Choosing to Cook or Exercise 

What Matters Most for Health?

There was a recent study that showed that American’s have a limited amount of time devoted to health activities:  cooking healthy meals or exercising. We all know that time is precious. Where we choose to spend our time should be focused on the activity that affects us the most overall health-wise. Both cooking healthy meals and exercising are both good things for improving your health, where will you decide to spend your time? 

The study showed that this unconscious trade-off was made across all demographics: men, women, single, married, with and without children. As the time spent on cooking healthy meals increased, the activity spent on exercising decreased in a given day period.

Where should we spend our time for the biggest health benefits?  

There is much discussion about the best way to improve your health. Should you eat better? or workout more?

Psychological Science reported that people who thought that eating right was the key to weight loss showed lower BMI (body mass index) compared to people who thought exercising was the key to weight control.

Maybe the people who valued eating right for health benefits, ate healthier in general and this choice caused lower BMI numbers. Or possibly the people who thought working out was the key to weight loss, had more muscle mass and that skewed their BMI numbers.

Both eating right and exercising are beneficial to your health… so if you have to choose where you spend your time, what choice do you make? 

When asked most people agreed that it was easier to change how they ate then adding exercise into their schedule. Everyone finds time to eat. When trying to figure out what was more important for certain goals, Women’s Health Magazine reports that diet was most important for weight loss and reducing heart disease. Exercise was more important for boosting energy, prevention of diabetes, and improving mood. Both eating right and exercising were important for cancer prevention. 

Every day you make the choice for where you are going to spend your time. Some days we may decide to spend a little more time moving and exercising and another day we may spend it preparing healthy meals in the kitchen. 

Tips to save you time in the kitchen for days that you exercise:

Take one day to prepare foods in advance

Use a crock pot for making healthy meals 

Prepare extra of some meals to freeze to use on busier days

Where do you choose to spend your time on health?  read more