- Health and fitness expert Jillian Michaels says exercise and diet both play a role when it comes to losing weight.
- However, she says weight loss is 80% exercise and 20% diet.
- She says weight maintenance is the opposite, 20% exercise and 80% diet.
- When you're trying to lose weight, it's critical to burn more calories than you take in, and the best way to do this is by exercising.
Both exercise and diet play a critical role when it comes to losing weight and keeping that weight off.
But just how critical each of these components are can be hard to know.
When we asked Jillian Michaels, health and fitness expert and creator of the Jillian Michaels app, she said it really depends on whether your goal is weight loss or weight maintenance.
Here are the formulas Michaels recommends for each of those goals.
If you're trying to lose weight, exercise matters more.
According to Michaels, weight loss is 80% exercise and 20% diet.
She says that you can't "starve the weight off" because that will shut your metabolism down. Instead, she says you need to exercise it off by creating an "energy deficit." What Michaels means by that is burning more calories than you're taking in.
Creating an energy deficit can be hard work. Michaels explains it like this: say you're a 30-year-old female who's 5'4'' and has a metabolic rate of 1,600 calories per day without exercise — meaning you burn around 1,600 calories per day as is, without working out — then Michaels recommends eating at least 1,200 calories per day. According to her, a pound is roughly equivalent to 3,500 calories, depending on the individual.
That means that without working out, you'll have an energy deficit of 400 calories per day (the difference between the calories you're taking in and the calories you're burning). Four hundred multiplied by seven is 2,800, which isn't even a pound a week. This is exactly why exercise is so vital when you're trying to shed pounds. "If you want to be efficient at weight loss, you have to exercise to boost the calories out," Michaels said.
If you're trying to maintain weight, diet matters more.
When it comes to weight maintenance, Michaels say the formula is switched: 80% diet, 20% exercise.
She says this is because if you're not overeating, you won't gain weight, regardless of if you're exercising or not. Using the above example of the woman with a metabolic rate of 1,600 calories, if she takes in 1,600 calories per day and doesn't work out, she'll maintain the weight she's at because she'll be taking in the same number of calories that she's burning.
Michaels does, however, make the point that this doesn't necessarily mean you'll be healthy or in good shape.
"I know people that never overeat... Their body fat percentage might be higher, they might not have a ton of lean muscle, and they might not necessarily be healthy, but they won't gain weight," she says.
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