Diet is more important than exercise to lose weight. Why? Because eating too many calories is really easy but burning them off is really, really, really hard. When people say that you “can’t out-exercise a poor diet” they are absolutely right.
In The Science of Dieting weight loss e-book, we go into great deal explaining why this is but let’s for a minute look at human extremes as an example. The world hot dog eating champion, Joey Chesnut, can down an astonishing 70 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. If you do the math, this is about 20,000 calories. Conversely, ironman triathletes complete a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile run (a marathon) consecutively, taking them around 10 hours to complete. They will burn approximately 10,000 calories to complete this race.
Joey Chesnut (pictured above) can consume 20,000 calories in 10 minutes and an ironman athlete can only burn half those calories (10,000) in ten hours of highly vigorous physical activity!
The upper limits of human energy expenditure per day seem to be between 10,000 and 15,000 calories. But if we gave you ten dollars for every calorie you could consume in a 24-hour period, how many calories do you think you could consume? 10-, 20-, or even 30,000 calories?
We aren’t going to list comparison after comparison here to make our point but suffice it to say, it is very easy to consume calories and very difficult to burn them. If you had to put a percentage on how important diet is versus exercise you would have to say that diet is 80-90% of your success and exercise is 10 – 20% of your success. But with that being said, in our next section (09) we would like to explain why You Have to Exercise to Lose Weight and Keep It Off.