As the New Year begins, we all set our minds to certain resolutions that we hope to change in the upcoming year. Most of us hope to lose some weight. However, some of us are not willing to give up on delicious foods in order to lose weight and prefer to spend a few hours at the gym instead. But is exercising without a healthy diet a good good enough to achieve your weight loss resolution?

Whenever someone embarks on a weight loss journey, the first thing they’re told is that diet and exercise is the foundation of any successful journey. Dieting is the concept of cutting down on our calorie intake by eating healthier, unprocessed foods and exercising allows us to burn even more calories. It’s a no-brainer that diet and exercise are both crucial to your well-being and your waistline, but can they be successful without one another? Can someone lose weight only through exercising? Or is shedding a few pounds something that can be done through only diet? Overall, it’s a known fact that most people would prefer to exercise rather than go on a diet. This is due to a wide variety of reasons. Firstly, people seem to believe that exercising is something that we do on a daily basis such as walking. However, an hour of walking only burns off 415 calories; this isn’t enough calories to see a drop in weight. Someone would have to do about 10,000 steps a day in order to burn significant calories. Even so, that would have to be combined with a healthy diet for it to achieve weight loss. Also, exercising is known to make you feel good whereas dieting and cutting off foods tend to make us feel deprived. Because of this, people think that it’s easier to burn off calories rather than cut them off. However, most people don’t realize how much they’d have to exercise in order to shed extra weight. In order to burn off one pound, you’d have to burn 3,500 calories. That means jogging for almost 9 hours, which no one is willing to do. This is why exercising is an important factor to healthy well-being but when done alone; it is not a fast and sure way to lose weight.

People will ask if that means that dieting alone is the best way to lose weight. The answer to that question is also no. While it is possible to see a drop in weight when dieting, a lot of time, we are losing muscle mass due to the lack of protein in our diet. Many people believe that cutting down all foods besides fruits and vegetables and only eating tiny portions very rarely will allow them to achieve their weight goal. It’s true that if one is to eat very little, they will see a difference in their weight. However, that weight drop will not last nor is it healthy; the body will go into starvation mode and store all foods that it is given because it won’t know when it will be fed next. This means that cutting down on food and how often one eats isn’t the way to go. Instead, one should focus on eating healthy foods and portions big enough to fill their hunger.

The best way to put this into perspective is by using the theory of a clogged sink. When we’re eating the wrong types of food and partaking in an unhealthy lifestyle, our body is very similar to a clogged sink. An unhealthy lifestyle affects our body as well as our mental well-being. When we choose to reduce our calorie intake, it’s as if we’re rationing our water usage to avoid flooding. Exercising, on the other hand, is scooping water out of the sink. Both of these methods will give little benefit to the sink and are just short-term options. The best option would be to fix the clogging sink. This can be done by choosing to eat healthy foods and exercising a fair amount which promotes our well-being and practicing a healthy lifestyle which promotes the optimal function of our digestive system and hormone regulation throughout the body.

In the end, losing weight is about small victories; everything we do on a daily basis adds up to our weight and any positive changes we make, no matter how small, will benefit our body and well-being. That is why the weight loss program at HolliBalance Well-being Center focuses on all aspects of weight loss rather than exercise or diet, and our experienced practitioners will be able to help you achieve and maintain your optimum body weight by recommending certain exercises. We believe that there is more to the clogged sink than just a poor diet and too little exercise. Other factors, such as stress, can play a part in a clogged sink and unhealthy habits. We look at different things that may lead to weight gain, such as emotional eating, and try to get to the root of the problem to solve the issue.

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