Exercise for good health. Eat right for weight control.
Do both and you're damn near bullet-proof.
Eighty percent of weight loss is all about what you put in your mouth in terms of the quality of the calories as opposed to the number of calories. The other twenty percent is stuff like exercise and quality rest.
Exercise is essential to good health - as little as 30 minutes of walking can be significant if you're currently living a completely sedentary lifestyle. But it's not the secret to weight loss. A guy named Tim Church at the Pennington Biomedical Research Facility did a study of some fat gals in Louisiana and found that
some exercise dropped weight and improved health, but
more exercise did not necessarily equate to
more weight loss (his study did not include dietary controls). These broads must have been monsters and out of shape as hell because he said that they would have to sit them down to rest
before starting the exercise sessions because their HR was jacked up so bad from walking up one flight of stairs to the lab they had to settle that down so they could start with something close to a normal HR.
There's a lot of studies coming out that prove exercise is important to good health. And exercising will help lose weight - to a point. But unless you're working out like a pro athlete, exercise is not going to make that big of an impact on your weight. At least not so that you can continue to eat poorly and expect that exercise will offset the effects of what you're taking in.
Avoid sugar like it's poison. Stay away from processed foods, fast foods, anything labeled "low-fat" (it's loaded with sugar), enriched flour, rice, corn and other grains, potatoes, fast food, fruit juices, and anything that has a list of ingredients that's a paragraph long. Go for real food like fresh green produce, meat, fish, poultry, whole-fat dairy and some nuts (not peanuts which are legumes) and some fruits like berries.
She pointed out something pretty interesting to me, she has a number of clients that come to her in their mid forties, have followed a good diet for years, and have been avid runners for years as well. Despite running 5 or so miles every day, they are horrified to see that once they get into their mid forties, they start getting that middle age spread and belly fat. How bad would it suck to run five or more miles ever day, follow a good diet, and still start getting a belly! And I have actually noticed that if you watch a televised marathon, you will see that quite a few of the older runners do indeed sport a little belly fat. They come to the this trainer and are shocked to learn that all their running isn’t sufficient, they need to put on overall muscle mass. She puts them on a full body workout regimen and they drop the belly fat.
Originally Posted by GymRat
I think she's right. Being a former Marine running was just something I've always believed was essential to good fitness. We seldom ran more than 3 miles but on the rare occasion. There were a number of officers who got so into running that they started doing marathons and their physiques went to hell. They looked like concentration camp inmates and their upper body strength was so-so (for Marines). Compare the bodies of a marathon runner to someone who does some running combined with some resistance training, or a sprinter, and see who looks healthier.