Women in general tend to believe that dieting is better than doing exercise to control their weight.  You, yourself have probably fallen for this myth.  You’ve more than likely have thought of reducing your caloric intake by saying “No” to a piece of cake (250 cal) rather than burning off the cake after you’ve eaten it (jogging for 2 miles at 110 cal/mile).
If you just kept saying, no and deprived yourself from eating foods that would make you overweight, you would eventually lose weight and get the body you want, right?

Nope!

Research and studies have proven time and time again that exercise is a more effective way to lose fat than just going on a diet.

Even with this research many people disregard it altogether and try to control their weight with other unsuccessful diet strategies.  There are two popular ways of controlling your weight.  The first is dieting and the second is dieting coupled with exercise.

1.  Diet Alone

Yes, eating well and reducing your caloric intake will slim you down, but it doesn’t focus on the real problem – decreasing your fat.  Most fad diets take you through a process of water loss, which accounts for early successes in those fad diets.


In addition, when you diet or restrict your caloric intake it can lead to weight loss, but the loss is mainly form protein (lean tissue) and water.  When you lose lean tissue, your body is less capable of burning calories and you end up just gaining back the weight.  On top of that because your body doesn’t have enough lean tissue to burn fat, your metabolic thermostat can possibly reset, causing you to gain weight even if you decrease your calories.

Diet + Exercise

Coupling your diet with an exercise program will yield a lot more results and benefits.  When you add exercise into the mix you open up a whopping amount of benefits to your health, including greater fat loss, lower heart rate and improved heart rate recovery after exercise, an increase in lean muscle and a higher metabolic rate.

It’s pretty clear that you need to include some sort of activity in your weight control program.  By combining both dieting and exercise you’ll be able to provide yourself with a positive attack on both causes of being overweight:  Excess caloric intake and insufficient caloric expenditure.