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Which is more effective for losing weight: exercise or diet?
Whether trying to lose weight through physical exercise or by managing eating habits, both present similar challenges: managing food metabolism and fighting the urge to eat more.
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Both diet and exercise affect calorie metabolism and hinder fat tissues from forming. However, losing weight still takes time. (Shutterstock/File)
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n the past few years, researchers and nutritionists have been arguing over the best way to manage obesity. Whether trying to lose weight through physical exercise or by managing eating habits, both present similar challenges: managing food metabolism and fighting the urge to eat more. However, they each have different effects on the body.
How can exercising contribute to weight loss?
Being overweight is defined as having an over-accumulation of fats in the body that are not proportionate to body height, resulting in a look of obesity. However, keep in mind that body shape and weight are also determined by fat proportion and muscle mass. Both exercising and undergoing a diet are known to influence the body’s fat proportion and muscle mass.
With physical exercise, the body will burn fat and stimulate muscle growth, resulting in more muscle mass. Keep in mind that your weight will not differ significantly from before because fat has less mass than muscle. Therefore with physical exercise there will be a decrease in fat mass followed by an increase in muscle mass, resulting in a more slender body because muscle takes up less space than fat.
How can diet help weight loss?
In dieting, the management of eating habits, the most important thing is to lower your daily calorie intake. If done consistently, the body will adapt and store fewer food reserves in the fat tissue, resulting in weight loss.
(Read also: How fasting helps lose weight)
Why exercise does not help weight loss.
The body conserves energy by forming layers of fat. Both diet and exercise decrease fat tissues, but losing weight still takes time. Physical exercise is a very time consuming way to lose weight and the effects can easily be lost because the body burns more calories and stores very little. Exercise gives us an appetite and we end up consuming more calories than the body needs, which causes the body to store the excess as fat. As a result, body weight will increase again unless we manage our eating habits.
Why dieting does not always make you lose weight.
If you only choose to follow a diet to lose weight, you will have to limit the level of calories to balanced things out; this should be sustained until weight loss is stable and perceptible . When dieting the body produces more of the grehlin hormone, which makes us hungry, and less of the leptin hormone, which signals that we should eat less and aids in the burning of calories, so the combination results in difficulties over losing weight.
So which is more effective?
Managing eating habits is more effective than exercising. This is due to the easier way of lowering daily calorie intake. However, for some people, decreasing the consumption of food may take a long time so it is best to both manage your dietary habits and exercise regularly to achieve the best of both worlds. Nutritional biochemist Shawn M. Talbott, PhD told Huffington Post that losing weight is 75 percent dieting and 25 percent exercising. He also said that excessive exercise followed by bad dietary habits will not result in significant weight loss. (kes)
