If your goal is to lose weight, eating healthy is three times more impactful than working out. (Hint: Working out will keep you healthy, and help you live longer)
The Time Ratio
It also only takes a minute to consume hundreds of calories, but it takes a lot more time to burn hundreds of calories. If you only change your exercise habits, and not your eating habits, you will have to exercise a lot more, to make up for the calories you are eating. While this technically means you could lose weight not changing your eating habits, it will happen slowly, because you will have to exercise a lot more. This type of change might not be possible for many people with busy schedules. A lifestyle where you eat a lot and then just workout a lot is not sustainable, and is not healthy. If you cannot stop binge eating, so you turn to exercise, I have a post on how to stop binging here. Overall, the time ratio shows that while the process might be more slow, in the end your lifestyle will be healthier, less busy, and more sustainable if you change your eating habits, and also change your exercise habits. If you want more tips on a healthy lifestyle you can read them here.
Resting Calorie Burning
Your body burns the most calories when it is performing it’s most basic functions. This is not something you can control. So you can only control around 30% of the calories you burn, because 70% is burned through your bodies basic functions. That 30% is through exercise. So this means that you can control 100% of what calories go into your body, through food, but you can only control 30% of the calories that leave your body, through exercise.
How More Exercise Changes Your Other Habits
Lets say you start exercising more, because you want to lose weight. (Hint: Not a healthy mindset for exercising! If you can’t stop thinking of exercising like this, then read this post.) You only want to lose a couple of pounds, so you think that exercising more will be enough. But what you haven’t thought about are the other impacts of exercising more. One of these is that you will eat more. If you don’t also change your eating habits, after a good workout you will find yourself turning to food that might not be so good. Unnoticeably you are now destroying the effects of that workout you just did. Have you ever noticed that after a workout your whole body slows down? This makes sense, but you are also not burning as many resting calories because of this. Overall, there are so many other factors that come into play when you start exercising more that just doing that will not even be enough. Especially if you wanter somewhat quick, but sustainable results.
Long Term Results
I touched on this a little when I talked about the time ratio, but while it is harder to change your eating habits than your exercise habits, you will get more, sustainable results from having better eating habits. While making a salad is a little more time consuming than going to McDonalds, working out for two hours a day instead of just eating a salad, is more time consuming. Once you have good eating habits, it will be easier to start exercising more, because you will have a better exercising mindset. You won’t exercise to lose weight, you will exercise you to be happy. Read more about the healthy exercise mindset here. Eating a salad for lunch instead of workout out for two hours is way more sustainable and will get you long term results. You will also feel less guilty having a day where you don’t workout. Overall, you will be creating that healthy lifestyle by making better eating habits, not just working out more.
You can email me any time at sadellehealthylifestyle@gmail.com and check out my Pinterest and Instagram under sadelleshealthylifestyle!
