Eat less vs eat more exercise at will, which is more effective to lose weight?

When it comes to losing weight, almost all of us think that we should eat less and move more, keep our mouths shut, and walk more.


If you eat too much carelessly, you turn around and run for five or six kilometers. You even go to the gym to do aerobics for more than two hours to burn off the calories you eat.
You can eat more as long as you are willing to exercise to consume it.
A day’s exercise may consume 300-500 calories. Is that really the case?

image 16 - Eat less vs eat more exercise at will, which is more effective to lose weight?

Before the discussion, let’s take a look at the main parts of the daily consumption of the human body:
Total daily energy expenditure
Basic metabolic rate (BMR): the absolute minimum energy required by the body to maintain yourself, which means the energy consumed by you lying on the bed and doing nothing at all
Food thermal effect TEF: the amount of calories consumed by the body to digest the food you eat
Adaptive heat generation at: changes in energy consumption caused by changes in physical environment (for example, the destruction of muscle fibers after strength training will increase protein turnover)
Activity consumption near: non exercise consumption such as brushing teeth, walking, shaking legs, sleeping and turning over
Exercise consumption eat: heat consumed by exercise
However, the generation is related to muscle, body composition, age, etc., the thermal effect of food is related to food digestion, and the adaptive heat generation is related to the physical environment. Therefore, these three factors can hardly be controlled artificially in the short term.
Then only [consumption] is artificially controllable. When you eat too much, that is, when your caloric intake is greater than your caloric consumption, you can increase your exercise consumption to balance the calories, and you won’t be afraid to eat too much.

image 17 - Eat less vs eat more exercise at will, which is more effective to lose weight?
  • Inhibitory energy consumption
    The additional consumption of human body is not always increasing, but there is an upper limit because there is constrained model of energy expenditure.
    According to the experimental data
    (1) , respectively, 30 minutes / 60 minutes of aerobic exercise every day for 13 weeks. The results are as follows:
    Although the energy consumption of the 60 minute group was twice that of the 30 minute exercise group, the cumulative energy balance calculated from the changes in body composition was not significantly different.
    On the contrary, the weight of the 30 minute exercise group decreased by as much as 1kg compared with the 60 minute exercise group.
    Moreover, as the aerobic exercise time becomes longer and longer, the energy consumption will be suppressed more and more. There is an upper limit for the total daily consumption of our body.
image 18 - Eat less vs eat more exercise at will, which is more effective to lose weight?

(2) So you can’t easily believe the calorie exercise consumption value displayed by app software.
In addition, the basic metabolic rate, which accounts for the largest proportion of the total daily consumption, is as high as 60%, the food thermal effect is about 10%, and the remaining additional consumption is about 10% – 20%.
If you don’t control your diet, you will obviously put the cart before the horse if you try to offset the extra calories of coke and potato chips by exercising.

metabolic compensation mode
A lot of long-term exercise will make the body more and more efficient. That is to say, when you exercise, you can use less heat to complete this action, which is one of the manifestations of metabolic adaptation.
(I have written about this principle before, but I don’t have much explanation here. I can review it: eating less and exercising more is not thin? I have finally found the real reason…)
This can also explain why after running for a certain length of time, the more comfortable you get to the back, because the body will adapt and VO2max (maximum oxygen intake) will be less than at the beginning.
So when you run 5km and consume 300kal, even if you continue to work hard for 10km, your body will not double and consume 600kal.

image 19 - Eat less vs eat more exercise at will, which is more effective to lose weight?

To reduce fat, the most important thing is diet
It is obvious that diet control is more important than exercise consumption, and the daily energy gap should come from diet control rather than a large amount of exercise consumption.
Although exercise consumption is not the most important part of weight loss, it is undeniable that it brings great benefits to our body and physiology.
Although it is not an effective way to help us lose weight by increasing consumption through exercise, exercise is still an important auxiliary means. (such as increasing muscle mass and improving EPOC effect through strength anaerobic training)
But it’s too hard for people who need to lose fat and have a poor foundation in sports to keep their mouths shut and walk.

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