The Importance of Diet for Fat Loss

When it comes to comparing diet and exercise for body fat loss there are a few sayings that I like to use. You may or may not have heard them before.

“You can’t outwork a bad diet”

Or,

“You lose weight in the kitchen, and build muscle in the gym”

Both of these sayings illustrate the importance of diet and nutrition when it comes to weight loss results.

A lot of times we think that we will just start exercising more and going to the gym and we will automatically start losing weight, and that is not always the case because of the fact that you need to be in a caloric deficit for weight loss to occur. You can exercise all you want but if you are still consuming too many calories, it’s just not possible to lose weight.

Here are a few examples of calories in some foods and how long it would take to burn off those calories through exercise just to show the significance of diet in weight loss.

2 slices of pizza will cost you approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes of walking or about 45 minutes of running.

A big mac meal, roughly 2.5 hours of running or almost 5 hours of walking. If you wanted to burn off this meal through strength training, we are talking over 6 hours of it.

1 chocolate bar would take over 40 minutes of walking.

A single scoop ice cream, approximately 22 minutes of jogging.

I am not sharing this information to say that you can never eat these things, only to make the point that to have successful weight loss results you must pay attention to what you are eating and how much of it you eat.

It only takes a few minutes to consume the foods but then takes multiples more in time to burn it off.

Of course, there are a ton of other benefits to regular exercise other then fat loss, so we all should be exercising regardless of our goal. But if fat loss is a goal, be sure to pay attention to what you are eating to ensure you are getting the results you want.

If you need a good resource for getting your nutrition on track with eating the right amounts for your goals, be sure to read Gino’s book Eat Smart, Eat Often, Eat Small. It’s free and it works!