The best place to start a healthy life is in your kitchen. Until your eating habits and your calorie intake is not controlled, there is no need for all that exercise and hard work. You may have heard the common phrase among fitness fanatics that “abs are created in the kitchen”. It is actually true. While your main goal might not be washboard abs and you may want only a flat tummy, but it still doesn’t give you the authority to eat food high in calorie and fats. You may never have really delved into the reason up till now as to why diet is more important than exercise. Lack of information is why you end up cheating on your diet and why you still have not reached your weight goals.

If you have been a fitness freak your whole life, then dieting with a particular set of foods is your usual routine. On the contrary, change in diet can be difficult for anyone who has recently shifted to healthy eating. Junk food is addictive and giving up is never easy. Especially in the starting stages, it can be hard to let go of sugar and carbs. The transition needs to be slow in order to have a long term effect on a person. Moreover, anyone with low will power will probably revert back to their old foods choices if there are any abrupt changes in his food intake.  Here is why a cheeseburger is a horrible choice for lunch as opposed to a healthy salad.

Why Exercise Won’t Compensate For Over Indulgence?

Underestimating your Meal:

There are times when you may think that eating a small cheeseburger or drinking a creamy latte won’t do you much harm. You think that you will compensate by exercising vigorously that day. Sadly this is not the case most of the time. You cannot just make up for an indulgent meal with an intense workout.  Restaurants sometime bring the calorimeter down by a few hundreds for better advertisements. Chances are if the meal is being advertised as a 1500 calorie meal, it probably is no less than 1700 when served. It is because the amounts of sauces or main ingredients can also vary. People buy into that illusion and mess up with their whole meal plan for the week.  The best way is to avoid high calorie meals at all and always have a healthy lifestyle is by marinating a perfect meal plan.

Sports are Not Your Profession:

You are most probably an average person who is required to sit in front of their desk 9 to 6 and go home or hang out in a local bar. Moving a lot is not a major part of your job. A professional sports personality has a really different lifestyle than you. You cannot compare yourself with a routine that you can never relate to. Sure these people may have the perfect bodies despite having grilled cheese for dinner, but a major part of their day is involved in training their body. They have to exercise half of the day to make keep themselves fit and uphold their physique in order to perform well.

Not the Right Nutrients:

You may think that you are full after a meal but despite that; there could be a lack of proper nutrients which is going to affect your body adversely. It is highly possible that the meal that you may be eating can be rich in fiber, but not in proteins or vice versa. This will create a lack of important nutrition, rendering you slow in your workout or making you feel lethargic. This is why you need to make sure that the diet you are following gives you a supply of sufficient energy needed to get you through the day promptly.

Working On a Specific Body Part:

Most gym and fitness regimes are designed to work specifically on your body parts for each day. One day you work on your legs, other day you work on biceps and so on and so forth. This puts you at a disadvantage if you have spoiled your meal plan by overeating. Your biggest concern is gaining belly fat. This can be minimized using waist cinchers and trainers. Despite that, even they wouldn’t help much if your eating habits don’t change. You won’t be able to exercise all your body parts which can give the fat you consumed, a better chance to settle in unwanted places of your body.

Late Dinner Time:

This again coincides with the lifestyle choice that you have made yourself. Not much of us are into doing anything that involves exercise after we have had our dinner. Since you are probably lounging in your couch and then going to bed after dinner, the weight that you are working hard to lose is going to find its way back to you.

Age Factor:

There was a time when the food that you ate was quickly digested because of your strong immune system and also because that you were really young. Teenagers need that amount of energy to grow, which is why they digest everything easily. But as soon as you have finished the process of puberty, your system starts functioning normally. You need to focus on having a healthy lifestyle as a college student to maintain a healthy life. Although you can make amendments further in your life, it is never too late. However, the earlier you start the better your life will be.

There is not just one factor that can make you gain weight for giving into temptation. Understanding what a moment on the lips does to your body and accepting its affects will definitely lead you to make better choices. A man with a good knowledge about his diet can have a lot better lifestyle as opposed to the person who blindly follows any celebrity meal plan, without knowing its full effects.