The old adage is that you can’t out-train a bad diet. In other words, if you exercise but your diet sucks, your results will be limited.
If you train consistently, you’ll get stronger, improve endurance, and support overall health, but the changes might not look as staggering. So, more accurately, if you’re looking to see changes, dialing in your diet will likely make the biggest visible difference.
For most people, improving their diet is harder than exercise. Nutrition tends to be more nuanced, food is everywhere, and most people eat multiple times per day — meaning there are multiple times when things can go sideways.
So just how much impact can exercise have on its own?
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Can Exercise Alone Help You Lose Weight?
Let’s look at the numbers.
A solid resistance training session might burn 200-300 calories during your workout, plus about 100 extra calories throughout the day. If you’re hitting the weights 3 times per week with higher volume (think 3 sets of 10 reps across multiple exercises), you’ll burn roughly 900-1,200 calories weekly.
That might sound promising, but here’s the reality:
These numbers only apply to high-volume training. If you’re doing lower-volume work (like 4 sets of 3-5 reps), you’ll burn significantly fewer calories.
Even at best, burning an extra 1,000 calories per week means roughly ~143 calories per day. One Starbucks caffe latte is 190 calories – instantly wiping out your training deficit.
Plus, your body adapts over time, becoming more efficient at handling the workload. Translation? You’ll likely burn fewer calories as you get fitter.
Bottom line? Exercise alone creates a small caloric deficit, but it’s a much slower path to change than combining training with better eating habits. But, the idea of training and diet being two separate battles might be misleading.
Exercise and Diet: How Working Out Can Improve Your Eating Habits
Turns out, consistent exercise might improve your diet by making you more likely to crave healthier foods, such as fruits and vegetables.
Research at Indiana University examined the “transfer effect.” This phenomenon occurs when making improvements in one area of your life spills over into other related areas. In the research, people who committed to a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise at least four times per week started eating more fruits and vegetables.
While it might not seem groundbreaking, there’s a bigger takeaway: if you find yourself struggling with a new healthy habit or behavior, it might make sense to find an easier point of entry.
Many people try to force themselves to eat fruits and vegetables. It’s great if it happens. If not, you might be better off finding a groove with training, winning your workouts, and seeing if that transfers to a piece of fruit after you exercise or a salad you sneak in during the day.
You won’t technically be out-training your diet, but you will be using training to outsmart your dieting roadblocks.
Why Mastering Any Healthy Habit Matters
Too often I see people struggle and fail because they’re determined to master a specific healthy habit rather than any healthy habit.
What works better? Finding alternative paths to your goal. If eating less sugar feels impossible, maybe start with a morning walk. If meal prep overwhelms you, begin with post-workout protein shakes. The key is building momentum through small wins.
When you’re stuck in quicksand, forcing the struggle will only make you sink faster. But shift your approach – find what feels achievable – and you might be surprised how quickly other healthy habits follow.
And remember, detours are acceptable, especially if they give you the jumpstart you need.
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