Attitude Toward Diet and Exercise

¶ … Attitude toward Diet and Exercise

I have always been interested in exercise and physical fitness but my attitude toward it has changed significantly over time. Like many people, I used to think that exercise was the only important part of achieving specific fitness goals. For example, I used to believe (and tell other people) that the key to losing weight was to do a lot of aerobic exercise. I used to be opposed to focusing on dieting for that purpose because my only real experience with dieting was my exposure to some of the fad diets popularized in the media.

I used to believe that it hardly mattered what you eat as long as you do enough exercise to burn off extra calories and lose unwanted weight. I knew from my personal experience that anytime I wanted to reduce my weight or tone up, all I had to do was workout a little more often or harder and longer. Without fail, every time I did that I was able to lose as much weight as I wanted to without any kind of dietary changes; I just continued eating whatever I wanted but I exercised more if I thought I needed to lose any weight or tone up. Therefore, it always bothered me when people had any kind of special diets or eating habits. My attitude was that people who are unhappy with their body weight should just exercise more and stop worrying about what they eat. I practiced what I preached by making sure that I compensated for eating a lot by going to the gym and making sure that I did enough aerobic exercise to make up for weekends of eating pizza.

Then, I became friendly with someone who is a professional fitness trainer with degrees in nutrition and exercise physiology; she also competes in amateur bodybuilding contests. She explained to me that exercise is only one component of weight control and that dietary factors are actually more important for maintaining optimal body weight than exercise. I was skeptical at first but then she showed me some pictures in her album and she began explaining to me what changes she had made in her diet and training routine to achieve some of the physique changes that were apparent in specific photos. In fact, she already had all of that information written in the margins right next the photographs. Every picture had a description of how many calories, and how many grams of protein, carbohydrates, and fats she consumed in between the consecutive pictures. She explained that her diet changed much more than her training during that time and I was very surprised at the difference that could be seen so clearly from picture to picture, and especially at the differences in her physique and muscularity from the beginning to the end of each contest preparation cycle. According to her, she maintains the same basic workout routine all year long and the real difference that accounts for the extreme changes in her muscularity before contests is almost exclusively a function of her diet.