Exercise vs. Juice Fast for the overweight & Obese

So this is definitely nothing close to a scientific study.  I will say though that I've run the gamut  of weight loss/health/exercise experiments.  I've trained with body builders & fitness gurus, been a wrestler at 3% body fat, trained for triathlons, and tried a lot of different things with diet.  Here's my experience.

Diet is Everything


No matter how much exercise i've done all significant weight loss comes from what goes in your mouth, not from what goes out your pores.  Just to give you an idea let's do some math.  A guy my size burns roughly 2200 calories per day just by being alive.  Now if i'm eating 3500 calories a day the math says that i'm going to gain weight.  Let say i wanted to keep eating 3500 calories a day but maintain that 2200 calorie level.  That means i need to burn 1300 calories to maintain that intake - every day.  Here's a list of how much excercise that takes for a guy my size:

• Race Walking: 1.5 hours ~ 1200 calories
• Aerobics- General: 1.5 hours ~ 1200 calories
• Bike Racing - .5 hour ~ 1000
• Boxing (in the ring proper fighting) - 45 minutes ~ 1100 calories

You get the picture.  Is it easier to carve out 1.5 hours of walking per day to MAINTAIN a proper body weight and eat whatever i want, or is it easier to simply eat less.  Eating less is a ton easier - i've tried both ways.  

Permanent Change

The real thing here is permanent change.  The juice fast is putting that into perspective. When i diet i usually do really well one week or one day then not so well the next so it's hard to keep that calorie count down - especially during deadlines - mostly because emotionally i eat food to handle a lot of the stress in my life.  The juice fast puts that into perspective.  To successfully push through it you must conquer all your demons.  So far i've been forced to conquer:

• emotional eating
• stress eating
• social eating

In the last 7 days i've come accross all of these and it's been painfully obvious that much of my eating is based on response to external stresses rather than real internal needs.  This is helping me to develop my long term strategy while in a place where i don't even have to think about food.  I think this is one of the really important thigns about juice fasting for overweight and obese people.  The fast gives you a chance to really figure things out while removing food from your life for a short time.