Nutrition Vs Exercise - You can't out train a bad diet..

So you decide that you want to lose weight and you set a target weight you want to reach. You then start to think, how will I ever achieve this. Go and see a nutritionist? Join a gym? Go to a Personal Trainer? Having been there myself, I’m going to tell you from my personal experience what I think works. Yes I could quote facts, figures and research - as to which diet works, as to which type of exercise is the best for weight loss, toning, building muscle (which I have read numerous articles and research papers on weight loss and nutrition) but this post it is going to be my personal opinion because anyone can give you facts and figures but I can give you the reality of it.

Ok so the fact that I’m a Personal Trainer and going to become a Nutritionist I come from both sides of the spectrum and have a fairly good understanding of both so I’m not going to be biased against one or the other.

Firstly let’s talk about exercise. If you’ve never exercised a day in your life (like my old self or what I like to call past Victoria) this can be a very daunting experience and is a great place to start for losing weight. I always tell my clients to have a goal of getting fitter and stronger first and then a bi-product of that will be the weight loss.

It is the amount and type of exercise you do that can either help or hinder your weight loss. It doesn’t have to mean long strenuous cardio sessions contrary to what everyone thinks. This is where people can go wrong, they slog it out on the treadmill/bike for hours on end but are still the same on the scales as they’re losing muscle not fat which is not what you want.

Now the nutrition side of things. I believe the old saying “You can’t out train a bad diet.” is one of the truest sayings in the world. I know so many people that go to the gym and do a hard session only to then come out and think awesome I just worked off so much and then go and stuff themselves silly with cake, chips and lollies – well I hope not all 3 at once but you get the idea.

People think that it should be the nutrition that complements the weight loss, but it is really the other way around. Yes I’m not going to dispute that exercising you lose weight ... you don’t need a personal trainer to tell you that ... but if you are exercising and then eating crap then you are not going to be losing any significant amount of weight. Ok well if you did 6 hours of exercise a day then maybe you would … but realistically who has time to do that?? - I’d love to meet that person. And the weight you would be losing would be either water weight or worse still your muscles.

For me, changing the nutrition part of it far outweighed any amount of exercise I could have done. There were days when I couldn’t exercise, as I was sick, stuck late at work – I used any excuse back then. And more importantly having rest days to let my body recover. But I still never let that not being able to exercise for some reason stop me from reaching my weight goal. So it was changing what I ate and fuelled my body with that truly helped me become a fitter, healthier, stronger person.