Fitness as a Lifestyle: Diet vs. Exercise
By Marcisco Morrison
Whenever you want to adopt fitness as a lifestyle, the most common advice you will get from your fitness coach is to diet and exercise. However, while both approaches are crucial in losing excess weight and remaining fit, hence leading a healthy lifestyle, it turns out that one is actually more vital than the other. Nutrition experts argue that a poor diet will somehow always catch up with you.

Why Dieting Is More Important Than Exercising
To maintain a lifestyle of fitness means that you must watch your weight. The only way you can shed off any excess weight is through the burning of more calories than those you take in. This is almost impossible, unless you check your eating habits. Experts say that one pound of fat generates 3,500 calories while running a marathon can only burn 2,600 calories. This goes a long way to confirming how ineffective exercise can be when you are aiming at keeping fit through losing excess weight.
This doesn’t in any way mean that exercise is unimportant. As a matter of fact, experts will tell you that you get faster results when you combine dieting and exercise. However, if you were to choose between the two, especially when you are out to cut some weight, evidence has it that the role played practically. Given that you can consume over 1200 calories when you eat something such as a burger and fries, it would be very difficult to lose weight and keep fit without being mindful of your calorie intake.
What is The Right Calorie Intake?
If dieting is such important matter when adopting fitness as a lifestyle, then how many calories should you be consuming? This is a common question among people who want to keep fit. Nutrition experts advise that women should consume about 1,500 calories in a day if they are out to cut weight, while men can consume slightly more. The easiest way to stick to this limit is by increasing the quantity of vegetables and fruits in your servings.
As much as going to the gym is helpful in burning more calories, a bigger percentage of people tend to recover the lost calories immediately after, which rubbishes their workout. For instance, what is the need of going to the gym to lose 500 calories, and then consuming a 1200 calorie dinner thereafter? This will simply be a big waste of your time!
One of the biggest culprits when it comes to excess calorie intake is beer. A single beer can pump anything in the neighborhood of 500 calories of more into your system. This is something that you can drink in a few minutes but to burn the same amount of calories you will need to take a three-hour walk!
Conclusion
After you have taken care of your diet, coupling it up with regular exercise can give you faster results in your quest to become fit and maintain a healthy lifestyle. This means that it is easier as well as more sustainable to make diet lifestyle changes instead of signing up for the gym, which you may end up dropping barely two months after joining anyway. There are always simpler alternatives of regularly exercising such as parking a little further from your workplace and walking. At the end of the day, keeping a healthy lifestyle is a sum total of small victories -it is the small things that you do every day which adds up to create a significant change.
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- Published in Blog