Are you looking for your abs? Or maybe some definition in those hard-working muscles you’ve been training? You exercise and put in the time, yet you still don’t quite see the toned and defined body you are working towards. Maybe you’ve heard the phrases, “You can’t out-train a bad diet” or “Abs are made in the kitchen.” No matter how hard you workout, if you don’t pay attention to your diet, you will not see the results of all your hard effort. That’s because it’s an inside job.
What you eat and how much, is so important, that some estimate it’s 60-80% diet and 20-40% exercise, that determines how your muscles show up in the game. I am a huge Active-ist for exercise because it allows me to do all the fun things l love to do like skiing, mountain biking, and dancing. Also, exercise is extremely important for our health and longevity, for our minds, for our bones, and a myriad of hundreds of other reasons. If you are wanting to lose weight though, diet plays a crucial role. This is because it takes a lot of activity through only working out to create a calorie deficit to lose those extra pounds on your frame. For reference, if you weigh 150 lbs, walking one mile burns approximately 80 calories on average. If you ran that distance, it ups the calorie burn to around 112. These aren’t exact figures and will vary based on your metabolic rate, your speed, and your fitness level, but they do give you an idea of how hard you would have to work out to lose weight by exercise alone. You can easily eat the calories you just burned in that one mile with 10 chips, or a small chocolate chip cookie, or one slice of cheese. In fact, you’d have to run seven to ten miles a day without upping your caloric intake to lose one pound a week. That’s very difficult to do for most people. I have worked with clients who thought that since they worked out an hour with me, they were free to eat whatever they wanted the rest of the day. Not so! Even elite athletes, who workout for hours each day, have been known to be meticulous about their diet. They workout for a living and still have to watch how much they consume. Compare this to the average person who sits at a desk for most of their day, and possibly then in front of the television at night.
To give more of an overall picture of the visual roles diet and exercise play, I tell my clients to think of it like this: Exercise builds the muscles that give your body it’s overall shape. Diet is what allows you to see that shape. Also, if you only diet, at some point you will plateau. Exercise helps you push past that. Both diet and exercise are vital to achieve not only how you want to look on the outside, but also the health you are seeking on the inside. Both diet and exercise are very important, but for different reasons. When you combine them, they work hand-in-hand to give you your ultimate health and body.
As with most things in life, we get our best results when we work from the inside out. Apply this to your body and you will start seeing results. After all… it’s an inside job!
Supporter for your health,
Irene
