A healthy diet or exercise—which is more important in different aspects of fitness, bodybuilding, or athletic ability? Combining a healthy diet with your exercise and training routine helps us take a step closer to our fitness goals.
What should be the first priority?
Being fit and healthy isn’t as simple as "eat less and exercise more to stay fit." Fitness and health are vast concepts. Every person has a different definition of what being healthy is. For a skinny person, gaining weight could be his fitness goal. Whereas, for an obese person, losing some weight could be the end goal, and so on. A different diet and exercise regime are required for each and every goal. You can’t give one or the other priority over the other. Diet and exercise go hand-in-hand.
For Weight Loss
In the modern world, where obesity is rampant, losing a few pounds at a psychological level is based on calorie consumption and expenditure. But you can’t just go into a total calorie deficit, which may lead to a decline in your health.
Keep your diet in check and rich in proteins, vitamins, minerals, and fibre and low in carbs, fats, and sugar to encourage weight loss. Along with a healthy diet, it is also important to know how you burn those calories. Exercise is also an important part of losing weight, because if you don’t exercise or workout, your body will turn those extra calories into fat, hindering your weight loss process.
Golden Rule for Weight Loss: Keep your calorie intake less than the calories you burn each day, and you’re good to go with your weight loss journey.
For Weight Gain
If you’re looking to gain weight, then diet plays a crucial role in that. A calorie surplus is required; that is, you have to increase your calorie intake in a day in order to gain weight or muscle mass. For example, if your daily calorie intake was 2000 calories, you must bump it up to say 3000 calories a day.
However, only increasing the calorie intake won’t be enough to stay healthy; you must make sure that it doesn’t turn into a dirty bulk. Keep a check on your diet; it must contain all the essential nutrients and not just fats and sugars. Along with a proper diet, exercise is a must, as lack of exercise leads your body to turn the calories into fat and make you look fatty rather than muscular or bulky.
Golden Rule for Weight Gain: Keep your calorie intake higher than your calories burned each day, and you’re good to go with your weight gain journey.
Diet Plan by Top Fitness Enthusiasts
1. Calculate your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate)
- Calculate your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure)
Now it’s very simple:
To lose weight
You have to follow a calorie deficit diet plan which means the amount of calories you take in a day should be less than your BMR.
To gain weight
You have to follow a calorie-surplus diet plan, which means the amount of calories you take in a day should be more than your BMR.
The Magnificent Theory of 80/20
You must have heard about the theory of fitness that it's about 80% diet and 20% exercise. The truth is, no one can go through with his or her fitness journey with either one or another. In the debate of diet vs. exercise, it is true that 80% of your diet determines whether or not you’ll lose or gain weight according to your goals.
But you can’t just leave it on the diet alone; 20% of how you progress towards your goal depends upon your exercise ability and your workout routine, especially in the case of weight loss, as you need to burn those extra calories that you intake during your diet.
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