Diet or Exercise – what is more effective for weight loss?

You have discovered a new diet, promising to help you lose weight and turn your body in perfect shape. Somewhere else you see a fitness program, that promise you the same. Which one to choose? What is the most effective way to lose weight. Do you have to faint from hunger or from muscle pain?

When you want to get and to stay slimmer – the best variant is to combine a healthy diet (not starvation) and any kind of physical activity, that is keeping your muscles busy.

Why you should combine Diet + Exercise?

When you start only a diet you will deprive your body from calories – eating less and low in calories foods will create a calorie deficit. But your body needs a certain minimum of calories for it’s basic physiological needs. This minimum of calories depends on your height, weight, sex and age. You can calculate your personal daily calorie needs with our BMR Calculator. There can be big difference between the calories, that you need and the calories that your mom, for instance needs to maintain your weight. And it is best first to determine what are your specific needs per day, so you can calculate what calorie deficit is optimal for you. Otherwise you risk your health, especially with extreme diets.

The fact that you are getting slimmer, doesn’t mean that you are losing fat at all. When you are on diet first you lose water. Then by eating less you force your body to use its internal resources to provide you with the energy you need. These resources can be muscles or fat. When this happens and your body can choose – it will use the muscles first. This is just easier for it. So you are on diet, there are visible results after some time and you think: “Perfect! It’s working!”. But this might not be the case. If you don’t use your muscles, your body will use them for energy. The fat that it has collected will remain and few months after the diet you will be at the start point again. The results will be gone. What will be left are the consequences for your body from every diet you do.

With dieting you expose your body on stress. Every biological process in it changes. It is not your normal state and your brain is giving you signals to eat almost all the time. After some time you stop feeling so much hunger as in the beginning of the diet, but your state is still not the usual one. After the diet, you hope you will keep your weight stable, but this doesn’t happen. At the end you just lost few weeks or months in misery. The outcome is zero or even worse – you gained few extra kilos.

Things that you want to happen to you on long-term, you usually plan well and don’t expect to reach them in short term. But with dieting most of the time we choose an extreme variant, so that we lose weight fast. What happens then? Simply – you want some results in short term, and you get them in short term. You get what you asked for.

Give your body the time to react on changes

When you want long lasting results, you have to plan how you want to look in long term and do it step-by-step, the right way. Dieting is important so that you lose weight. Only exercising is not effective enough. More calories are coming from food per day, than can be burned with exercises – even if your exercises are very intensive. But if you only follow a diet, without any activity, then you will look like a shapeless bag of potatoes – there will be no relief, no muscle to keep your body in shape. Therefore you have to combine diet and exercises. How less extreme is your plan to get slimmer, how better.

When we want to lose weight we have no patience and can’t think realistic.

This is because our idea of being in perfect shape is totally f*cked up!

To be in a perfect shape doesn’t mean to be skinny. Neither to have 90/60/90 body measurements. These requirements are for professional models in high fashion industry, where they have no other job than this – to care about their appearance.

Being in perfect shape, means to be happy with your body, to feel light and full with energy. To love the way you look and feel. Everything else is not important. How others perceive you and what they think of you depends only on you and no one else. If you treat yourself with love and respect, others will do the same. Your body shape reflects largely the way you feel and think about yourself.

There are few major differences between slim and fat people, systemized on the picture below.

You may agree or disagree, but if you have been slim and fat, then you will know these are just facts.

Being slim doesn’t mean dieting non-stop, but enjoying everything in life and loving and respecting yourself. To become slim, you have to change a big part of the right side with the left side of the list. You have to start believing that you deserve the best and stop accepting anything else than that.