“Without dietary intervention, can you successfully transform your body through exercise alone?”
March 2, 2010 by Deb
And the answer? Not so much.
In fact, in the studies I have read, even 3+ hours of exercise per
week failed to lead to substantial fat loss in the absence of
strategic dietary manipulations.
Clearly, your diet is critically important to truly changing the
way you look and feel.
But what about exercise? Is it worthless, or does it make
considerable difference when combined with exercise?
To get the answer, we turn to a recent review conducted by the
Harvard School of Public Health just this year.
The review analyzed data from 18 different research studies, all
of which studied the effectiveness of a diet + exercise
intervention vs. diet alone.
The results? In both short term and long term studies, diet +
exercise resulted in greater overall weight loss than diet alone
each and every single time.But even more important is the body composition data. When
looking solely at scale weight figures, it may appear that the
diet + exercise only slightly edges out diet alone. But when
analyzing the actual body composition data, diet + exercise
always results in much more fat loss and much less lean body
mass loss.
This is extremely important for a couple reasons:
1. Lean body mass retention is critically important to keeping
metabolism high as each lb of lean muscle requires approximately
50 calories per day to maintain.
2. When speaking of “transformation”, losing 20 lbs of pure
fat will have you looking and feeling infinitely better than
losing 10 lbs of fat and 10 lbs of muscle. I mean, amazingly
different.
Just imagine what your body would look like right now if you
dropped 10 lbs of pure body fat and added 10 lbs of lean muscle.
That’s the power of diet + exercise vs. diet alone.
And to that end, I’d recommend combining diet
tips with the following training advice:
1. Optimal training doesn’t require hours upon hours of time
in the gym. 45 minutes, 3-4 times a week is all that is needed
to reap the benefits of including exercise in your transformation
process.
2. Intensity trumps time. Work out shorter, but harder. Gauge
your workouts not by how long you go, but by how hard you go.
3. Combine both strength training and interval training for the
best results.
If you’re really looking to transform your body, combining
optimal training with solid nutrition will have you off to a
great start. But to maintain that momentum, two other
components are necessary: unstoppable mindset and ongoing
support.
Believe in yourself; believe in the change to come.
Deb 
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