weight loss, and also the effectiveness of using both methods at the same time.
In this article I am going to discuss:
#1- The effectiveness of using healthy eating or exercise as stand-alone methods for losing weight
#2- Why healthy eating tends to be more important for weight loss
#3- How effective the combination of dieting and exercising at the same time can be
I’ll share my personal experiences with trying to lose weight with each method, we’ll see what some research has to say on the subject, and we will also logically break down the subject ourselves… solidifying what most people already suspect (that diet + exercise is incredible!)
Evaluating your current habits
To effectively determine whether diet or exercise will make a bigger impact for you personally in your weight loss efforts, ask yourself which of those areas you could use the most help in.
For example, if you already get a moderate amount of exercise but your diet is very unhealthy, then eating healthy will definitely make a bigger difference over increasing your exercise activity, at least at first.
However, if it’s the other way around, and if you already eat kind of healthy but don’t get much exercise at all, you may find that adding exercise into your routine at will be the most important thing to focus on at first.
But when you ask yourself this question of what area you are lacking in the most, don’t be hard on yourself if you come to find that you are eating very unhealthy AND not getting much exercise at all… because that means you can make an even bigger difference by making healthy improvements.
Some people who are wondering whether diet or exercise is more important for weight loss are just starting their journey, and wanting to know which one to focus on first.
But some people who wonder that same question are already working hard towards their goals and wondering how to best step up their results.
In both cases, it’s important to evaluate your current habits so that you know what areas need the most work, and therefore how you can make the biggest impact by making a reasonable change that you can consistently maintain.
How effective is eating healthy for weight loss?
Eating a healthy diet has become famous for being the most important and impacting thing to focus on when losing weight.
For most people who are overweight, it was an unhealthy diet that led them to gaining weight, and a healthy diet that is needed to reverse the process and lead them to their weight loss goal.
Our modern sedentary lifestyles still make a huge negative impact on our health and weight… but it is our poor diets that are the leading cause of wide-scale weight gain.
When an unhealthy diet is the cause of your weight gain, that means that you have lots of room for improvement, and that transitioning to a healthy diet will be extremely effective for helping you lose weight.
Unhealthy foods are high in calories and typically very low in valuable nutrients, which means that they cause you to store fat quickly and do a very poor job at satisfying your hunger.
This creates a vicious cycle of never feeling satisfied, always overeating, and constantly gaining weight.
But when you begin to transition to a healthy diet, exactly the opposite happens.
Healthy foods are low in calories and high in valuable nutrients, which means that eating more of them will reduce your daily calorie consumption while giving you more volume of food and satisfying nutrients at the same time.
This is exactly how healthy food causes you to lose weight without the need to be hungry.
When you fill your belly with healthy foods, you actually replace the unhealthy foods that you would have eaten otherwise.
The volume of space in your stomach is literally filled, which fulfills one type of hunger signal that we experience… and it also satisfies you on a nutritional level which further reduces the cravings for unhealthy food and fulfills the other aspect of hunger.
So with concern to super healthy foods, the more you eat, the more you lose.
By super healthy foods, I am talking about the most natural and nutritious foods that there are.
Vegetables, fruits, whole grains (brown rice, oats), beans / legumes, nuts, seeds, and also unprocessed meat, are all examples of foods that are amazing for weight loss.
These types of food are what are called, “whole foods.”
Whole foods contain lots of satisfying nutrients despite being low in calories, and digest slowly.
Vegetables in particular are extremely low in calories and high in nutrients, especially leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli.
These qualities lead to extremely effective and hunger-free weight loss, when natural / whole foods are consumed frequently.
But you don’t have to eat only the absolute healthiest foods 100% of the time to successfully lose weight.
To build a healthy diet that has enough variety to last a lifetime, you should also make as many healthy trades as you can, for packaged foods such as bread, pasta, yogurt, cereal…
These types of foods are modified and processed by companies, and although choosing a whole food would be the better choice… when you are going to eat these packaged foods that have become a normal part of our modern lives, choosing the right type (such as wheat versions of bread products or all-natural cereals) will help you get more satisfying nutrients while consuming fewer calories and less chemicals that spike insulin.
The key to sticking to your healthy diet is to focus on consistently improving your diet content, and ridding yourself of the idea of perfection.
So long as you make a significant improvement over your previous eating habits, eating more and more healthy foods on a weekly or monthly basis… your daily calorie consumption will constantly be declining, and so will your weight.
You would be surprised at how quickly the results add up with simply adding one or two healthy meals per day.
With the addition of healthy food comes the replacement of unhealthy food, without you having to actively think about restricting foods or worse going hungry.
Check out this article on defeating obesity with healthy foods if you want to learn more about how eating healthy food causes weight loss.
What happens when you try losing weight with diet alone
But just because healthy eating is the most important factor in losing weight, doesn’t mean that you should neglect exercise.
Later I’ll express the importance of both eating healthy and exercising, and tell you how to ease into both healthy habits at a pace that you can manage, but before that let’s consider how a sedentary lifestyle might limit your full potential despite the incredible power of healthy eating.
When you lose weight just by eating healthy, without exercise… some of the following may happen:
#1- Your rate of fat loss might be less than you hoped for if you are not getting much exercise, even when you are eating healthy… since it will be a bit harder to create a calorie deficit.
#2- You will lose your muscle, even though you are eating healthy and giving your body the nutrition it needs to maintain much more muscle than those who starve themselves for weight loss. When you don’t ever exercise while losing weight, your body will have the tendency to burn your muscle along with fat.
Without exercise you will lose fat slower since the calorie deficit that you create each day will be almost entirely dependent on your eating habits.
To get the same level of results from healthy eating alone that you could get with healthy eating and exercise combined (more on this below)… you would have to be far more diligent about eating healthy.
So if you’re dieting efforts remain at the same level but you remove exercise from the equation, not only will you be in a smaller calorie deficit than if you exercised… but without working your muscles on a normal basis your body will preferentially shuttle excess energy into fat storage, rather than into your muscle tissues or using it as instant energy.
It’s not just that you will get a lesser fat burning result when you don’t exercise… you will also lose a lot more muscle while you are losing weight if you are not staying active.
Of course, eating healthy food rather than starving yourself altogether goes a long way towards helping you keep your muscle, but while in fat burning mode if you are not using your muscles than you will be losing them.
How effective is exercise for weight loss?
Exercise is also a very powerful thing to focus on when you are trying to lose weight.
If you currently get a very small amount of exercise or physical activity on a normal basis, starting to exercise consistently will help you to start burning lots of calories and fat.
(The question is whether the reduction in calories will be enough to create a calorie deficit that can overcome the calories and fat you are adding back on with your current eating habits. More on this below.)
Dedicating to consistent exercise will help you burn any excess calories that you consume so that you don’t store them as fat, and under the right conditions will help you burn more calories than you consume… which of course means losing weight!
The great thing about exercise is that a little bit goes a long way.
Lots of people don’t exercise at all because they feel overwhelmed by the false notion of needing to exercise for an hour every day.
In reality you can spend 15 to 20 minutes exercising a few times per week and get amazing fat loss results from your efforts.
The key is to work as hard as you safely can during your workout so that you actually make a big impact in a short amount of time.
You may think that the more reps you do and the longer your session is the better… but it’s actually more effective to get a shorter, more intense, and in the case of weight lifting… heavier workout.
Focusing on short, intense workouts will make your exercise routine much less intrusive to your schedule, it will give your body an amazing workout without over exhausting yourself with endless sessions of boring cardio.
Whatever type of exercise that you choose, you want to make sure that you are going to want to do it on a consistent basis.
If you are currently not getting much exercise then an increase in any type of physical activity will make a huge difference, so don’t get too hung up on which type of exercise is better than another.
Any exercise when performed consistently will help you lose weight.
But since this article specifically addresses the effectiveness of diet and exercise, I wanted to show you how you can get really powerful results in a short amount of time.
The great thing is that the most effective types of exercise are the fun ones, and a lot of the boring ones are actually the least effective.
If you want to exercise from home and don’t have any equipment, bodyweight exercises (such as pushups, situps, burpees) are a great way to get both cardio and a good muscle workout.
Bodyweight exercises can be useful for any body type, from people who are extremely obese to people who are already in great shape and want to step up their game.
Additionally, if you really want to get amazing results from your workout then it is extremely valuable to gain access to weights, whether that means buying your own set or joining a gym.
Many people only associate weight lifting with building muscle, and don’t realize how incredible resistance training is for losing fat as well.
What happens when you try losing weight with exercise alone
Many people including myself have lost a significant amount of weight just by exercising, without diet… and two things typically happen when you lose weight this way.
#1- You may gain the weight back since your unhealthy diet is always ready to take you back to square one if anything changes in your routine.
#2- The results are much slower as your unhealthy diet is working against your exercise efforts.
For those who are able to lose weight by exercising alone even when their diet is very unhealthy, the junk foods that they consume create a constant struggle against their exercise efforts… which makes it more difficult to lose the weight and much easier to gain it back.
When you manage to outrun your bad eating habits with exercise, it’s usually only for a short time until they catch back up with you.
When I was in high school I lost quite a bit of weight in weight lifting class while eating the normal junk-filled teenage diet, but my success at that time was short-lived.
My poor diet content was just waiting for me to let up on my workout routine just a little… until it could start packing the pounds back on again.
When I graduated high school I didn’t get nearly as much exercise, my diet got even worse… and I gained 80 pounds in 8 years.
I talk with lots of people who work incredibly hard on their exercise routine but experience very slow fat loss results because they either struggle to get their diet under control or do not focus on it at all.
They burn tons of calories… but their eating habits give so many calories back that the weight either comes off extremely slowly, or in some cases they will actually gain weight while trying to lose it.
I have said often that doing things the healthy and smart way, while dedicating to both eating healthy AND exercising consistently, is so effective that it almost feels like cheating.
I don’t say that in an attempt to be catchy… I actually mean that when I look around at some people who are working even harder than me on their exercise routine but not eating healthy, while I am getting better/faster fat loss results… it actually feels like I am cheating, and operating on some loophole rule that nobody ever shared with them.
That is why I am so passionate about spreading the healthy weight loss message that I do at The Shape Within, because I feel the need to tell everyone how to make the entire journey of losing weight much easier.
The effectiveness of combining healthy diet and exercise
When you dedicate to both eating healthy and exercising, you will get to enjoy the full benefit of each individual method combined.
You might think that doing both of these things consistently would be twice as hard, but when you see the awesome results for yourself you won’t think that it’s so hard after all.
I have heard lots of stories from people who have successfully lost a significant amount of weight, and they have all expressed the importance of both eating a diet filled with natural and nutritious foods, as well as the importance of incorporating exercise.
I absolutely experienced the same thing when I lost 80 pounds. I have tried to lose weight with only exercise and with only eating healthy… and doing both was the key to my success.
But most people probably don’t need anyone to tell them that eating healthy and exercising is better than doing either one or the other…
It’s fairly intuitive that doing both would yield better and faster results than only doing one or the other.
But what really helps to know that doing both doesn’t just make a small difference, it will make reaching your weight loss goal far easier in terms of how quickly you lose weight and how excited you remain with your ongoing progress.
What happens when you eat healthy AND exercise
So before we take a look at what the research says on diet versus exercise to double confirm what we already suspect, let’s lay out what happens when you improve your diet and increase your physical activity at the same time, and why doing so is such a powerful thing.
While eating more healthy foods and also increasing your exercise activity, you have the opportunity to put yourself into a calorie deficit with two different healthy methods at the same time.
If you were already losing weight with just diet or exercise alone, then by adding the missing factor into your routine you would get to enjoy the full fat burning potential of your added effort.
For example when you have already crossed over into fat burning mode with eating healthy foods for the day, and there are no excess calories to overcome… adding exercise into the mix will go completely towards further creating a BIGGER calorie deficit.
You might be thinking, “but don’t you have to eat more when you exercise anyways”?
Yes you do, but you see… if the foods that you choose to fuel your workouts are healthy, nutritious, low-calorie selections, then eating to recover from your workout will only serve to carry you even faster towards your weight loss goals instead of away from them.
By fueling your exercise routine with healthy foods you allow your body to remain in fat burning mode and use your own store of fat for energy.
As a bonus you may also find that exercising will actually reduce your cravings for junk food and prevent you from eating out of boredom so much, due to how great exercise makes you feel.
With both habits working in your favor, and neither of them working against you, it is easy to experience significant forward progress.
So when you are both eating healthy and exercising, the results don’t just combine together… each one intensifies the effectiveness of the other so that in many cases, the result will be multiplicative instead of just additive.
Healthy foods fuel your workouts and increase the effectiveness of them too… while keeping your calories low. Instead of reversing the progress that you gain with your exercise routine, eating healthy will help you burn even more fat when you eat to recover your muscles/energy.
Conversely, exercise further increases the effectiveness of your healthy diet with concern to losing weight.
A simple analogy that I like to use concerning this situation/opportunity is this:
Instead of taking 2 steps forward and then 1 backwards every day, yielding an overall gain of 1 step forward per day…
You take 2 steps forward and then ANOTHER 1 step forward, and yield an overall gain of 3 steps per day.
Without holding yourself back, you more than double the results that you see from your hard efforts.
So this is why dedicating to improving your diet content and adding more exercise into your life is not going to be a burden, but will actually make reaching your weight loss goals much easier and quicker.
At the end of this article I will tell you how to take action, and balance getting started with both eating healthy and exercising, but let’s go one last step in becoming confident with the power of this combination, and see what the research shows on the subject of diet vs exercise for weight loss.
I want to make sure that you have complete confidence in making the decision to dedicate to both healthy habits consistently, so that you can make amazing progress during your journey.
What the research has to say about diet vs exercise for weight loss
So let’s see what the scientists who have actually studied this subject, have to say.
This first research that I want to show you is a treasure trove of information that I refer to often, as it entails a compilation of many studies that not only cover the subject of diet vs exercise for weight loss, but also considers the effectiveness of both… and on a slightly unrelated topic also compares endurance training and resistance training.
…some may select away from exercise altogether, which based on overall effectiveness should be discouraged but if utilized as a stand alone intervention, diets can be effective if hypocaloric and comprised of a higher percentage of total caloric intake from protein…
…When combined with diet, exercise interventions were more effective at inducing responses in body compositional changes than either an exercise, or diet, alone option for intervention. The effectiveness for exercise becomes more pronounced with higher levels of intensity of exercise regardless of the methodology employed (i.e. ET, RT, or combination therein) within the intervention protocol.
Here is another study that expresses the effectiveness of healthy dieting and exercising as stand-alone interventions, but shows that combining the two is indeed much more effective:
We found that a year‐long lifestyle‐change program, incorporating either combined or separate dietary weight loss or moderate‐to‐vigorous aerobic exercise interventions, produced clinically important and significant reductions in body weight and improvements in body composition among overweight‐to‐obese postmenopausal women…
…Although our diet and exercise interventions had beneficial effects on weight loss and body composition when delivered in isolation, the greatest effects were found in the combined intervention group.
Last but certainly not least, is a study that also shows how either eating a healthy diet OR exercising can be used to lose weight successfully, but the greatest results and chances for long-term success come from doing BOTH.
The present study indicates that programs including both diet and exercise produce greater weight loss than diet alone in obese and overweight individuals soon after the intervention period and after 1 y of follow-up.
Start with what you are comfortable with
Although the main point of this article was to compare the effectiveness of methods, and determine the best way to lose weight fast and naturally…
What is truly “the best” for you at this moment in time, is dependent on what you can successfully maintain on a daily/weekly basis.
Lots of people start their weight loss plan so intensely that they never get to see any significant results add up over time before they get overwhelmed and give up.
In those cases, doing the “best” thing is too much and actually results in failure.
So as you start your weight loss journey and begin making healthy changes, strive to work towards doing the best for yourself, but give yourself time to get there.
When I finally started losing weight consistently, I began with healthy eating alone even though I knew that exercise would also be important… so that I could focus on getting used to eating healthy every day.
I started small when changing my diet, and instead of trying to be perfect and then giving up like I had so many times before, I resolved to make forward progress in steps that I could handle, and confidently maintain.
I started with one healthy meal per day, then added more and more healthy food as time passed, which made me lose weight faster and faster. The foods that made me fat were literally being replaced with foods than made me thin.
It didn’t take me long to start developing a consistent habit for eating at least some healthy food every single day, and so shortly after I added exercise into my routine.
Since then I have constantly improved my diet and workout routine one step at a time.
So ask yourself, what level of healthy eating and exercise you can get started with today, that you know in your heart you will be able to dedicate to consistently (every day for food, 3 times per week for exercise).
Maybe it’s one meal per day, maybe it’s two… but be honest with yourself so that you set yourself up for long-term success instead of impending disappointment.
Ease into it at your own pace, strive for a balance of healthy diet AND exercise, and tell yourself that this time will be the time that you keep pushing forward!
If you’re feeling ready to start your own weight loss journey filled with healthy foods AND exercise, try the 8-Week Weight Loss Challenge! It will help you improve your diet and increase your exercise activity gradually, in a series of easy-to-follow steps. Sign up below for your free copy or learn more about the course right here.
