Nutrition or Exercise: Which is More Important?
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The one question I get asked every single day is which is more important: nutrition or exercise? To be 100% honest with you, the two go hand in hand. But I get it when you’re first starting out, tackling both fitness and nutrition together is extremely overwhelming. And I’m a firm believer that creating small changes, one at a time is the best way to build life-long habits. So, in this episode, I share which one I think is more important to focus on when first starting out, nutrition or exercise. Plus I give you my explanation as to why and my best advice for getting started!
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey there, beautiful human. You're listening to Embrace Your Real with me, Julie Ledbetter, a podcast where I empower you to just be you. With each episode, I dish you a dose of real talk and actionable advice for building your confidence, honoring your body, and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned if you're ready to embrace your real. Let's get it, let's go.
Hello and welcome back to the Embrace Your Real podcast. I am so grateful that you are spending some time with me today. I'm so thankful to be in your ears, wherever you are, whether you're driving, you're traveling, you're working out, you are cleaning, you're cooking, all of the things. I'm thankful to be here, I'm thankful you're here and I'm just going to dive into the episode. Now, the ultimate question that I get every single day in some way, shape or form is, "Julie, what is more important? Is nutrition more important or is exercise more important?" Especially with people first starting out or people getting back on track, they want to know like, "What do I start with? How should I go about it?" I will always say, obviously if you want to see optimal results, you eventually need to nail down both just because the two do go hand in hand. But I get it, when you're first starting out or when you're on this journey of really trying to get back into it, it can feel overwhelming and when you make too many changes too fast, typically none of them actually stick.
I am a firm believer in tackling one habit and then habit stacking on top of that, slowly adding in another habit. Ultimately what I found is that that's the absolute best way to build the lifelong habits. In this episode I'm going to share which one I think is more important to begin with, nutrition or exercise, and I'm also going to give you in-depth explanation as to why. But before we dive into the episode, it is review time. I'm so grateful for all of your reviews. Spawn of Wisdom says, "Authentic and inspirational. This podcast is for everyone, especially every girl and woman that need to hear it. Julie gets real with her story and you can feel she wants to help. It's almost like she's your big sister or best friend coming alongside of you, cheering you along and telling you how it is." Thank you so much, Spawn of Wisdom, I'm so grateful for you and thank you to every single one of you guys who rate and review the podcast. Literally, I look at them daily and I'm just so grateful for you. If you haven't already rated and reviewed the podcast, it would mean the absolute world to me, takes less than 60 seconds. If you do, please screenshot it, send it to me in a DM and I will personally voice memo you back.
Okay, let's go back into the episode. So, which should you start with, nutrition or exercise? If you've ever heard the saying, "Abs are made in the kitchen," or "You can't out-train a bad diet," which I'm guessing most of you have, these may just be cliche, overused sayings, but they do hold some truth and so you have my answer. It is nutrition. Nutrition should always come first. Without nutrition being nailed down, it's difficult for you to see results from your workouts longterm. Oftentimes what I see is people get really excited to dive into a workout program. They're doing a workout program. They're not nailing their nutrition by any means. They're just living the same nutritionally that they were, they've just added in workouts. Oftentimes what I see is people are killing themselves in these workouts. They're crushing it, but then they're not seeing results and they're wondering why. And so I'm here to tell you that honestly, without your nutrition nailed down, it's really difficult for you to see your results from your workouts.
Many health and fitness experts across the board say around 80% of your results actually come from your nutrition and some even argue it's like 90, 95%, that are solely dependent on your nutrition when it comes to your overall results. Whatever the exact percentage is, I'm not worried about that. But obviously it's going to vary person to person but nutrition plays an integral role in your results. If you guys are not following Jordan Syatt, he's amazing, just Jordan Syatt on Instagram. He has a podcast, I believe as well. But he made a great point when he was discussing this very same topic. He was saying, "You won't always have time to work out, but you always have time to eat." I loved that because no matter how your day unfolds, eating will always be a part of it. Right now you may not be consistent with moving your body, but you are consistent with eating, right? So why not start to refine the thing that you're already consistent with first before trying to dive in and change all these other areas of your life.
And so yes, in short, nutrition is more important than exercise, especially when first starting out. But like I said at the beginning, to get optimal results, you're going to want to conjoin nutrition and training together because they do work hand in hand. But I want to dive into a couple reasons why nutrition is so important. If you think about it, if you begin working out, you might work out somewhere between three or four times per week, when you first start, right? I know for me, I consistently work out four to five times per week. But let's say that you eat three meals and about two snacks per day and that's a conservative estimate, right? If you really break that down, that means that you're eating 35 times per week. So you have over 30 more opportunities to make a better choice for your body than if you just only focus on exercising. When you really break it down, you really ultimately have over 35 opportunities to drastically change the results that you see.
There are a lot of factors when it comes to losing and gaining weight, but the overarching piece to the puzzle is calories in versus calories out, which I've talked about before. But the more calories you eat and the fewer calories you burn, you'll gain weight or vice versa, right? Working out though, is not the only way that you can put yourself in a caloric deficit, and I've talked about this before, having a caloric deficit. I shared the dangers of being in a caloric deficit too, too long. But ultimately a caloric deficit without working out, you can absolutely be in one, right? You can create the same caloric deficit without working out, you just have to be paying attention to the amount of food that you're eating. It really is that simple. No, it's not going to help you define and tone and build your muscles if you're not working out and you're just focused on your eating. But if you're giving it the right amount of carbs, the right amount of fats, the right amount of protein, calculated off your sedentary lifestyle, it would be impossible for your body to physically gain weight.
On the flip side, if you're working out but you're not paying attention to your nutrition, you'll quickly see that you're gaining weight or you're not seeing results because you are eating more than you're burning. Like I said, comes down to a caloric deficit. Yes, you can create a caloric deficit from working out and adding that into your activity level when it comes to learning how much to properly fuel your body, but you can also create a caloric deficit just from your sedentary lifestyle. I know for me there's certain times of my life that... It is a great example of this, is if you have an injury, right, and you're physically not able to work out at all, you can still be in a caloric deficit. Not that I'm saying you should be when you're in an injury because typically your body needs all the nutrients it can get to really help repair whatever is injured in your body. But if you are not able to work out for whatever reason, you can absolutely still be in a caloric deficit, you just have to factor in your sedentary lifestyle off of that.
Oftentimes when we are working out, we compensate for the calories we burn, right? If we did a rigorous workout and we see on our Fitbit or our Apple Watch that we burned X amount of calories, we think it's okay to just go drink that Starbucks Mocha or get the waffle fries instead of the salad or whatever. It's important that we recognize that... I'm all about eating what you want, but it's important that we know and keep in mind that there is a specific amount that our body actually just needs, right? The point of working out is to, one, build muscle, and two, put ourselves in a slight caloric deficit, if you're looking to tone up or lose weight or whatever. If not, and you just want to be moving and maintain your weight and just feel good, or if you're trying to gain muscle, you obviously have to be in a caloric surplus, so just keep that in mind.
I'm all about eating the foods that you want, you just need to make sure and remember that if you already have your macros calculated based on your activity level, the number that you are seeing on that Apple Watch, it should not be something that you're like, "Oh, I get to actually factor that into adding more calories to what my caloric intake goal already was. No, when you have a caloric intake and it's factored off of your activity level, it doesn't matter how much you burned on your Apple Watch, your caloric goal, that's already taken into consideration.
I hope that that makes sense. I know we can feel ourselves confused in that area, and so that's why I always, always, always suggest that you invest in a program that will actually teach you more about this. I can only go so much in depth on a shorter podcast with you, but I have a whole program that will teach you in depth why we do what we do, how we do what we do, to really empower you so that you don't have to rely on us longterm. Our goal is for us to come into your life, teach you what you need, empower you in what you need, show you the ropes so that you can take it and you can run with it for the rest of your life. I don't think that it's healthy to have to feel like we need to depend on a coach for the rest of our life. Now, do I think a coach is helpful? Of course, a coach is very helpful when it comes to accountability and support and constantly learning and growing, but I don't want you to feel like you have to rely on a coach for the rest of your life because the whole goal is for you to feel empowered and for you to feel in control, depending on the different seasons and the different phases that you'll go through, right?
Another reason why nutrition is important is because exercise increases your appetite. If you're working out, typically your appetite increases, right? It's important that you have a solid foundation to stand on when it comes to fueling your body. You're going to want to know how much your body needs to be functioning optimally. Otherwise, you're just going to eat and eat or you're going to be eating constantly questioning yourself, "Is this good? Is this good? Is this bad? Is this good? Right?" I think without having the foundation of nutrition... This is why I'm a huge firm believer in really learning the fundamentals of nutrition and how much your body needs because it eliminates the, "Is this good? Is this bad? Is this too much? Is this too little?" Because if you know how much your body needs, it just is a plain fact, this is how much your body needs in protein and carbs and fats. However you want to reach that is up to you, right, up to your preferences, up to your eating preferences, your food choices, all of those things. But then it eliminates that unnecessary stress that comes from us constantly questioning something.
Another reason why nutrition is important is you need certain foods that will help you fuel your workout, right? Without nourishing your body with what it needs, you're not going to be able to have the effective energy or the optimal energy that you would like to have for your workouts. To piggyback off of that, food also fuels your results. If you're not giving yourself the proper amount of protein or carbs or fats, you're not going to fuel your muscles properly for the rebuilding phase, the growing after your workouts, things like that. Your muscles absolutely need the proper nutrition to grow optimally. Essentially, exercise without focusing on what you're eating of course, is not a waste of time, but it would almost be like trying to swim upstream. You're making it more difficult on yourself than it needs to be. Like I said, you can totally exercise and not pay attention to your nutrition, that's totally fine. If you feel good and you feel like you have enough energy and you feel confident and comfortable in your body, that's amazing.
I would say probably one out of 10 people feel like that, leaving the nine, the 90% of people, they question themselves, they feel unnecessary stress, they feel like they're constantly asking if this is right or this is wrong or good or bad or all of those things. And so it's really, really important that you just immerse yourself in nutrition. The beautiful thing about it is once you learn it, you have that tool for life. I always tell my clients inside the program, "It's a tool belt that you have and you're constantly building to that tool belt and that tool belt you'll have for the rest of your life." At any given moment, whether... people come and go. When it comes to macro counting, I don't believe that you need to macro count for the rest of your life, but I truly believe that if you can be intentional for six to 12 months in your life to learn the fundamentals of macro counting and just how much your body needs to function properly, it can single-handedly transform your entire life and it will help you in your future endeavors.
It will help you whether maybe in six years you're like, "I decided that I want to be an Ironman." If you don't know how to properly fuel your body for the amount of activity that you're going to be doing, then you're constantly going to be questioning yourself and it's going to be super stressful. But if you learned the tool of how to properly fuel your body, no matter what your activity level is, you will be incredibly amazed at how that will serve you in all the different seasons of your life, right?
So going back, what does it look like to start with your nutrition? Well, first things first, I am not a believer in diets. I don't believe they work. The reason that people start and stop them is because they are constantly cutting foods out, they're in extremes, things like that. Instead, by focusing on your nutrition, that doesn't mean start a diet. That also does not mean eat as little amount of calories as possible. It means to learn how to properly fuel your body, right? It does not mean, "Okay, I'm going to start to learn how to fuel my body, so I'm going to restrict my calories." Hint, hint, that actually makes you gain weight in the long term, more than likely, because it can cause an array of negative health issues. If you haven't already listened to episode 18, I go extremely deep on this topic, so be sure to tune in there.
But what does it mean? Starting with nutrition means to nourish your body with what it needs. What does that mean? It means giving yourself the right amount of carbs, protein and fat, which automatically add up to the amount of calories, right? Oftentimes people ask me, "Do I need to focus on calories or macros?" I say, "When you're focused on your macros, your calories will add up." Because a one gram of protein is four calories, one gram of carbs is four calories and one gram of fat is nine calories. So when you're just counting macros, you don't need to count your calories because the calories automatically add up, right? It will automatically add up to the right amount of calories that you need to consume based on your body, your goals, your activity level, all those things. That's another reason I am not a believer in diets because diets are typically a one-size-fits-all. Macros are completely different, depending on the person, depending on the goals, the body type. I mean there's so many different things that go into calculating your customized approach to this, right?
It's really, really important that you focus on eating what your body needs and you will see changes, even without lifting a pound. I talk about this and how when we are on a journey of becoming our best self, whether that's a weight loss journey or just feeling our best, I don't even like weight loss, but like feeling our best, you need to stop focusing on the scale. Because if you look at so many of my photos that I've posted, I look so much different. I look leaner, my body looks completely different, like 20 or 30 pounds heavier than it did. If I was simply just focused on the weight scale, then I would constantly be like, "What is going on, I keep gaining weight?" But my body looks better. I feel better. I have more energy. My body's actually leaner at a higher weight. Obviously it will take longer if you only focus on your nutrition and never focused on your fitness, but you can still see results if you're just focused on your nutrition. So keep that in mind.
If you need some help getting your macros calculated, I have a free ebook, I'll put it in the show notes. It's 35-plus pages. It shows you step by step how to calculate your maintenance macros and things like that. If you want a more in-depth approach, I always have my Macro Counting Made Simple Online Academy. I provide you the customized macros, yada, yada, yada, I don't need to go more in depth there. There's show notes about that if you want to learn more about it. If you do want to properly feel your body though, I will tell you, investing in a program is the best way to go. I am a huge believer in honoring your body with at least 30 minutes of movement. Now, this isn't always a workout. I always say that, "This is not always a workout." Right now I'm consistently reaching about four to five days a week working out. Typically about five days, some weeks it's four days a week. I go periods though where I'm only consistent about three days.
Regardless of how much I am working out, I'm still honoring my body with 30 minutes of movement. That could be walking, it could be playing softball with the boys, it could be running, jogging, all those things, right? It doesn't just have to be a workout, it could honestly be cleaning your house or grocery shopping. There's some times I just walk through the aisles of Target. Obviously we are in quarantine life right now, so that is not a thing. But previously, previous to COVID-19, I would just walk the aisles and that would be my movement some days. Don't judge any type of movement as being worse or better than the other, just allow movement to be movement. I think when I made that switch in my mindset of, movement is not just a workout, movement is movement and let it be, it shifted my mindset so much and allowed me to just start to enjoy movement for what it is in that moment.
With all that being said, of course exercise is also important for not only building the body that we want and building muscles and it's great for both physical and mental health, it's also been proven to help you feel more confident and productive and energized and happy. It's going to increase your immunity, speed of metabolism, boost your digestion, all those things, improve your quality of sleep, fight anxiety, depression. I could go on and on and on. Movement is important, yes, but nutrition is a great place to start if you are in a starting place or a restarting place and you just feel overwhelmed doing all the things at once. I would always encourage you to start with nutrition because it's a great building block as to building the habit of nutrition and then once you really nail that down and you feel like you're consistent with that, then adding in the habit of movement and exercise and slowly adding in other habits, right? Mindset, habits, meditation, gratitude, journaling, all of those things are key, in my opinion, to an essential, happy, healthy, sustainable lifestyle.
I hope that this episode shed some light on this question that I get asked a lot. Maybe you are wondering it too, like "What's more important?" I always say when in doubt, look at your nutrition, because your nutrition has everything into play. That even includes like your neat, right, your non-activity exercise thermogenesis. It's all of those things put in to one, so if you're just focusing on your nutrition, you can absolutely manipulate your nutrition based on your sedentary lifestyle. Anyways, I hope that that encouraged you. I hope that this sparks something. I would love to hear what came from it so be sure to screenshot this, post it up on your story, tag me, Julie A Ledbetter. I look forward to chatting with you. If you also have a friend that might need this message or you feel like would really help them, I encourage you to share it out. It's super easy on Apple podcast. You can click the three dots and it will copy the link and you're able to text it out, share it on your socials, all the things, I appreciate it all. I will see you guys in the next episode.
All right, sister, that's all I got for you today. But I have two things that I need you to do. First thing, if you're not already following me on the gram, be sure to do so, juliealedbetter. Yes, it's with an A in middle, for that daily post-workout real talk, healthy tips and tricks and honest accountability to keep your mind and heart in check. The second thing, be sure to subscribe to Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode. Thank you so much for joining me. It means the absolute world. I'm going to leave you with one last thought. The most beautiful women that I have met in my life are the ones who are completely confident and secure in being authentically themselves. Remember that beauty goes so much deeper than the surface, so go out there and embrace your real, because you're worth it.