Which is better for weight loss, diet or exercise?

[Teacher Terry]

I have lost 18 lbs in the past 8 weeks. It was diet as it’s too smoky outside to exercise.

 

[YVRRocketSurgery]

I had a co-worker lose a bunch of weight solely by cutting out a bunch of the junk he was eating daily: potato chips, sugary drinks, fast food, etc.

For me, I feel adding the physical activity (on top of a managed diet) helps supercharge my weight loss and/or allows me to get away with a little bit of cheating/flex with some of my meal choices.

 

[Koolau]

Yep. Diet from what I have heard. BUT also heard that exercise tends to quell apetite by stabilizing blood sugar (assuming moderation.) Best of luck with any weight loss plans. It ain't easy so YMMV.

 

[jollystomper]

At my age I would say diet. I have always been active and exercising, but paying attention to my diet since retiring 2 years ago has helped me lose and keep off over 25 pounds. Both cutting out a lot of the bad stuff (particularly added sugars), and eating more reasonable proportions were factors.

I agree that a key benefit of exercise is that it suppresses the desire to eat. On days when I am very active, I eat less. Walking the golf course for 3 hours I do not get hungry during or after the round, a single normal size meal that day is fine with me.

 

[Aramis]

The simple answer is that you lose weight when you are functioning in a calorie deficit mode. You can create that deficit however you choose; reducing intake or increasing expenditure.

I would put it to you that, it is, generally, going to be healthier if one expends calories through exercise than through caloric restriction. Presuming, of course, you don't have a massive caloric intake problem, like 5000 per day, mostly consisting of refined sugar, for example.

But the math is the same; take in less then you burn and you will lose weight in proportion .

 

[1242Vintage]

Focusing on Improving your diet (reducing calories and improving the quality of calories) is the key to weight loss. I’m a cyclist and when weight loss comes up with my cycling pals a typical comment about weight loss is “you can’t outride a bad diet”.

 

[Born2BRetd]

The simple answer is that you lose weight when you are functioning in a calorie deficit mode. You can create that deficit however you choose; reducing intake or increasing expenditure.

I would put it to you that, it is, generally, going to be healthier if one expends calories through exercise than through caloric restriction. Presuming, of course, you don't have a massive caloric intake problem, like 5000 per day, mostly consisting of refined sugar, for example.

But the math is the same; take in less then you burn and you will lose weight in proportion .

It depends if the weight gain is simple ie. eating too much/not exercising. If the weight gain is due to high cortisol, cutting calories might not be the answer. I gained weight after menopause due to an inability to sleep more than 20 minutes at a time due to hot flashes. My diet was healthy and I was exercising. Once I was able to tame the hot flashes (which took several years) and then retired and was able to sleep 10 hours with naps, the extra weight fell off without a change to my diet.

 

[mystang52]

I'd totally disagree on that. BMI will be inflated if you build muscle. It doesn't distinguish between fat and muscle. You could take a body builder or lots of pro football players with 7 % body fat and BMI will say they're obese

For most of my adult life I've been 5'10. Over the years, down to a tad over 5'8. Can I still use 5'10 for purposes of measuring BMI ?

 

[Ronstar]

Sure. What was once 5’10” is now compressed to 5’ 8”. So the 5’10” is still there, just temporary presented as 5’8”

But more importantly, BMI doesn’t mean much.
Like others have said, body builders etc are healthy but have BMI’s that indicate them to be overweight. I read that every player, except for 2, of the Chicago Bulls championship teams were overweight by BMI standards.

 

[Dtail]

Sure. What was once 5’10” is now compressed to 5’ 8”. So the 5’10” is still there, just temporary presented as 5’8”

But more importantly, BMI doesn’t mean much.
Like others have said, body builders etc are healthy but have BMI’s that indicate them to be overweight. I read that every player, except for 2, of the Chicago Bulls championship teams were overweight by BMI standards.

Evander Hollyfield was another good example.

 

[W2R]

Exercise alone doesn't work for me. I have to watch what I eat. If I am being careful about what and how much I eat, then exercise helps a little.

Exercise is important for other reasons, though, like flexibility, strength, and so on.

 

[Katsmeow]

This is not even a debatable issue. What you eat has far far more impact on weight loss than exercise. That doesn't mean exercise doesn't have benefits. It does. It should be done. But, it doesn't make much difference to weight loss. You can't out exercise a bad diet.

But more importantly, BMI doesn’t mean much.
Like others have said, body builders etc are healthy but have BMI’s that indicate them to be overweight. I read that every player, except for 2, of the Chicago Bulls championship teams were overweight by BMI standards.

This is true about body builders and athletes but is immaterial to the average person with a high BMI. Yes, indeed you can have an overweight or even obese BMI and have a low body fat percentage so that the BMI doesn't matter.

But, honestly, that is not true for most people. Most people who are overweight or obese by BMI have excess body fat. It does them no favor to talk about athletes as if that invalidates all BMI numbers. I used to write a weight loss blog and I heard this all the time. But, I heard this from people who were not the relatively rare people with high BMI and low body fat. For most people they are fooling themselves.

As far as whether to use the old height v. new height if you get shorter, there is no one consensus on this. You can find arguments both way. I researched this awhile ago because I have list about 3/4". At the time I did this I was at the top of the normal range for my original height. But, I went to a new doctor's office who insisted I was now an inch shorter (using rounding) and so that would make me "overweight". I hoped there was a clear answer on this but there really isn't.

 

[big-papa]

For me, no question, diet has a bigger impact. But as hard as it is to reduce food intake, it's even more difficult if I'm not exercising.

 

[The Cosmic Avenger]

Also, I found that when I was over 250 lbs. I was very uncomfortable exercising. I could walk for hours, but my back and feet would hurt, and anything more vigorous was ungainly and difficult. Once I had logged my food for a long while and lost weight, it was much easier to exercise.

 

[eytonxav]

I have also lost 1" in height over the years, wish it wasn't so. Maybe I need to spend more time hanging from the rafters.

As to the original posed question, the conventional thinking years ago was that calories in or calories burned were equivalent, so that diet or exercise were considered equally and this has proven to not to be the case for weight loss alone.

 

[mystang52]

If my experience is typical, exercise is a necessary component of permanent weight loss. I was an overweight couch potato until my late 40's. I had lost weight numerous times by dieting, but the weight always came back, and relatively quickly. I think (but have no scientific knowledge) that regular exercise causes changes in metabolism, above and beyond whatever calorie burn comes from the exercise itself.
In my case, though, there was an additional mental benefit. As I started walking, biking and running for exercise, I found I wanted to keep doing it. I'm now an addicted runner/swimmer/cyclist, and the 45 pounds I lost 20+ years ago has not returned. I still have to placate my sweet tooth, but I keep it limited. "Everything in moderation."
Dieting alone was successful in the short run, but it was almost all-consuming for me. I kept forecasting how much longer I had to go before reaching goal weight, and as already mentioned once I got there I had no plan....other than to return to my old ways.
Now if only I could get back to my younger 5'10 height

 

[Navigator]

If my experience is typical, exercise is a necessary component of permanent weight loss. I was an overweight couch potato until my late 40's. I had lost weight numerous times by dieting, but the weight always came back, and relatively quickly. I think (but have no scientific knowledge) that regular exercise causes changes in metabolism, above and beyond whatever calorie burn comes from the exercise itself.
In my case, though, there was an additional mental benefit. As I started walking, biking and running for exercise, I found I wanted to keep doing it. I'm now an addicted runner/swimmer/cyclist, and the 45 pounds I lost 20+ years ago has not returned. I still have to placate my sweet tooth, but I keep it limited. "Everything in moderation."
Dieting alone was successful in the short run, but it was almost all-consuming for me. I kept forecasting how much longer I had to go before reaching goal weight, and as already mentioned once I got there I had no plan....other than to return to my old ways.
Now if only I could get back to my younger 5'10 height

Your experience matches what they found at the National weight loss registry: National Weight Control Registry . People who lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off exercise for an average of 1 hour a day. They also eat a fairly low calorie diet, about 1700 calories a day for men. As for how they lost weight, the study found that people used a wide variety of methods. I guess the moral of this is to use anything that works for you in order to lose weight, but watch your diet and exercise to keep it off.

 

[jollystomper]

In my case, though, there was an additional mental benefit. As I started walking, biking and running for exercise, I found I wanted to keep doing it. I'm now an addicted runner/swimmer/cyclist, and the 45 pounds I lost 20+ years ago has not returned. I still have to placate my sweet tooth, but I keep it limited. "Everything in moderation."

Interesting. When I did a DNA test to look at what made up my ancestry, I also had the test look at my "markers" from a health, exercise, and nutrition perspective. One of the findings was "You are likely to enjoy exercise and stick to a routine". True in my case, I never get bored from exercising, but to see it might have been encoded in ones DNA (as much as one chooses to put stock in it) was interesting.

 

[Retch The Grate]

Well, it's definitely diet but exercise has an important role too. If you don't exercise at all, you will lose weight on a roughly 3lbs muscle/1lb of fat split as your body decides you dont need to have that expensive muscle that you aren't using while in an obvious famine situations. If you exercise enough, you lose about 1lb of muscle/3lb of fat ratio. Both cases you will get lighter, but exercise helps cue your body to the fact you need to keep the muscle...

 

[skyvue]

I have journaled my diet and exercise in great detail for over 15 years now and I can say for certain that diet is a much bigger factor in weight loss for me personally.

I know from my data that if I eat around 2,300 calories per day (as a weekly average) I will maintain my weight. Eat more than this target I will gain weight, less and I will lose it.

I also know from experimentation that cutting my calores to 1,800 per week, with no exercise, led to fairly consistent weight loss. Eating 2,300 calories per day while adding 500 calories of exercise offered much less (at least less consistent) weight loss for me. It seems to me that when the treadmill or fitness app tells you burned 500 calories that does not actually cancell out the 500 calorie cheeseburger.

 

[Marco]

I'd rather be fat and fit, than thin and sickly. Luckily we don't have to choose between those two! We do have to choose to take responsibility to get moving, and eat healthy, and sadly t seems too few make that choice.

Marco

 

[Jim in PA]

It’s an old line and I’m surprised that no one mentioned it.
Exercise is extremely important... especially that exercise when you push your chair back from the table. That’s the key to losing weight.

 

[MRSPOCK]

Similar to real estate, the top 3 rules are, diet, diet and diet

 

[gooddog]

Obviously you can lose weight with diet alone, but is it wise? Lifting light weights, doing some form of cardio (or combining the two) builds bone density, keeps blood sugar in check, strengthens your cardio-vascular system. A lot of people look at exercise in a negative way because they when they start, they start big. Start small with short walks, or do a light aerobic plan, with some hand weights. After a few months you will move into harder exercise because the current program is too easy. If it took you 10 years to get out of shape, don't plan on getting in shape in 1 year - take your time. JMO

 

[Murph]

If you could only choose one for weight loss, which would you pick, diet or exercise? Based on my own experience the answer was obvious, but this subject had been debated in the past. Here is an article on this subject by Will Brink:
https://brinkzone.com/exercise-and-weight-loss-how-important-is-it/

Diet. You are what you eat.