Nutrition, Exercise or both? The answer lies in another question – “What is your goal?” Lets find out what you should focus on.
Nutrition, Exercise or both?
Most of my clients come to me for some kind of weight loss, whether because of my history of weight loss myself or whether we are all just aware of our weight these days – this is the most common goal.
1. You eat many times a day
So it would make sense to focus on healthy habits that allow you to stay on track every single day at every single meal. While you could, and you may, workout every day it’s only for a short period of time.
For the rest of your day your progress hinges on what you eat, how you eat and what your portion sizes are.
If you can focus on getting to grips with good eating habits this will unlock your potential for greater results.
2. You can’t always workout
At the moment this rings true even more. While there are plenty of exercises you can do at home with minimal or no equipment (you can ask me more about that here) we are sedentary for a lot of the day now due to lockdown restrictions.
The walk we can do every day is good for activity levels but it’s a big step down from a harder training programme that you follow 5 days a week.
If you rely solely on exercise you would see a plateau in results or perhaps even an increase in weight – if this isn’t what you want you are then losing progress.
Keeping on top of your food intake helps you to keep seeing results when the gym isn’t an option.
3. You are always in control of your intake
It might seem like this isn’t the case but let me explain. Lets say you’re in a situation where you can’t choose what to eat, for example work training days, meals out with friends, being stuck somewhere hungry and the only option is fast food.
You might think “The diet is ruined” or “I can’t eat anything healthy, this will stop my weight loss”. The truth is that you are always in control of two things:
-
How much you eat
-
How fast you eat
These two variables mean that even if you have to eat something that is a) calorie dense or b) not what you would normally choose, you can still be in control.
So, nutrition over exercise?
If you had the choice between one or the other then yes – nutrition is the key for weight loss. Ideally you would incorporate both to some degree. Resistance exercise after all helps to maintain muscle mass while losing weight which is important for changing your body shape.
However, if too many changes at once would be overwhelming, or if you’re not in a position to exercise at the moment, changing your eating habits will give you the weight loss results that you’re looking for.
Food intake determines fat loss much more than exercise alone.
Ok, so where do I start?
I’m glad you asked. I work with my clients to help them build healthy habits that they can continue to use for the rest of their lives. They can integrate the nutrition into each day and no matter what life throws at them they can stay on track.
At the moment I am helping my clients with emotional and binge eating urges. I have a 10 week programming running at a discounted price during the UK lockdown. You can find out more here.
Ainzlie
If you want some more tips on surviving lockdown, check my last 2 posts.
