The 80/20 rule of Diet and Exercise
Are you someone who has just started hitting the gym every day to get fitter? Do you think that exercise is the most important factor or prerequisite for achieving fitness? Don’t you think fitness entails more than that?
The truth is that fitness is more than just exercising day in and day out. Although a plethora of fitness and nutrition experts have always stated this, we would like to reiterate the fact that a healthy combination of nutrition and exercise is the key to maintaining physical AND mental fitness. If you are someone who is just starting out their fitness journey, we’re sure you must have gone through a lot of content related to fitness. In your process of exploring the internet for the best ways to stay fit, have you by chance, come across a rule called the 80/20 rule of fitness?
The 80/20 rule suggests that 80% diet and 20% exercise ratio is just the optimum formula to achieving your fitness goals and that any one of these is completely useless in the absence of the other component. Read on to find out more about this rule!
How Is Diet Crucial In Your Fitness Journey?
A lot of us must be under the impression that we just need to burn calories via exercise, and that would be enough to keep us fit. But the quality of your diet is completely ignored in this scenario. Your health is more than the number on the weighing scale. The micronutrient composition of your diet is crucial to your fitness. If you consume a pizza and burn the calories with intense exercise the next day, that would take care of your weight but your diet would still be lacking in essential nutrients. Eating well is more important than just burning off the calories. Consuming unhealthy foods and balancing them out with exercise is not a sustainable approach. Instead, pay attention to your minerals, vitamins, fiber, protein, etc. to lead a better fitness journey. All these components aid equally to your mental, physical, and emotional health. In fact, nutrient deficiency can cause major blunders in your fitness journey if you’re not careful enough.
How Exercise And Diet Complement Each Other For Weight Management?
It is an established fact that there needs to be a caloric deficit in order to keep fit. There needs to be a change in fat-free mass, your resting metabolic rate, and energy expenditure even while you’re not exercising. In simple terms, our body needs to spend more calories than it’s taking up via diet if you’re looking to lose weight. While either dieting or exercise might be a convenient option as per your preference to accomplish this, we would suggest otherwise.
If you want to talk numbers, consider this situation: If you aim to lose just 6–8 kgs in three months, you would be required to attain a caloric deficit of at least 500 calories for the given period, on a daily basis. Now if you choose to over-consume food and try burning those calories at the gym, it is going to be extremely difficult for you to burn the extra calories while also creating a deficit for weight loss to happen. With our busy lifestyles and haphazard working schedules, do you think you could stay committed to a rigorous exercise schedule? You would need to jog 7–10 miles a day to burn enough calories.
Speaking of using diet alone to maintain fitness or lose weight, the physical activity you conduct throughout the day is crucial for your bones, muscles, and joints. Exercise is so important to maintain muscle strength and your overall fitness that it only takes a minor illness to render someone to be dependent if they’re leading a sedentary lifestyle. If you exercise regularly, your body keeps improving phenomenally in terms of functionality and fitness. But again, exercise alone can’t generate enough energy expenditure that results in a negative energy balance as efficiently as a calorie deficit diet. So, a mixture of these two is suggested for optimum results.
What Is The 80/20 Ratio And Why Is It Important?
Experts have suggested an 80% dieting and 20% physical activity ratio for optimum fitness. A lot of us go to the gym or indulge in some kind of physical activity every day. But losing weight through only exercising is neither a sustainable nor an easy process. Instead, it is suggested that we pay attention to our diet (80%) as well and complement the process with exercise (20%). Why is it so? Let’s see!
What Should Be Done?
Now, let’s discuss this with an example to demonstrate how this 80/20 ratio is practical. If you plan to maintain a calorie deficit of 500–700 kcal/ day, it would round up to 4200 kcal/week. If you calculate accurately, 80% of this turns out to be 3360 kcal, and the rest (20%) is 840 kcal. Let’s distribute this energy expenditure in a ratio of 80% diet: 20% exercise over a week, and observe the results. After all, numbers give you a better perspective. The second column suggests the energy expenditure through exercise and the third column suggests the calorie deficit via diet.
Are you satisfied with the results? Doesn’t it look easy and achievable when you split your diet and exercise regimen in this manner?
The point here is that exercise is definitely important to train your body and get in good shape. But the diet will keep you going by fuelling nutrients into your body. For you to lose weight, look fit, get healthy inside out, exercise is beneficial in hundreds and thousands of ways, and that is undeniable. But your diet contributes to 80% of your fitness journey. After all, we are all aiming to get fitter and healthier, not just skinnier, right?
