What’s more important for weight loss…diet or exercise?

Both diet and exercise are important for your health, but you can make a bigger impact on weight loss by changing your diet than by increasing your exercise.

Calories in, calories out.  That is the basis for weight loss.  You must use more calories than you consume. 

Calories in:  This is determined by the food and drinks that you consume.

Calories out: Everyone has a baseline number of calories that their body uses to survive.  This is called your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).  Your BMR changes based on age, size, body composition and gender.  The activity that you do during the day increases the number of calories that your body uses on top of your BMR.

If we look at a 140 pound, 50 year old woman, she will burn about 300 calories from walking briskly for an hour. That is about the same number of calories that are found in a medium size café mocha and less calories than a medium size blueberry muffin (480 cal).

 It is very difficult to “exercise off the pounds”, as it takes about 3,500 calories burned to lose one pound.  So if you are serious about working on weight loss, change your diet and reduce the number of calories you are consuming.  Just say "NO" to the blueberry muffin. 

-Dr. Schulz 

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