Dieting Vs. Exercise

What's more important for slimming down and losing weight, dieting or exercising? First, let's visit each subject for a moment to see what each will do and won't do in relation to our bodies.
When we go on a calorie restricted and modified diet, our bodies start using up the three days storage of energy it keeps in cells, without replacing the storage the way it was before. So for the first few days you body might drop a little of the excess weight. Then alarms go off within you that intake is less than before, so it turns on the hunger signals in the form of hormones. The main one of these is grehlin, which has been discussed before that I have nick-named it Gremlin. If you make it past the next few days of a growingly intense hunger, then your body employs it's next defense against what it views as potential oncoming starvation. It starts slowing down the energy converters in the cells, thus slowing your metabolism, or the rate at which you are converting glucoses and lipids (sugars and fats) into energy. Thus, you can survive on less calories, and your body can maintain the same weight and fat stores as you have been maintaining to that point.
Now let's examine what plays out when you just increase your exercise amount and/or intensity, without changing your diet. You begin to metabolize more calories than you were before, although the amount is relatively smaller than most exercise machine companies and gyms would have you believe. Also, you build more muscle, which we all have been educated to know that more muscle burns more calories than less muscle and certainly more than fat stores. For a female weighing about 130 lbs. on a medium sized frame, being somewhat active, her basal metabolic rate would usually be about 1600 calories per day. Adding in exercise, at 30 minute increments the increased calorie burn would probably be about another 150 calories during that workout, and with the increased metabolic burn which can last up to 12 hours, another 50 to 100 calories might be burned. So you can see that not a whole lot more is required for the extra exercise (even if the exercise bike is saying that another 350 calories has been burned). Increasing the muscle mass would increase the basal metabolic rate gradually, so after this daily 30 minute workout until the body has reached the point that it is used to this amount and type, quite often within one month, the metabolic rate might be up another 50 calories per day. Increasing the intensities of the workouts as each plateau is reached, so that it always feels like it is a little tougher than you can comfortably do, keeps the burn rate higher and the building of muscle stronger.
When the two are combined, the results are much better. Reducing the caloric intake, eating a healthier diet focused more on whole foods in their raw state, and exercising daily with switching routines and increasing intensities, you can keep your metabolism revved, so your body will be forced to pull from the lipid (fat) storages to produce energy. Of course, the exact degrees to which exercise and diet adjustments need to be made for achieving results is slightly different in everybody, depending on factors such as overweight amount, muscle area being built, whether stores are yellow fat (like women put on) or brown fat (like men put on in their midsections) which actually causes a metabolic boost being described as "fat-burning fat", if the person has been a yo-yo dieter or not dieted in a long time, external temperatures, sickness, etc.
So we can see that to achieve optimum fat loss and improved health, proper diet with reduced caloric intake, combined with varied exercise must be combined. You'll feel great doing it, so it's well worth doing!