When it comes to achieving effective weight loss, 80 percent of your efforts will be from your diet. The remaining 20 percent will be attributed to various lifestyle changes that you make including your physical activity level, the amount of sleep you get on an average night, and even your stress control. As much as we may not want to change the way we eat, it is by far the most important and influential factor helping to determine whether or not you will burn unwanted body fat.
If you were hoping to be able to make a few minor tweaks here and there to what you eat but count on your workouts to burn the fat, you’re likely to be disappointed. It’s not that you can’t ever lose any weight in this way. It’s that it probably won’t happen anywhere near as efficiently as you’d expect.
The reason weight loss is 80 percent diet is that the food you eat determine how many calories your body receives each day. Whether you’re counting calories, cutting carbs, going keto, or taking on any other strategy, when it all comes down to it, if your body isn’t burning more calories than you’re eating, you won’t lose weight. Therefore, no matter what you’re doing to drop the pounds, what you eat needs to provide your body with fewer calories than it will burn on any given day.
Maybe it’s your intention to do at least one amazing workout every day. What about that? Is weight loss still 80 percent diet in that case? The short answer is yes. The main problem is that you likely think you’re burning more calories than you actually are when you complete a workout.
Even a really great workout session, done at your best performance level, is unlikely to torch the calories you’ll have in the meal that follows. Depending on the snack you have – or even the protein shake – you may not even be burning that much.
Exercise is a fantastic component for any fat burning strategy. It will definitely support any efforts you’re making to control your caloric intake. However, we are nearly all victim to a number of misunderstandings about the type of difference it’s making. It’s not really our faults, either. Our fitness trackers and exercise equipment are constantly estimating our calorie burn, and they are notoriously inaccurate. Trusting the calorie burning feedback from these devices can be detrimental to our understanding of how we’re doing. Always assume that the true number is lower than the reading on your gadget.
We need to remind ourselves that weight loss is 80 percent diet. This will encourage us to choose foods more wisely and will ensure that our fitness efforts really do burn as much fat as possible.