“No matter how much you exercise, if you eat poorly, you will struggle not with just your weight but with your health.” I recently read this quote from nutritionist, Michelle LeSueur, on Facebook, and I couldn’t agree more. At Cafe Physique, we offer both fitness and nutrition services. Our personal training, yoga, and pilates offering is hot stuff. Everyone understands the benefits of working out, so the fitness services are easy to sell because people just get it. The nutrition services? Um…not so much.
Most people feel like they don’t need help with nutrition because they either “already know how to eat well” (but are not actually doing it), or they think their workout will make up for the poor diet. Well, as this picture so clearly illustrates, “You can’t compete with what you eat.” It’s nearly impossible for the average (or above-average) person to exercise enough to overcome the ill effects of bad eating. Even if you can burn the calories – and that’s a big IF – the exercise still won’t fully compensate for the sodium, artificial foodlike substances, cholesterol, carcinogens, and more that come along with the traditional American diet.
Now don’t get me wrong. Exercise is, indeed, a big step forward. According to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, there is strong evidence that exercise lowers the risk of early death, coronary heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, adverse blood lipid profile, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, colon cancer, and breast cancer. It also helps prevent weight gain, improves cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness, prevents falls, reduces depression, and provides better cognitive function for older adults. And finally…exercise promotes weight loss “when combined with reduced calorie intake.”
These are huge benefits and certainly should not be overlooked, but exercise alone is still not a “get out of jail free” card. A health report by the World Health Organization listed (in order) tobacco, high blood pressure, alcohol, cholesterol, overweight, low fruit and vegetable intake, and inadequate exercise as the biggest perils to the health of the world’s richest nations. Nearly all of these risks are diet related, but yet, people are still mostly gung ho about working out – not eating right.
So for 2013, while you’re making resolutions and planning for the “new you” everyone is advertising (eyes rolling), make sure that you’re not setting yourself up to take one step forward and two steps back. Clean up your diet first…and let exercise be the (theoretical, fat-free) icing on top.
