When it comes to losing weight, many programs and plans focus around either diet or exercise. Although both are ideal to maintain a healthy weight, it’s often easier to focus on just one. So if you had to choose, is diet or exercise more effective for losing weight? Let’s take a look.

Diet

Your daily diet or nutrition is crucial to maintaining your health. The nutrients you put in your body affect everything your body does and without good nutrients, your body starts to break down and doesn’t function like it should.

What Foods Should You Focus On?

When you’re trying to lose weight, the food you eat becomes the fuel your body needs to burn fat. Obviously some foods are better at this than others. For example, eating lean protein, like eggs and chicken, will help your body build muscle and burn more fat than eating carbohydrates, like rice and potatoes.

So in order to switch your body to fat-burning mode, instead of fat-storing mode, you want to focus on eating more protein and less carbohydrates until your body starts to burn fat appropriately. To find out if you’re getting enough protein, check out Are You Getting Enough Protein In Your Diet?

Use The Glycemic Index

You also want to focus on eating foods that are low on the Glycemic Index. The Glycemic Index is basically a system that ranks different foods from 0 to 100 based on how they affect your blood sugar. Foods that raise your blood sugar dramatically receive a higher rating and foods that do not raise your blood sugar or raise it a small amount receive a lower rating.

The idea is to eat foods that have lower GI ratings to avoid spiking your blood sugar and help your body lose weight. Eating low Glycemic Index foods also helps you to avoid conditions like Type II Diabetes.

The Glycemic Index can also help you determine which foods may seem healthy but could be hurting your weight loss efforts. For example, bananas seem like a delicious and healthy snack. After all, bananas are fruits right? Well, yes, bananas are fruits and fruits are healthy, but if you’re seriously trying to lose weight, bananas wouldn’t be the first on my list of recommendations. Bananas contain a lot of sugar. Natural sugar, yes, but sugar nonetheless. Therefore, they score a 62 on the Glycemic Index. As you can see, the Glycemic Index can be a great indicator of foods that may be healthy, but may not be ideal for losing weight.

Consider Calories

Whether you’re a devout believer in the “Calories in, calories out” weight loss method or not, the calories you consume and the calories you burn do play a role in losing weight. For example, even if you focus on solely eating vegetables and protein, you still have to consider portion control and burn more calories than you eat to lose weight.

It’s been said that “You can’t out-train a bad diet,” or in other words, you can’t workout out hard enough to lose weight if you’re eating thousands of worthless calories.

When you’re trying to lose weight, you also want to get the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to how many calories you consume. For example, if you’re committed to consuming 1500 calories, you want to get the most nutrients you can for those 1500 calories to optimize your weight loss and turn your body into a fat-burning machine.

Exercise

On the other hand, exercise is also a vital part of losing weight. According to the “Calories in, calories out” method of weight loss, you have to burn more calories than you consume to lose weight. This can become a problem if you don’t exercise because your diet is restricted to the number of calories you eat and it can be very difficult to maintain a diet of so few calories.

For example, let’s say you need to limit yourself to 1200 calories a day to lose weight. Eating 1200 calories a day is not a lot and dieting alone can leave you hungry and irritable. If you add exercise, however, you could consume 1500 calories and burn 300 calories in your daily workout, giving you the same 1200 calories a day but you actually got to eat 1500 calories.

More Muscle Burns More Fat

It’s a widely known fact that the more muscle you have, the more fat your body burns. Exercise helps you build more muscle and consequently, helps you burn more fat. Some would use this logic to make the case that exercise is more important for weight loss than diet.

Tightening and Toning

Another important factor in losing weight is losing inches and toning your body after losing weight. While your diet may help you lose weight, exercise helps tighten and tone your muscles to make you smaller. More muscle can also help you look more fit at a higher weight than if you weigh less but have no muscle.

So The Big Winner Is….

Both! If you’re truly trying to lose weight in the most effective way possible, you want to maintain a good diet and healthy exercise. Good nutrients are the fuel that your body uses to burn fat and calories and get in shape fast!

I know, I know, not what you wanted to hear, but if I absolutely had to choose between the two, I would say that it really depends on what you are working toward.

If you want a sleek, slender physique, think Victoria’s Secret model, it’s more important to focus on your diet and eating clean, healthy food in proper portion sizes. It’s also important to exercise but you can stick to more mild workouts like yoga and pilates, that combine toning moves with stretching and elongating muscles.

However, if you want a more muscular physique, think professional athlete, then exercise is what you want to focus on the most. You want to train hard with high intensity workouts and weight lifting. Your goal is power and performance and you need your body to support that.

But if you’ve got time for both, that’s the way to go. Unless you’re trying to accomplish a specific goal, maintaining a reasonable diet filled with tons of healthy nutrients and a little splurging, AND a moderate exercise routine with a good mix of cardio and weight lifting is the perfect balance to live a healthy life.

Do What Works Best For You

My last piece of advice is to do what works for you. Some people loath exercise but they have a lot of self-control to stick to a clean diet. Others can’t help but have their daily sweets but love to get their sweat on. Try it all and find what works for you. After all, that’s the only way you’re truly going to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Just remember, balance is key.