In order to lose weight for good, there are two elements of the equation that are essential, and that is diet and exercise. You getting both in order is going to be paramount for success.

You’ll always have those people who will wonder why they can’t just diet or they can’t just exercise – if they do one very well, won’t that lead to results? While you may be able to lose weight with a diet alone, don’t even attempt to lose weight just exercise. You cannot out-exercise a bad diet.

Let me say that again because it is vitally important that you fully understand this concept. You cannot out-exercise a bad diet. Period.

Don’t even try. So why is this the case? Why can’t you exercise away a bad diet?

The fact that you need to remember is that it’s just too easy to accumulate a high amount of calories with a few wrong food choices. For instance, if you eat a slice of cheesecake, that could easily tally you up to 600-900 calories depending on the variety and what all its served with.

Related:Calculate your daily calorie intake with our free calorie counter

Most people don’t realize just how much exercise it would take to burn all these calories off.

You’d easily be looking at 60-90 minutes at minimum and that would be relatively intense exercise. Unless you have all day to be doing your workouts, it’s simply not going to cut it.It’s far easier to make a few small cuts to your diet intake to create the calorie deficit we mentioned earlier for fat loss to occur.

If you try and exercise your way to this deficit, you’re going to wind up burnt out, injured, and hating exercise before not too long. It’s far easier to use a combination of both to get the results that you’re after.

Another thing to take note of is the fact that exercise will serve more than just burning calories as well. In reality, the real reason to exercise while dieting is two-fold:

1. It’ll help you boost your metabolic rate

When done properly, exercise is going to be excellent for increasing your metabolic rate, meaning you burn more calories 24/7 without having to do anything else additional. The faster your metabolic rate is on a day to day basis, the faster you’ll see weight loss progressing along without having to resort to that ultra low calorie diet plan where you are starving half the day and devoid of all energy.

Intense exercise that’s short and focuses on power based movements (as we’ll talk about shortly) is the form of exercise that will make your body almost fat resistant. That means that by doing this variation of exercise, you can essentially defend against fat gain into the future. You won’t have to worry about regaining weight as easily once you reach your goal weight because your body will naturally be burning up extra calories you might consume.

2. It’ll help you sustain lean muscle mass

The second reason you should be doing exercise on your fat loss diet plan is because doing so will also help you sustain your lean muscle mass better as well. If you can perform regular exercise sessions, you’ll send the message to your body that it needs to keep its lean muscle mass, meaning you’re less likely to start burning it up as a fuel source when energy gets low.

If you aren’t exercising and are just dieting, you put yourself at a much greater risk of burning both muscle and body fat, which is not what you want.

Fat burn – yes.

Muscle burn – no.

Exercise is what makes the difference. So as you can see, there are more reasons to exercise while dieting than just to create a calorie deficit.

The calorie deficit is really low on the priority scale when it comes to the actual exercise session that you do. More important is how many calories that workout causes your body to burn because of the fact you did it as well as the benefit it provides in terms of assuring that you lose fat, not muscle.

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Author: Rob Miller

Rob Miller founded SupplementCritique.com over 7 years ago, and has been the chief editor ever since. He has a diploma in Advanced Dietary Supplements Advisor, and worked at GNC for 3 years. He KNOWS supplements, both inside and out. Rob currently resides in Jupiter, FL, with his wife of 4 years.  Learn more about him in his Bio here. Follow him on Twitter , Facebook, LinkedIn, or find him on Google +. View all posts by Rob Miller