You Can't Out Exercise Bad Nutrition

I pride myself in being a man of many quotes, but this time I cannot take the credit, (Thanks Amy). I cannot think of a more appropriate way to make this statement. For years I've said that it is much easier to lose weight through nutrition than it is from burning the poor nutrition back off when doing cardiovascular exercise. Here's how it works:

Eating food = 100% control of both the good and the bad food entering your body. You just have to decide what goes into your mouth. Everything passes through your mouth and through your digestive tract whether you like it or not.

Burning calories = up to 50% efficiency in burning the fat back off.
When you burn calories, you have many different energy systems designed for different tasks. Even in your most "efficient" fat burn zone, the one designed to burn fat, you are not burning fat calories alone. In fact, your lucky to burn roughly half of the calories from stored fat sources in your body.

Let's put it this way. Here's a scenario. I know of many of you that have one particular food, or treat that you find it is hard to give up. For today's purposes, I will use cheesecake as an example:

Low Carb Cheesecake, the "healthy version":

Amount per Serving
Calories 610 Calories from Fat 513
% Daily Value *
Total Fat 57g	88%
Saturated Fat 29g	145%
Cholesterol 270mg	90%
Sodium 410mg	17%
Total Carbohydrate 39g	13%
Dietary Fiber 12g	48%
Sugars 4g
Protein 16g	32%

---

Either you can opt out of this insanely unhealthy pleasure, or you can feel free to burn the 513 fat calories back off by spending over an hour sweating on our elliptical machine. You decide, but it takes 3 minutes to eat the cheesecake and have to spend over 60 minutes to burn it back off? That's a bad investment in my eyes. Think of the problem you face if you simply eat one piece of cheesecake and make 2 more bad food choices in that week.... Now you are up to 3 hours of cardio, just to end up where you were before you decided to indulge. Last time I checked, most everyone I know exercises to get ahead, not just to compensate for bad choices.