Is it true that exercise is the best method to lose weight and keep it off?

Question

Tamara Freuman, MS, RD, CDN · Answer

So the question is, is it true that exercise is the best method to lose weight and keep it off? The answer is no diet is a much more effective way to lose weight or as exercise seems much more effective and helping people maintain the losses that they've achieved through their diet. Exercise is actually pretty lousy in and of itself for weight loss. And part of that reason is metabolic adaptation to exercise. After you start doing exercise for quite some time, your body. He actually gets much more efficient at it, and the calorie deficit that it produces is surprisingly modest for the effort that you put in. So it's really really hard to exercise enough to induce substantial weight loss alone without changing your diet. So, there's a bazillion important reasons to exercise. Weight Maintenance Weight Management is one of them pretty low on the list. There are so, so, so many other benefits for exercise. So, I really encourage it, but just don't expect it to take off a whole bunch of weight. Hope that helps.

Dr. John E. Lewis · Answer

I love this question. This question is, is it true that exercises, the best method to lose weight and keep it off for many people? I would say that it's intuitive or it seems to be that case that you can exercise yourself to weight loss. Well, unfortunately, for those people who believe that that's actually untrue, because of the way that we the way Society is today, where everything is so sedentary, and everything is so easily at our fingertips. That we can drive to a grocery store or restaurant and consumed several hundred if not several thousand calories at a meal and not even think twice about it and not even spend any energy to actually acquire those calories that we have serious over balance in the way. People are living today. So, in other words, they are overfed and undernourished. And then meanwhile, they are moving very little, so we are a very sedentary society today, but it is absolutely not. True that exercises, the best method to lose weight. Now, the debate rages on about is a calorie is a calorie. And obviously, there are different components to that. Meaning that if you eat 100 calories of spinach versus 100 calories of chocolate, chip cookies, well, it's still 100 calories, but obviously the body is going to look at the spinach very differently from the chocolate chip. Cookies. Nonetheless, the law of thermodynamics didn't go away. So theoretically if you ate below your base, Metabolic rate, plus whatever amount of calories, you expend every day. If you do that for a long enough period of time, even if you were just eating chocolate chip cookies, you would lose weight, but exercise is not the best method to lose weight. It's actually getting your diet under control eating properly. Definitely restricting your calories and then eating the best sources of food. Myself being someone who's eating a plant-based diet for over roughly 26 years. Now, obviously I have my bias about that but definitely nutrition and diet. Modification dietary modification is a is the way to lose weight and keep it off, not exercise.

Cliff McArthur, MS RDN CSSD · Answer

Is it true that exercise is the best method to lose weight and keep it off? No, that's not. True. Nor is it true that nutrition just died in. Just eating fewer calories, is the best method. What's true? And has been pretty clear? I think in the literature, the scientific literature for a long number of years is that the best method is not one method? But several methods, a combination of three things more exercise, more days than not better nutrition fewer calories. Calories, but of filling Foods foods, that make you feel full. It don't make you feel like you're dieting and three better sleep, better sleep, hygiene, getting more sleep. So that our bodies basically process the day better just processing the day better recovering, better alone. Can help make it easier to lose weight exercise. Certainly does a very good job of setting the stage. Your body's reaction to food, and what it's going to do with any food is very heavily influenced. Fluent by having exercise. It's one of the reasons morning exercise maybe arguably in some ways better than afternoon or evening exercise exercise at any time. It's fantastic. I'll take it. But the best combination is all three. One of the effects that I'll note for you here of exercise is that it basically tells your body, any food you eat later? Shunt or deliver a little bit more of it, more of it. Than, if I had not exercised to muscle to Healing to recovery efforts and not too fat, then if you haven't exercised. So, I might be a little bit easier to retain fat. If you haven't exercise, exercise is definitely the Cornerstone of a weight loss and weight maintenance effort, but it's no more important than what you do with food, and what you do with your sleep, all three a very critical. All the lost weight loss and keeping it off.

Emily Zorn, MS, RD · Answer

Is it true that exercise is the best method to lose weight and keep it off? So, this is what I say, I'm a dietitian and I may be a little bit biased, but it has been shown that nutrition has a much bigger impact than exercise when it comes to weight loss. Now I'm not saying exercise isn't important, right? Having good nutrition paired with exercise. That's going to make weight loss so much easier. So if you can do both definitely do that. That, however, you can just make nutrition changes, not worried about exercise, and lose weight. If you think about it, say you go on a 5 Mile Run, you're probably burning around 500 calories that might take you, you know, 40 to 50 minutes, however, fast you might run well, thank how fast you could eat 500 calories like in a milkshake. That's about 500 calories. That could be gone in less than 10 minutes. So Because of that that's why nutrition is so. Important takes a long time exercising to burn a whole lot of calories so if we focus on nutrition that is going to be the best and first most important way of losing weight. But if you can definitely add exercise on top of that because the nutrition and exercise combo together is much more powerful than they are separately.

Dr. Emily Werner, PhD, RD, CSSD · Answer

Is it true that exercise is the best method to lose weight and keep it off? I think the best method to lose weight and keep it off is to find sustainable ways to work exercise and a well-balanced health focused diet into your life and that could be done in a ton of different ways and it's really helpful to work with a dietitian who can help you figure out what options are the most sustainable for you, but if we're going to rank things as being you know most important for losing weight and keeping it off I'm gonna put diet above exercise because you really can't outwork a bad diet. Weight loss boils down primarily to calories in calories out and you can only expend so many calories in a day but you sure as heck can eat a lot of calories if you want to. So for me I believe diet is more important to consider than exercise when we're talking about weight loss, but both are very important.

Bob Seebohar, MS, RD, CSSD · Answer

Well you know exercise can definitely help the body and help anybody lose weight but combined with nutrition. So exercise is not the only way to lose weight and I would even argue it's probably not the main way to lose weight. You really have to dial in and tighten up your daily nutrition first and add exercise at the same time. Both together are like a great relationship, right? They work with each other and they're going to provide very good results. So always combined solid exercise, aerobic and anaerobic such as strength training with a A high-quality daily nutrition plan.

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"Is it true that exercise is the best method to lose weight and keep it off?"