Diet and Exercise Differences for Weight Loss

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Losing weight with diet and exercise can be extremely difficult for people. However, proper diet and exercise are essential to losing weight, but which is more important?

If you could only choose between the gym or salads, which would you choose?

Burning Calories

There are many different ways to burn off a couple of hundred calories, such as surfing for an hour, running for 20 minutes, or singing a song 23 times. Meaning it takes a lot of time to burn a substantial number of calories, even with vigorous exercise. Exercise and diet work well with one another.

Comparing this to the diet, a chocolate bar is about 200 calories, and it takes an hour of walking to burn off those calories. Likewise, it would take an hour and a half run to burn off two pop cans.

Physicians suggest that people cut high sugary and processed foods out of their diet to cut the extra pounds.

Diet and Exercise Studies

Multiple studies have shown that dieting plays a more prominent role in losing weight than exercise.

A metanalysis of children in 2011 found that physical activity was not the determining factor in their weight. However, a study of 3000 adults discovered that minimizing calories is linked to more weight loss than exercise.

Studies comparing industrialized and developing countries found that physical activity is very similar in both countries. Therefore, making bad dieting decisions is the likely factor for the obesity epidemic in the industrialized world.

Best Way to Lose Weight

A combination of diet and exercise would show the best results over the long term, and exercise has many other benefits beyond weight loss, such as mental health benefits and slowing the aging process.

Although, if you want to lose weight, you will likely get better results if you focus on your diet first.