Is Healthy Eating More Important than Exercise for Weight Loss?
Physical exertion is one of the best means of losing weight and should be part of all dietary regimes.
It has long been assumed that burning off calories through exercise is the most valid way of losing weight, however, the best means of losing weight is in fact through healthy eating.
Healthy eating is more important than exercise for weight loss because exercise increases your appetite, leading you to consume more calories which usually compensates for the calories you lose working out. Healthy eating is the best and only effective means of reducing your overall calorie intake.
A combination of both healthy eating and exercise is required to drive a healthy weight loss, but healthy eating should always take precedence.
This article will help you safely implement healthy eating into your weight-loss regime, and explain what to expect from healthy eating as the weeks go by.
How much weight can you lose just by eating healthy?
When implementing healthy eating into your exercise regime, it is of paramount importance to know exactly how much weight you can expect to lose from week-to-week.
Like everything, balance is key, and you need to make sure you are reducing your calorie intake at a healthy level, especially if you’re committing to a heavy exercise regime alongside the diet.
This is how much weight you can expect to lose over the course of a year:
In 30 days
If you eat healthy for 30 days, you can expect to lose 6-8 pounds.
When it comes to weight loss, you simply cannot cut corners. What dietitians recommend that you aim for is between 1-2 pounds of weight loss per week.
One pound roughly equates to 3,500 calories, so you’re going to want to aim to cut out around 500 calories per day, with the ultimate goal of losing 8 pounds per month.
In 3 months
If you eat healthy for 3 months, you can expect to lose 15-24 pounds.
3 months is a long time, and it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve 8 pounds per month consistently, given that unforeseen events such as birthdays and weddings, illnesses, or off-days where you don’t feel like dieting, may decrease your overall dieting progression.
With that in mind, eating healthy for 3 months can help you lose anywhere between 5-8 pounds per month and achieve a reasonable target of 15-24 pounds shed within 3 months.
In 1 Year
If you eat healthy for 1 year you can expect to lose between 60 and 96 pounds.
Staying steadfast to eating healthily for a year is a seriously laudable achievement, give or take a few blips in the healthy eating here and there.
As we’ve already mentioned, it is incredibly difficult to achieve the same level of weight loss every single month, especially over the course of a year.
Therefore, a healthy weight loss over the course of a year would be anywhere in the bracket of 60 and 96 pounds.
How does healthy eating make you lose weight?
First off, healthy eating to lose weight is not as simple as adding in a few extra pieces of fruit to your diet now and again. You need to regimentally take in less calories than you’re going to burn off.
Healthy eating makes you lose weight because you are not putting as many calories into your body, and are instead burning off the calories you already have.
There are many means of determining how many calories your body needs to function healthily, which depends on your lifestyle, specifically, how much exercise you are doing alongside dieting.
Here’s how to determine your daily calorie requirements
- Weigh yourself in kilograms
- Multiply this weight by 1.0 if you are male or 0.9 if you are female.
- Next, multiply this number by 24
- Multiply this by your lean factor multiplier
- The result will be your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which is very useful in calorie counting.
Once you’ve calculated your BMR, you need to multiply it by the level of activity you do daily, which will provide you with how many calories you burn per day.
How many calories you burn:
- 1.3 – next to no activities
- 1.55 – regular walking throughout the day
- 1.65 – regular lifting in a work setting
- 1.80 – if you do 4 hours a day of physical exertion
- 2.00- if you do 8 hours a day of physical exertion
Determine how many calories you burn daily, and then aim to eat less than that as part of a healthy diet in order to lose weight.
Can you lose weight without eating healthy?
It is possible to lose weight without eating healthy, however, it’s impossible to lose as much weight.
Without eating healthy, you’ll only be able to lose no more than a pound a week. As mentioned before, exercise increases your appetite, so you’re likely going to want to eat after working out.
Exercising without eating healthily will not help you lose weight as effectively. If you’re serious about losing weight, and keeping yourself in shape long term, you’ve got to eat healthy.
Is healthy eating overrated or underrated?
Healthy eating is underrated, period. Healthy eating does not only help from a dietary perspective, but also helps to curb and prevent heart diseases as well as cancer. Healthy eating also prevents asthma, acne, depression and high blood pressure.
How much weight can you lose if you eat healthy and practice yoga 3 times a week?
Yoga helps you lose weight, when practiced in conjunction with eating healthy, as it makes you more mindful of your body, and what you are fueling your body with. You may find refraining from unhealthy foods easier after practicing yoga as you will feel a heightened awareness towards the detrimental effects of food that is bad for your body.
Yoga is also a good exercise to practice alongside dieting, as it provides a light bit of exercise, and is not too overbearing to the point that it makes you want to eat a lot afterwards.
The following forms of yoga are good for burning calories:
- Ashtanga
- Vinyasa
- Power yoga
- Restorative yoga
Wanna know more? 👉 Here What is The Most Intense Form of Yoga?
Does healthy eating make you poop more?
Yes, healthy eating will make you poop more, but this is a sign that you’re eating well. This will be particularly apparent if you’ve changed your diet drastically, and have suddenly started to eat healthily.
Experiencing regular bowel movements is what you are aiming for in healthy eating, as it shows that your bowels are responding well to the diet change, and are working at a healthy rate.
Eating unhealthily makes you have bowel movements at an irregular rate, which poses numerous health concerns if experienced long-term.
Does healthy eating make you fart?
Eating healthy will produce an excessive amount of gas. An excessive amount of gas is in fact a healthy amount, and it shows that your high-fibre, healthy diet is producing a positive effect on your body.
No matter how healthy your bowels are, carbohydrates sometimes don’t break down, which produces excess levels of gas.
Conclusion
Healthy eating is more important than exercise for weight loss because when you exercise, you are more likely to end up taking in more calories to make up for the energy you lose during your workout. It is therefore not practical to rely on exercise alone to achieve your weight loss goals.
Healthy eating allows you to calculate exactly how many calories you are putting into your body, as well as determining how many you are burning daily. Of course, exercise can help, but relying solely on exercise would be futile in the endeavour of producing real weight loss.
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