The Fine Line

You can shed the kilos via skipping lunch, but if you reduce calories without excercise it could come back to bite you, and if you train without adjusting your food intake you will quickly reach a plateau. Welcome to the diet v excercise debate – all the more important come social season, when time is scarce and (high-energy) food is abundant. Help to mitigate the damage of extra race-day canapes with these training tweaks.

- Katelyn Swallow

THE GREAT DEBATE

SO WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT: DIET OR EXERCISE?

While seemingly simple on the surface, try posting the question in a fitness Facebook forum and see what happens. The reason for all the industry chatter is because of the complexity of the subject – and the fact that tactics that fail in the long term often appear to work in the short term. For example, reducing your calories to create the recommended 250 to 500 daily calorie deficit will result in weight loss – it’s just that, without exercise, some of this loss is metabolism stimulating muscle. On the other hand, if you eat a bucket of fried chicken, even the most intense high intensity interval training (HIIT) class is unlikely to make a dent in your fat stores.

“It’s an age-old argument, but I have to go with diet [as being the most influential to body composition changes] as there is no way to out-train a bad diet. The rise of social media has seen an increase of people looking to influencers, rather than experts for advice, which sometimes offer inaccurate advice around diet,” says Clinton Hill, the head of personal training operations for Vision Personal Training (facebook.com/ visionpersonaltraining).

“When it comes to weight loss and muscle gain, the general rule to follow is 70 per cent success comes down to diet and the remaining 30 is the work put in at the gym. In addition, creating a healthy diet is usually the toughest obstacle to overcome for those looking to lose weight. There isn’t one perfect diet; we have to align each client’s wants and needs, as well as consider their hormone profile and DNA.”