Imagine (or don’t as needed) that you are a take out junkie who eats out 3 meals a day and does no exercise. If you had one hour to devote to improving your health, would it be better spent in cooking yourself healthy meals or exercising?
(please don’t cheat and say exercise AND order better meals)
In short, for someone getting both wrong (and disregarding specific medical conditions), is it better to improve one’s diet or level physical activity?
I have no special health knowhow, but I suspect that hitting the nutrition angle might be better overall. It’s hard to live without getting some exercise, after all.
An interesting angle, (espeically in terms of healthy weight,) would be to compare the calories in one typical take-out meal versus the calories you could burn in 1 hour of exercise.
And would it be cheating to suggest an alternation system? Home-cooked healthy meal 2 days, then 1 day with an exercise session and so on?
Of course it would be cheating. 
The question is purely abstract and hypothetical, not looking for advice but just wondering what factor weighs more (no pun intended) if a compromise were impossible.
Another vote for cooking, here.
In an hour, you can burn 1000 calories if you really bust your ass and don’t take a break. Frankly, I doubt anyone who hasn’t trained for that sort of thing could manage that much exercise. That’d almost be running a third of a marathon. For the average person, maybe you could burn 500 calories in that hour if you really pushed yourself. (see here for a reference on calories burned/hour).
If you’re eating fast food for three meals a day, you’re easily consuming over 3000 calories. If instead you prepare two meals a day, you can easily trim 1000 calories off of that. As a single dude, I’m (ideally) spending less than an hour a day cooking for myself. I’ll usually cook two or three big dinners every week (taking about an hour for each), and then nuke leftovers and make quick sandwiches the rest of the time. Add in time to plan and shop for groceries, and it still is probably under an hour a day on average.
ETA: I forget exactly where I heard it, but I remember hearing recently in the news that diet was far more important than exercise for significant weight loss. Also, exercise tends to up your appetite, and you can negate all of your hard work by eating a couple candy bars.
Skip the meal and exercise for 1 hour
You still need adequate calories and nutrition to sustain life and lose weight. Attempting to lose weight by not eating properly and just exercising will fail.
Doesn’t the OP make somewhat of a leap to state that an hour’s worth of nutritious meals will replace the fast food calories? After eating the 1600 calories worth of nutritious meals, you might very well still be hungry and then eat another ~2000 calories of fast food two hours later. Thus, actually sticking to the diet requires a full 24-hour day of effort, rather than a single hour.
It’d be better to spend that one hour reading and educating yourself on health so you’d realize one measly hour spent cooking or running isn’t going to matter one drop. I don’t mean to be snarky, but really, health is a multi-variabled, additive, long-term thing.
If it were purely a matter of losing weight, it’s a relatively simple caloric intake vs expenditure calculation, and as lazybratsche pointed out, it’s easier to reduce intake by 500 calories than to burn 500 after the fact. However:
-Starvation diets don’t work in the long term, and if that one “healthy” meal a day causes you to be hungrier than usual, you may very well overcompensate in your other meals (consciously or not).
-(Good) food gives you more than just empty calories, so blindly reducing intake is not a good idea.
-Exercise, likewise, does more than just burn calories.
-Poor nutrition will lead to one set of problems. A sedentary lifestyle will lead to another set of problems. There’s a definite overlap between the two sets (usually resulting from obesity), but beyond that, there’s no black-and-white answer as to which set of problems is worse – would you prefer high cholesterol or back pain? Acne or depression? A weakened immune system or a higher chance of physical injury?
I’m assuming the OP means per day.
Myself, I’d vote for the exercise. I know I don’t eat as well as I should, either, but a half-hour or so of exercise a day (mostly in biking or walking to and from the office) seems to be enough to keep me at least close to being in shape.
Divvy it up.
One-half hour of jogging or bike riding, and one-half hour doing that annoying chopping up of vegies and grilling of lean meats for your low-cal at-home meals.
Right, but spending an hour to replace a Big Mac combo meal with a balanced dinner of lean protein, moderate amount of carbohydrates, and lots of fruits and veggies is hardly a starvation diet. Done right, that will cut out hundreds of calories, provide a lot better overall nutrition, and still be filling while tasting pretty good. The OP specifically mentioned using that time to make a healthy home-cooked meal.
ETA: Now I’m getting hungry, and roasting some squash and zuchinni with a bit of pasta is suddenly a lot more appealing than nuking yet another frozen burrito…
That’s why “healthy” was in quotes – “done right” is nontrivial – but you certainly made it clearer
dance around the kitchen while cooking the lovely healthy meal.
I’d spend it cooking. You’d be amazed how much better food is for you when you make it yourself and you can work on shaving out just enough of the “bad” so that you get the taste you want without quite as many calories. (Perfect example: I make tuna sandwiches with half sour cream and half mayo instead of all mayo. No real flavor or texture difference and it saves about 50 calories). There’s at least a little exercise involved in cooking (especially if you count cleaning up) and you’ll save a TON of money. Saving money might reduce stress, which might reduce the tendency to eat so much.
However… I don’t know if that’s really the best decision.
Studies seem to show that the people who survive longest are active. A fat active person is healthier than a skinny non-active person. Being overweight only looks like a risk factor in and of itself because most overweight people are also not active.
Skinny, non-active person here. Given minimal exercise, can I cut out enough calories from food to make up for drinking lots of beer every day?
I think lazybratsche has the ticket with post #4. If one hour of exercise can only burn 500 calories, you are better off going the diet way if that hour’s effort can cut your caloric intake by more than that.
Plus, you are not just cutting calories. Presumably you are also cutting bad fats, empty carbs and adding better nutrients, vitamins, minerals, etc.
That said, I get the feeling that people in the field are always pushing harder for the exercise part over the diet, but that is just my unscientific observation…
I feel obliged to say that you don’t have to cook to eat healthy. Just learn to make better choices. It’s easy to slide into fast food habits because you think you;re saving time, but I think that’s an illusion. It’s just as easy to find a cup of yogurt and a bottle of water as it is to get the Wendy’s cheeseburger combo.
If you only have one hour, go for the exercise. Cardio stuff. Walking for an hour? You’ll feel great. And your next takeout meal ? You’ll have another hour tomorrow too, right?
I wish I could devote a solid hour everyday, even to something as seemingly useless as walking! Maybe if I got off of the computer…