Sunday, February 7, 2016

Exercise vs. Diet

Just like everyone else out there struggling with their weight, I had this question bothering me for close to a decade. Eventually a few years ago, I sorta figured out that improper eating has a lot more detrimental impact on your weight than proper exercising can undo it.

Simply put, it is easy to lose weight by proper eating and no exercising, but it is very very difficult (or impossible) to lose weight by proper exercising and improper eating. As an Engineer, I consider this as a very simplistic - Input - Output = Excess Weight problem. If your calorie intake is more than your daily calorie requirement, then you simply end up gaining weight (the excess calories get stored in there). And you can't really burn that much calories off by just exercising, unless you are a full-time athlete or a person who does extremely strenuous physical work all day.

I came across this video that explains this simple concept beautifully, and I thought it's worth sharing:


Anyway, for all you diet skeptics out there, who will be prompt to point out that one friend who is very lean and eats a lot, I just have to say this: not all bodies are equally efficient. Some of us are blessed with a super awesome metabolism, that manages to convert each and every calorie consumed, into a calorie that can be used (100 calories in = 100 calories that can be used by the body). These some of us have a natural tendency to grow fat if we don't take care of our diets.

The lean over-eating people are blessed with bad metabolism. They can eat to their heart's content, but their bodies can't convert all those consumed calories into useful ones. Though we can be envious of them, we have to live with the fact that our bodies are just very efficient. Had we been cars, people would have loved us for our fuel efficiency.

And to end this blog post, I would like you to visit this link, where they have visually shown how 200 Calories of a few food items look like. See. Ruminate.

No comments:

Post a Comment