INTRODUCTION
There is a common phrase going around. “You can’t out-train a bad diet!” What we are going to discuss in this article is, is that true? Is it possible to eat whatever you want and still lose weight? Still, be in shape? Just by training more? The answer may surprise some people, however, we hope to clear this issue up for a lot of people.
Now, there are a lot of people on Social media and YouTube who have done experiments for this with varying results. We aren’t going to carry out any experiments, we are going to go over and discuss hard number and theories, use some examples to work out what would need to be done to accomplish this. Then we will round up the article with an explanation if it is possible in real life. So let us get started.
THE BASIC PRINCIPLE
So, as we all know and have discussed multiple times the only way to lose weight is to eat in a calorie deficit. Thus, burning more calories than you consume. So let’s say your burn 2000 calories a day, and you eat 1800. You will be in a 200 calorie deficit.
Now if you are planning to eat what you want, you aren’t going to know how many calories you are in taking. So you don’t know how many you have to burn. Thus the confusion begins. So, how would you go about training a bad diet? Well, to keep it simple, we are first going to start by ignoring protein goals. (Which is vital to maintain muscle mass while cutting). Just focusing on calories in and calories out.
Second, We aren’t going to worry about the quality of food, nutrition anything like that. This is going to be purely based, like we said above, on calories in and calories out. So let’s talk theory and numbers.
LET’S TALK THEORY AND NUMBERS
So in theory let us use an example person to work out how many calories they would need to eat a day to lose weight. If we take an average male, weighing around 80kg (176lbs) and around 175cm (5 Foot 9) tall. If we say he is lightly active then we know (using the free Sets & Reps Calorie Calculator) that he needs to eat around 1970 calories a day to lose weight.
Now if we say that he is eating around 3000 calories a day (Obviously they wouldn’t be tracking, but for this example, we will say he is consuming 3000 calories). So this means for them to still be in a deficit they are going to have to burn an extra 1030 calories in exercises. This will place them in the correct deficit to lose weight.
These are just numbers, and while you can make it work in numbers, putting it into action is a completely different matter! So can you replicate the above in real life?
DOES IT WORK IN REAL LIFE?
Now, 1030 calorie of exercise might not seem like a tough task. Go for a 10-mile run or so and you will burn around 1000 calories. However, the issue comes from a few things. The first one is recovery, to burn a 1000 calories every day will be alright for the first few days but then it will become tough. You won’t have time to recover so you risk injury and damaging yourself.
The second reason is the numbers above are assuming that we know what he is eating. If you are allowing yourself to eat whatever you want, there is a chance that you might eat well above your daily caloric intake, say 1000 to 3000 calories more. Not knowing how much you are eating, will make it hard to know how much you need to burn. So, in theory, you are going to have to over-exercise. You could be doing all the exercise you can and still be in a calorie surplus. Without knowing the numbers you won’t be able to know your progress.
CONCLUSION
Hopefully, this clears up this common misconception for people. Can it be done? Technically yes! Realistically, can it be done? Not really. The issue comes with keeping the workout level at a level where you can burn X amount of calories per day, every day.
So if you think that your diet isn’t good and you are eating way too many calories, the fix isn’t to just work out more. We would suggest tracking what you eat for a week or so and this will then give you a guide of how many calories you are eating. From there you can reduce calories however you see fit.
If you want to find out how many calories you need to eat to lose or gain weight then you can download our free Sets & Reps Calorie Calculator here. Using the calculator you will be able to find out exactly how many calories you need to eat.
Written by Kieran Blacker
Kieran is the CEO and Founder of Sets & Reps. He decided to make an application that helped people get a gym workout when not at the gym. He designed, Coded and built the application himself.