It's the mental part...

I read a lot of articles about fitness, nutrition, weight loss, etc. I find them mostly interesting and I'm always open to learning new things. A couple of days I read an article about weight loss and how it's all about the diet. The basic argument, and I'm paraphrasing a whole lot, was that exercise is not that important and you have to focus on your diet in order to really lose weight. As I read that I was thinking about some videos I had seen a year or two ago. The trainer was trying to make the point that diet was more important then exercise and he set up a demonstration. Basically he worked out while another guy ate pizza. The pizza eater counted how many calories he ate and the guy working out then figured how long he would have to work to burn the calories off. So the pizza guy ate a slice in like 2 minutes and the exerciser calculated that he would have to work out for 20 minutes to burn it off - or something like that, you get the idea. After seeing those videos I agreed and really tried to focus on what I eat. I think that was the beginning of my clean eating routine. So as I'm reading the article yesterday, I'm thinking about those videos and the lack of success I had focusing on just diet. That's when it occurred to me, you have to watch your diet closely because you can't work off what you eat, but exercise is important for other reasons.

When I work out it does things to me that have nothing to do with burning off calories. It makes me feel good. The more I workout the easier it is for me to follow a clean eating plan. The more I workout the more confidence I have that I can do this. I increase my body confidence. I feel more energetic and want to do things. Exercising sets me up mentally so that I can focus on eating. I think that what you eat is far more important then your workout, but you need to get out there and move too. It does things that no amount of food can.