By: Chris Gates
What should you focus on to lose belly fat: diet or exercise?
It’s a super popular question, and one that you’ve probably wondered about more than once.
The two biggest pieces to any fat loss program tend to be managing your nutrition, and participating in an exercise program of some sort.
But does one of those matter more than the other?
Is exercise, and burning calories, going to be what leads to the most progress?
Or is your diet—what you eat on a daily basis—the thing that will truly lead to shedding that belly fat you’ve always wanted to get rid of?
In this article, I’m going to make everything unbelievably simple for you and answer the question: is diet or exercise more important to lose belly fat?
First, let’s dive into some background information on how your diet and exercise blend together to promote fat loss, and specifically reductions in belly fat. And then we can nail down which is most important.
How Your Diet Promotes Fat Loss
Managing the amount of calories you consume is extremely important for losing belly fat.
At the end of the day, to lose belly fat you need to be in a calorie deficit. I’ve written about calorie deficits a ton. You can learn more here, here, here, and/or here.
But I’ll quickly summarize the concept of a calorie deficit in this article as well to make sure we’re on the same page…
A calorie deficit is negative energy balance. It means you’re consuming fewer calories from food (calories are a unit of energy) than your body burns each day.
When your intake is less than your output, you will lose body fat. There’s quite literally no other way to do it.
So that means carefully managing your nutrition is going to be important. By getting in a calorie deficit consistently, you’ll be setting yourself up for success with fat loss.
Beyond energy balance, the composition of your diet can help you lose belly fat as well.
High-protein diets have been shown in research to effectively support fat loss, for a number of reasons. Protein is the most filling macronutrient, so eating more protein leads to an increased feeling of fullness. It also has the highest thermic effect of any macronutrient, which means your body burns more calories to digest protein, as compared to digesting carbohydrates and fats.
And finally, when paired with a strength training program (we’ll address exercise in a second) protein is effective at helping you build muscle, and the more muscle you build the more you’ll boost your own metabolism. That means you’ll naturally burn more calories over time, which means getting into a calorie deficit may become easier.
On top of protein, we also have research indicating foods that are high in fiber and/or water content are effective at increasing the feeling of fullness after a meal, which can help promote being in a calorie deficit and losing belly fat. You’ll find high fiber and/or water most commonly in fruits and vegetables.
So what this all boils down to is:
- Managing your diet is important to lose belly fat.
- You need to be in a calorie deficit, first and foremost.
- Protein, fiber, and water content in your meals can help you get in a calorie deficit, and stay there long term.
- Regularly consuming protein, fruits, and vegetables is a great start.
How Exercise Promotes Fat Loss
Exercise is a valuable tool when it comes to losing belly fat, and let’s be clear on this right from the start…
Exercise is not valuable because it helps you burn calories.
Burning calories is a byproduct of exercising, but it shouldn’t be the primary reason for why you exercise. Rather, you should regularly exercise because it promotes a slew of health benefits that will build you up (rather than break you down).
People often gravitate to cardio to lose belly fat, for the simple reason that it’s probably the most efficient way to burn calories. But that’s the wrong approach.
Cardio promotes better heart health, improves brain and joint function, benefits many of the organs throughout your body, and can promote better energy throughout the day, and better sleep (just to name a few benefits). These are the reasons to do cardio.
Because think about it… If your body is functioning well, and you have more energy, and you’re getting better sleep every day as a byproduct of doing cardio, you’re going to be putting yourself in the best possible position to stick to your fat loss goals every day.
You’ll have the energy and ability to be in a calorie deficit and train hard on a regular basis.
That’s why you should do cardio. And that’s how it will help you lose belly fat.
But don’t stop there, because strength training is probably the biggest piece to the fat loss puzzle when it comes to exercise.
Regular strength training can help you lose belly fat and improve your body composition in two ways:
- It will help you maintain the muscle mass on your body right now.
- It may help you actually build muscle throughout the fat loss process.
When you strength train, it encourages your body to build muscle. Your brain signals to the rest of your body that lifting weights was hard, and muscle is needed in order to be able to do those same challenging tasks again.
You’ll hold on to the muscle mass you have, and potentially even build new muscle mass, when you lift weights. And by doing that while in a calorie deficit, this means your body will burn fat as its primary energy source, and you’ll lose weight specifically from body fat.
It’s the exact formula for losing belly fat, and the most effective way to lose belly fat and keep it off.
Hopefully you now can see that a combination of both cardio and strength training will build your body up and maximize the amount of body fat you’re able to lose.
Is Diet or Exercise More Important to Lose Belly Fat?
Clearly, both diet and exercise are important for losing belly fat, but there is one that reigns supreme.
Diet.
Millions of people have lost belly fat without ever doing a planned workout, but nobody has sustainably lost belly fat without making some type of adjustment to their diet.
And this all comes back to the concept of a calorie deficit, which you learned about earlier.
A calorie deficit is required to lose belly fat.
If you’ve gained excess belly fat over the years, it’s because you’ve been eating in a calorie surplus, which is the opposite of a calorie deficit. It means you’ve been consuming more calories than you’ve burned on a daily basis for an extended period of time.
So the quickest, most efficient, and most sustainable way to reverse that trend and start losing belly fat is to get yourself into a calorie deficit.
And the quickest, most efficient, and most sustainable way to get into a calorie deficit is to reevaluate what you’re doing with your diet, and make some changes.
These don’t have to be drastic changes. I’d actually encourage you to make very small tweaks, track your nutrition, and track your weight loss progress over time. Eat as much as you can, and change as little as possible, while you’re losing body fat. Only make changes when necessary.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you should abandon exercising altogether.
Not even close.
Diet and exercise are basically Nos. 1 and 1a in terms of importance for losing belly fat. They both matter. A lot.
So I’d recommend that you also regularly participate in both cardio and strength training throughout each week. For more details on how much you should exercise to lose belly fat, give this article a read.
But at the end of the day, you need to make behavior change with your diet in order to make progress that you can sustain.
This goes back to the old adage of, “you can’t out-exercise a bad diet.” And it’s true.
The amount of work it takes to burn off the calories from a bad diet is absurd, and not something you should reasonably expect you can do for any extended period of time.
The average person burns ~100 calories walking a mile. So if you overeat by 300-500 calories a day, that means you’re doing to have to walk 3-5 miles a day just to maintain your weight. Does that sound feasible, or enjoyable to you?
Of course not.
So to lose that unwanted belly fat, you need to address both your diet and exercise plans. But give a little bit of extra care and attention to your diet.
Without changing your approach to the way you eat — without some type of shift from what you’re doing now to those tips we went through earlier (high-protein, fiber, water content, etc.) — you’re going to constantly struggle to lose belly fat and keep it off.
Diet is more important to lose belly fat.
Combining both diet and exercise to lose belly fat is the most powerful.
I hope this helps!
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I hope this article helped you get a better idea of how to set up a diet and exercise plan to lose belly fat. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I’d be happy to help answer anything that’s on your mind.
Additionally, if you’re interested in getting some personalized coaching to help you lose belly fat and achieve your goals with diet and exercise, fill out a coaching application form and let me know more information about your goals! I’d love to talk to you about them, and discuss what type of plan might work best for you to lose weight sustainably.
Thanks for reading!