30/04/2015
Exercise vs Diet
What do you think is more important – exercise or diet?
Fitness experts are often asked this question by clients, friends and family – “What is more important: exercise or diet? Main sirf diet follow kar loon toh chalega kya?”
Popular opinion says that dieting is more important and also more convenient. To an extent, I would agree with this answer, because –
➢ A diet can be started by anyone – young or old – in any stage of fitness, while any form of exercise would require a basic minimum level of fitness. While dieting does require a certain amount of willpower, exercising requires a tremendous amount of motivation and courage.
➢ A diet can be followed anywhere – at home, in the office, or while travelling. Exercise usually requires a designated space such as a gym with equipment, or a park.
➢ People can argue that exercise too can be done at home – just go for a one-hour walk around you neighbourhood every day! But walking has its limitation – it is effective only for a certain period of time, after which the lack of ‘progression’ makes it useless. This is true for all exercises, actually – no workout is effective without progression*. Which means – if you walk now, you should jog tomorrow. If you jog today, you should run tomorrow and if you run today then start sprinting tomorrow. This limitation does not apply to diet.
➢ You can devote only a limited period of time – maybe an hour or two – for exercise, while you have the whole day to diet. Because you have 24 hours for dieting, you can play around smartly with it through the course of the day. For example, you can eat lightly during the day to ‘prepare’ for a heavy dinner with friends later. Or, in the case of gym goers, if you forget to have enough proteins in the morning, you can always add an extra meal later in the day.
All these points make it seem that diet is indeed more important than exercise. But this is not true.
What science says is that exercise and diet are equally important. One cannot give more or less importance to either.
Why? Here’s a simple way to understand this.
Imagine you own a car, but you can’t afford any fuel. Will you be able to drive it? No! A car cannot move without fuel.
Now imagine that you have both the vehicle and the fuel, but you never take the car out for drive. It sits in your garage year after year, without getting touched or used. One fine day, you decide to take it out for a spin – what do you think will happen? Yes, you will probably not go anywhere!
This is true for the human body too. If the body is the vehicle, then diet is the fuel and regular exercise is the regular usage. Just like the fuel actually makes a car move, the food we eat will be used up by our body to move; and regular exercise will keep our bodies in good ‘running conditions’.
Going back to the beginning of my article, I’d say that ‘which is more important?’ is the wrong question. Put some efforts into both exercise and diet, and the combination of the two will give you maximum fitness results.
That’s why… it’s not exercise vs diet. It’s exercise with diet.
– Siddharth Nain, Personal Trainer
