For anyone who has ever wanted or tried to lose weight, successful or not, they know how difficult weight loss can be. Losing weight can be a real challenge, which is clear when you look at how many people in the United States struggle with weight loss.
For most people, they don’t even have a real chance to lose weight because their weight loss plans don’t involve effective weight loss methods. Whether it’s a faddy diet, an overpriced and ineffective exercise program, or an impossible-to-maintain regimen, many people are doomed from the very start when it comes to their weight loss plan.
While most people know that in order to lose weight they must exercise, diet, or do some degree of both, not understanding the degree of importance of dieting and exercise before making your weight loss plan can result in a flawed plan. This can happen due to relying too much on the wrong aspect of weight loss, or not enough on another aspect.
So, when setting up a weight loss plan, what should your focus be – diet or exercise?
When it comes to weight loss, the most important factor that actually allows you to lose weight is the calorie deficit, which means you take in less calories than you’re burning.
While exercising might increase the number of calories you are burning, it also tends to increase your caloric intake a little as well. Also, by managing your diet and food intake you can take direct control of your caloric intake, which is most effective. So, just by eating less than usual and more efficiently, or healthily, you often create more of a caloric-deficit than what would’ve taken you hours of daily exercise.
If you look at the effectiveness of exercise the picture becomes more clear. A semi-strenuous exercise, like moderately swimming around a pool for 30 minutes, only burns between 350 and 400 calories. Such a calorie cut is equivalent to cutting two cans of soda out of your daily diet. So, when you compare it directly, you can either stop drinking soda, or you could swim for 30 minutes every day to get the same calorie loss as dropping soda. For most, cutting the soda out of their diet would be much more efficient.
Recent studies have shown that despite increased activity levels overall, America has still gotten fatter. When it comes down to it, the effectiveness of exercise in itself is much overplayed in regards to weight loss. Of course, supplementing any good diet with a solid exercise regimen is more effective than doing either on their own.
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Furthermore, in addition to helping you reach your weight loss goals quicker and more effectively, exercising regularly comes with a multitude of health benefits such as decreased risks of heart disease, strokes, and cancer. Thus, exercising regularly, if you don’t, is very important for many reasons regarding weight loss and your overall health.
Basically, any effective weight loss plan will rework your daily habits in regards to both your diet and exercise tendencies. However, the most effective weight loss plans should focus most strongly on the various dieting aspects rather than just the exercise ones. Dieting can even result in effective weight loss by itself, which would be much more difficult than exercising alone to lose weight.
At the end of the day, there is not one secret answer of how to lose weight. Losing weight takes hard work over a decent amount of time, and without discipline and an effective plan to guide you, your weight loss goals will definitely be very difficult to come by. Any effective weight loss plan should focus on reforming your diet while including complimentary aspects of exercise and rest. When it comes down to it, losing weight takes time, hard work, and focus. Remember, weight loss is a long-distance marathon – not a short-distanced sprint.