Exercise v. Diet

[HIT_it_RAW]

Even the example HIT_it_Raw gave of the person who sits on their ass and eats meat, fruit and honey and gets fat, I would still say is healthier than almost any "bodybuilder".

That fat paleo person will probably live longer and not be as likely to succumb to any weird diseases.

I fully agree. although I don't like using the word bodybuilder as it's synonomous with a steroid abusing, protein powder drink sipping lunatic. Most of them are of course but not all. there are a good bunch who live healthy don't do drugs and are just interested in building their body in a healthy natural way.

[Darwinian Fitness]

I fully agree. although i don't like using the word bodybuilder as synonomous with steroid abusing, protein powder drink sipping lunatic. most of them are off course but not all. there are a good bunch who live healthy dont do drugs and are just interested in building their body in a healthy natural way.

Good point, maybe I shouldn't have used bodybuilders as an example, because I wasn't even thinking about the steroid abusers.

Because even if we take "health-conscious fitness fanatics" as a group, most of them are eating rubbish like cooked chicken breasts, rice, milk, legumes, cooked vegetables.

I would still say that the fat raw paleo person is healthier - they aren't bombarding their body with as much bad stuff. 

[aLptHW4k4y]

It's really individual. Whether I eat the "rubbish" or the "healthy" food (according to your labeling) doesn't make that much of a difference for me, as exercise vs. no exercise does.

[Darwinian Fitness]

It';s really individual. Whether I eat the "rubbish" or the "healthy" food (according to your labeling) doesn't make that much of a difference for me, as exercise vs. no exercise does.

Is it possible that although it doesn't feel like much of a difference, those unnatural cooked foods could be slowly causing damage on the inside that may not become apparent until later in life?

[Rawr]

I voted Diet because I presupposed these meanings:

Diet = all you eat and drink
Exercise = what you do ON TOP of heartbeat/breathing/other "unconscious" movement

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If you defined "Exercise" as ANY muscle movement, then those 2 would be of the same importance, because you can't live without "exercising" your heart and lungs.

[achillezzz]

Jack lalane used to preach how effective exercise is for detoxification. He always pointed out what some athletes eat and how they get away with it.  We are mostly water hardcore exercise will make you sweat sick imagine how much toxins can be flushed that way! Exercise and diet both have enormous value for human to have quality lifetime.

[Chris]

Nutrition is always your foundation. It will give you energy, health, and vitality. Not saying exercise isn't important. It is! They go hand in hand. You can't have one and not the other. In order for your body to get stronger, you need to break it down. Recuperation is just as important. I see a lot of people who workout, and never see the results there looking for. It's VERY important to eat some high quality protein and fat within an hour of working out. Your body is craving the nutrients it needs, in order to repair the damage that was done to your muscles. I can't emphasize how important this step is. Your body will absorb much more nutrients in this time frame. Remember, you need to replace all those calories that you just burned. So eat right, workout right (very important), recuperate, and repair (rest). If you stick to this formula you will see results I promise you. One more thing for the Ladies, strength train (I'm not talking low reps., and heavy weight either)! It will lean you up, and protect your bones, not to mention all those additional calories you'll burn in the process.

[bachcole]

I also did not see my choice available.  I would have voted 90% diet and 10% exercise and 100% genetics and epigenetics.  You can feed an autistic child paleo and fermented veggies until hell freezes over, and he will always be autistic, although I think that doing so would improve his autism dramatically.

I notice that the more posts a commenter has, the more important they think diet is.  The longer I stay on paleo and fermented foods, the more important that I think diet is.  And I am typing this after just having run 20 minutes.   (:->)

[PaleoPhil]

I also did not see my choice available.  I would have voted 90% diet and 10% exercise and 100% genetics and epigenetics.  You can feed an autistic child paleo and fermented veggies until hell freezes over, and he will always be autistic, although I think that doing so would improve his autism dramatically.

Some parents report that their children's autism diminished so much via healthy diet & lifestyle that ALL symptoms were resolved. In other words, effectively a "cure," though I don't like the word "cure," because some people bizarrely take it to mean that their children can go back to eating junk food--and perhaps it's that which you are warning against?

I notice that the more posts a commenter has, the more important they think diet is.  The longer I stay on paleo and fermented foods, the more important that I think diet is.  And I am typing this after just having run 20 minutes.   (:->)

This is a diet forum, so it may actually reveal how much the exercise meme is pushed in the popular media that even in a forum dedicated to diet, like this one, we find exercise being promoted so strongly (or maybe it really is that much more important--time will tell). Exercise is very beneficial, yes, maybe especially the sort of natural outdoor exercise our ancestors did for millions of years, but I suspect that diet is even more important. For some reason, if you say that, some people seem to get angry and assume that you don't think exercise is important, which is not my intention at all.

In my personal experience, I have found diet to be somewhat more important, as have many others, but that doesn't somehow cancel out the importance of exercise.

[wodgina]

I thought spammers couldn't put links in GS?

[PaleoPhil]

An article came out on this topic:

Hunter gatherer clue to obesity: The idea that exercise is more important than diet in the fight against obesity has been contradicted by new research. By Helen Briggs, 25 July 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18985141

[panacea]

The truth to this is unequivocally that diet and proper physical activity are very close to equally important.
By 'physical activity' I don't necessarily mean exercise. Many people sit for long periods of time and in furniture that is designed to let you be lazy and not keep your spine upright on your own, shoes etc affect our posture, laying down in soft beds prevents healthy turning/tossing during sleep to prevent static positions, all of that stuff violates our natural physical activity regimen which would be one of moving about, walking, mostly upright, barefoot, grounded to the earth electrically, etc.

Exercise is a specific branch of physical activity and it can be both good and bad just like with different versions of the same food (grain fed beef vs grass fed). For example, exercising while panting with your mouth open is going to severely starve your body of oxygen, cause your muscles to ache, cause you to feel like crap over extended periods of time and do pretty much nothing for you unless the only alternative was to be hospital bed-ridden or stuck in a wheel chair to let some part of your body atrophy from non-use, like legs+wheelchair.

On a grander scale, just about everything affects our health - toxic or healthy air, temperatures can affect health too (too cold vs too warm), electrical insulation or EMF pollution, toxins like lead pipes or BPA, all the way to things as simple as posture or breathing with the mouth instead of the nose, talking too much in real life can cause this if you do it improperly (people who give speeches are known to be very exhausted afterwards for example because they are in effect starving their body of oxygen).

It's usually the weakest link in this 'grand' scale that mostly decides what our health is like. For example someone who eats an ideal diet, and exercises the ideal amount, but only gets an hour of sleep each night, is not going to have a properly functioning body, but will recover much quicker than someone who is obese and sleeps enough each night (with the fat cells storing toxins from fast food).

So, in reality, Diet vs Exercise importance will shift as one or the other becomes the weakest link for the individual. The real mystery is what exactly is the best diet, and not just WHAT foods but HOW, WHEN, QUANTITY, etc. Same thing for exercise. I think it's pretty obvious that walking, jogging, or running are the ideal human exercises but factors like barefoot vs tennis shoes can be just as important as the WHAT. Factors like how you breathe when exercising, same story. Other factors like temperature and medium of exercise too (for example, swimming would be the most ideal exercise medium for people who have joint problems if it wasn't for the extremely toxic effect of chlorinated pools).

[LePatron7]

I'm pretty confident a healthy diet like RPD w/ no exercise is better than a SADiet w/ lots of exercise.

How ever I think exercise is a healthy thing. And someone on a SADiet exercising will be healthier than someone on a SADiet not exercising.

RPD + exercise leads to some pretty awesome health.

I lost like 80 lbs on a cooked paleo diet/the SCD. I had trouble keeping weight on on raw paleo at first because I didn't realize the importance of upping fat.

I notice the easier to absorb the foods are, raw meat, raw fats, simple carbs, the more I need to eat to maintain a lean physique without getting too  skinny.