There’s a book review in this week’s New York Times entitled “The Worst Foods in America” that reminds me of how hard it is to lose weight with exercise alone. While there’s a lot to be said for integrating exercise into a well-balanced weight management plan, if your only weapon against the flab is exercise, you’ll likely be in for some serious disappointment.

Bear with me now, I’m going to throw a couple of numbers at you. If you want to lose one pound of fat, you need to get rid of about 3,500 calories. If a new runner burns 1,000-ish calories over the course of a week (three runs of thirty minutes each, burning about 350 calories per run) they’re about a third of the way to losing their first pound. Not bad, right? Well, that depends.

Most of us know what it’s like to start a new exercise regimien. You need a lot of energy to get out and run, and that energy comes from food. So our new jogger decides to up his food intake to make up for the energy he’s using up on his early morning runs. Wanting to stay healthy, he adds a medium-sized apple and a medium-sized banana to his daily diet. How can he go wrong? Easy.

Our new jogger burned about 1,000 extra calories in his first week, but by adding the banana and the apple to his daily diet, he upped his caloric intake for the week by about 1,200 calories. Can you see where I’m going with this? Our new jogger certainly isn’t going to be losing any weight, and may be in danger of gaining weight! How discouraging is that? After a couple of weeks of exercise and no positive results from the scale, our new jogger may well give up and go back to his couch potato ways.

What got me thinking about this was the obscene calorie counts in these “worst foods” from the Times article. A turkey burger from Ruby Tuesday’s that weighs in at over 1,000 calories, some McDonald’s chicken breast strips at 800+ calories, or a nice dessert from Chili’s with an amazing 1,600 calories. I started adding up how much running it would take to burn off one of those meals. I like to run, but not that much.

My point is not to discourage anyone from picking up a Nike+ Sport Kit and hitting the track in an effort to lose weight. In fact, I think it’s a great idea. It’s just that I’d hate to lose a new jogger when they step on the scale a few weeks into their Couch to 5k plan and see that they’re not making as much progress as they’d like to. Make sure that you take your diet into consideration as well. Jogging can certainly melt the pounds off, as long as you work as hard on your diet as you do on your Nike+ stats.

On a more personal note, my Mother has always told me not to take financial advice from a poor person. That’s some mighty fine advice, and I’d like to add that you should never take diet advice from a fat person. Over the past year I’ve used calorie counting to lose more than 45 pounds, and I didn’t start running until after I’d lost the first 30 pounds. I followed the Hacker’s Diet and I use the Hacker’s Diet Online and Physics Diet to track my progress. While I’m aware that a lot of people hate counting calories, it’s what worked for me, and the examples above are very similar to the examples that finally convinced me that I could lose weight without too much sweat being involved. It was only a strong desire to eat more that finally convinced me to start running, a very happy side effect of my new, healthier lifestyle.