I have mentioned this in passing many times before but I’ll say it again: Losing weight is about 80% diet and only 20% exercise. In general, if you want to lose weight, then adding all the exercise in the world will do you little good if you continue with your current diet. Conversely, a few proper changes to your diet will immediately lower your weight even if you add absolutely no exercise.
Yes, a good diet is that important but don’t just take my word for it. The European Congress on Obesity in Amsterdam has just released a report that concludes that it’s excessive eating that has contributing to the rising obesity in the U.S.:
”In the U.S., over the last 30 years, it seems that the food side of the equation has changed much more than the physical activity side,” Professor Boyd A. Swinburn, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, noted in a telephone interview with Reuters Health.
Weight gain in the American population seems to be virtually all due to the consumption of more calories, with declines in physical activity playing only a minor role, Swinburn explained. [Yahoo News]
As he goes on to explain, sure exercise can play a key role in regulating our metabolism and building lean muscle, but if you have to choose between diet and exercise, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.
The technique used to arrive at thse results is very interestig and you should read the entire article to get the full details, but in brief, what the researchers did was compare how much food Americans needed to maintain a steady weight to the amount of food they actually ate in the 1970s and early 2000s(using national surveys). This comparison let them estimate how much Americans would weigh after a 30-year period. Finally, they simply looked at actual weight data after 30 years and note that the weight gain could all be explined by overeating alone!
Diet is inded the single biggest factor that contributes to weight gain or loss and careful consideration to our meals will enable us to maintain oursleves at the right weight-range.
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I respectfully agree to disagree…….Bob Greene, Oprah’s person trainer says just the opposite……more exercise is the key……I think they are equal issues.
I speak from experience……in charge of a school district with 20,000 students, in 2004 our rate of overweight and obese students was 3% with the national average was 35% plus…we mainly focused on physical activity. We had every bad vending machine in our school but because of exercise our students were fit.
The problem is, such few schools in the United States have quality PE programs, it is hard to to a study on the value of exercise in schools.
After 15 years of developing a model PE program, we are convinced a quality PE program can help solve the obesity crisis.
http://www.pe4life.org