Can you lose weight if you workout hard but overeat?
Losing weight is easy if you just work out and eat healthy. However, for some it can be a tough task to get back in shape after an unhealthy binge or celebration. Plus, most people prefer focusing on their fitness goals than worry about the consequences of eating too much.
At any given moment there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world who have been trying to lose those pounds since they arrived at the gym. If this sounds like you, you should immediately read up on what happens when your diet doesn’t match your workouts.
What happens if you workout hard but overeat?
If someone works out hard and tries to lose weight while overeating, its no surprise that person wont achieve anything. Instead, the opposite might happen.
The main goal of working out for most people is to lose weight or stay healthy. They think just working out will magically lose their weight or make them healthier instantly. They grind in the gym day and night hoping to achieve their goal. Despite of the hard work they put in, they do not see any result. Can you guess why this happened? Well, the answer to this is pretty straight-forward. They were over-eating!
What most people fail to do while they are working out is focusing on their diet. Our body is like a machine. It requires food as a fuel to operate. Think it this way, a car requires fuel to run. If the fuel is lower than the operating time of the car, it is gonna stop working. Similarly, our body requires a certain amount of calories to operate properly in an average day.
The calorie requirement of an average adult male is around 2,000-3,000 whereas in females, it varies from 1,600-2,400. This is the amount of calories required for an average person to function properly. While this is an average estimate, it varies due to many factors like height, weight, etc.
Related reading: How much rest should I take between aerobic workouts (for weight loss)
Why you will not lose weight if you overeat while working out hard?
Getting back to our actual topic, if you overeat while working out hard, you wont notice any difference. There is a simple principle to this, calories in and calories out. This means if you take in less calories than you burn, you will lose weight. In the other hand, if you take in more calories and burn less, you will gain weight. This is a very easy to understand method of knowing how losing/gaining of weight works. So, when you are overeating and working out hard at the same time, the calorie intake and calorie burn are at similar level. This means you will neither gain nor lose weight.
Burning calories while exercising is way harder than taking in calories while enjoying your food. This means even if you work out extremely hard in gym but overeat, you will see no physical results at all. You may get stronger but don’t hope to lose those pounds while doing so.
Concluding paragraph
To summarize this, no, you wont lose any weight if you workout hard while overeating. Working out is very good for our health but we should not ignore our diet. Most of the professionals in the field claim that diet is more important than the workout itself! If you eat healthy and accordingly to your workout, that will help you stay fit for a long term.