For me personally it’s always been diet 100%. I can get away without exercising and feeling good with a good diet but if I had a bad diet I feel like shit no matter what exercise I do.you know how the saying goes you can’t out run a bad diet
This is a scenario where nobody can give you a suitable answer without additional contextual information.
Cake in-and-of-itself isn’t “bad”. Depends on what else is in your diet.
Exercise is almost always beneficial, unless done to such an intensity or frequency as to cause injury.
Eating cake will affect your blood sugar, insulin resistance, cholesterol and cortisol levels. Exercising will influence these things too but not necessarily reverse them. It’s not just canceling out calories. It depends what your goals are. I think diet can be healing but exercise is crucial too.
Diet >exercise. You can work out hours a day and it still will not compensate for a bad diet. It’s also hard to ever know the exact amount of calories you are burning because most tracking devices can be very inaccurate. Therefore if you’re trying to lose weight it’s easier to calculate how many calories you are intaking to be in a calorie deficit than to try and guesstimate how many calories you burned working out to afford a slice of cake. But life is all about moderation so enjoy the slice of cake from time to time and exercise to live a healthier life.
Cardio plus cake is better. Cardio has a bad rep nowadays but it’s still very useful for general health. 400 kcal is burned in approximately 45 minutes of low intensity jogging.The guy not eating the cake and watching Netflix has it worse in my opinion.
I don’t know, but here’s something to chew on (ugh).
Calories are not all the same. 400 calories from sugar, for example, will build up more fat than 400 calories from protein (or fat … isn’t that Weird). This largely is because sugar, or carbs more generally, increase insulin. Insulin increases the storing of triglycerides; essentially it builds up fat. Obviously, I’m simplifying.
But what I haven’t thought thru is when you burn calories, are they the same? So I don’t know.
I do know that exercise increases your appetite. I think it’s due to hormones released. On the other hand, exercise releases good hormones like human growth hormone that stays in your body for hours and increases the burning of fat. It might be useful that just 20 minutes of intervals gives 90% of the benefits of a 1 hour jog. This last stat could be wrong; it’s been a while since I read it. But the principle is valid.
Finally, one think I consistently hear from researchers in this field is that exercise in general is a tough way to lose weight; diet is generally more efficient. However there are tons of other benefits from exercise.
How did our ancestors live a healthy life? They ate fresh, unprocessed food as much as needed. And did physical exercise in doing daily chores (walked, didn’t take a car for short distances), played, relaxed. We just need to be as natural as possible like them; enjoy fresh food and be physically active.
I asked this question before and the answer was hotly debated but eating then burning it off brings you back to net zero but you get muscle and cardio fitness on top of it.
Thank you everyone who responded. As I mentioned, this is a hypothetical question and I wanted to learn what would be better for the body. I am a big proponent of clean eating for the most part but every now and then, when I am tempted by a sweet goodie, specially in the holidays, I do try and exercise more on those days. It got me thinking about the bad effects of sugar and butter and the good effects of cardio and exercise and I wanted to know which outweighs the other.
If your primary motivation to exercise is being able to eat over-infulgent food regularly, my snap judgement is that you need to re-evaluate your relationship with food and also where the priority of maintaining good health truly is on your list of priorities.
Like I said, that’s my snap judgement without any additional context from you and I’d imagine there is more context to your question.
If your goal is to maintain healthy body fat levels, no exercise and consistent, proper nutrition would technically be the answer to your question, in my opinion.
Initially, for your weight, diet. But you can’t expect to be in a good mood and want to eat well again, unless you exercise!
Even if you can maintain a healthy weight with diet and not exercise, you probably won’t be in the best mood and probably won’t have be very healthy other than your weight.
Okay, maybe if you were eating REALLY healthfully, like whole-foods plant-based without caffeine or alcohol, either, you could skip exercise and feel great, but chances are you’re not even if you’re a disciplined person.