5TH AUGUST 2018
Diet or exercise - what's more important?
It’s an age-old topic when it comes to maintaining a healthy lifestyle or trying to lose weight, and it’s a little bit like deciphering the riddle of what came first, the chicken or the egg?
Is it more important to have a good diet or is it more important to exercise well?
The answer is quite simple; you should have a healthy balance of both.
In order to have a healthy, strong and good-looking body, you can’t expect to gorge on chocolate and crisps but then because you spend an hour at the gym every day it doesn’t matter; it totally does.
As a role reversal, you can’t just expect to eat well and swerve the gym and expect a nice body in return, it just doesn’t work like that.
Balance is the absolute key and once you have that balance in place, you’ll see consistent results.
• Nutrition has a direct impact on how well you perform in the gym
If you ate all kinds of rubbish before a gym sesh, would you really feel like working out, or are you more inclined to be sluggish and half-hearted? Common sense should kick in here and tell you that it’s far better to eat well before a work out rather than munch a Chinese banquet and expect the same results.
Good food makes your exercise more productive, period.
• Exercise will make your hunger spike
When you’ve just had a big work out, you may not feel hungry straight away but that hunger will spike as your energy levels are dipped into. Find foods that complement your workout regime and will give you that all-important energy boost that is needed after a session.
A chocolate bar may give you an immediate sugar rush and fill a hole, but ultimately you will crash and need something else.
• You don’t have to be good all of the time
OK, so we aren’t going all military here – you can have treats and cheat days or meals, but the important thing is to strike a balance. If you have a heavy meal, follow it by making sure that your next one is healthier, and maybe work out a little longer in the gym to sweat out the toxins and burn off the fat.
• Allow common sense to prevail
We live in a world that is a lot more conscious of what we put into our bodies, making it much easier to make the right choices when it comes to food. Use your common sense when you’re deciding what to eat – we all know that a tuna jacket potato is better than fish and chips and so on and so forth.
• Eating well isn’t enough if you want results
If having a strong, lean and muscular body is what you are looking to achieve, then you won’t get there by just having a pristine diet of all the good stuff, as fantastic as that is. Working out will allow you to build up your muscles and achieve the overall look that you want.
It’s all good eating poached fish, brown rice and veggies, but if the most exercise you get is walking from the cooker to the couch, then your bod is going to stay pretty average.
