How Important is Nutrition

I’m often asked which is more important, exercise or nutrition.
In my opinion, nutrition is.

The secret to losing weight and keeping it off can be broken down into what I call the Three Basic Components: Exercise, Nurition and Consistency. In order for them to work, however, you must put 100% into all three of the components. Nonetheless, when nutrition is compared to exercise, I'd say 70% of your success is the result following a solid nutrition routine and 30% from your exercise routine.

Why is Nutrition so Important?
When trying to get in shape, the majority of your effort will be spent trying to stay on your nutrition routine. You're constantly required to make decisions that affect your satiety, insulin level, BMR, catabolic state, etc. In contrast, less than two hours a day go toward exercise. Therefore, the majority of the fat-loss process is about remaining in compliance with your nutrition routine. As an illustration, let’s say your average day is similar to this. You get up at 6:00 a.m. and eat breakfast. Like a good little worker bee, you're in the office by 9:00 a.m. It's now time to squeeze in a snack. You return a few phone calls, write a few reports, and of course, discuss the urgent matter of who got booted off your favorite reality show with your co-workers. At 12:00 p.m. you go to lunch. Upon returning, you spend the next two hours fighting off the post-lunchtime drowsies; nodding off at your desk like a bobble head. At 3:00 p.m. it's time for another snack. You get off work and make your way to the gym around 6:00 p.m. Once there you do your routine and get out by 8:00 p.m. You go home, get showered, read the paper, play with your pet or kids, then eat dinner around 8:30 p.m. You talk on the phone, watch a little TV, get some work done, or whatever, and at 11:00 p.m. you have another snack. You brush your teeth—because you refuse to be called yuck mouth—and prepare your lunch—placing it next to your car keys. You then go to bed so you can do it all again tomorrow (Don’t you wish life could be so calculated). Therefore, in a healthily planned day like this you have to consciously stop and eat six times. Equally important, you can’t just throw anything into your mouth; it has to be from your meal plan. Anyone already successfully living a healthy lifestyle unquestionably agrees that following a nutrition plan is more complicated, and requires more work, than following an exercise routine. Furthermore, if you don’t follow your nutrition routine, your body won’t receive the nutrients it needs to benefit from exercise anyway.

Providing your body with the correct amount of calories is the most challenging aspect of fat loss. If you haphazardly consume calories throughout the day you won’t reach your fitness goal. Eating too many calories results in weight gain, and as mentioned in The Trouble with Conventional Weightloss , if you don’t eat enough calories you’ll gain weight. Bottom line, regardless of how many hours of exercise you are putting in to burn fat, if you’re not simultaneously following a sound nutrition routine, you’re wasting your time.

This article is a revised excerpt from the book
TrainChange: A Unique Step-by-Step Analytical Approach to Fat Loss
By Al Smith, Jr., The Fitness Specialist®