What has the most significant impact on weight loss, exercise, or eating less and healthier?

It is 90% what you eat.

Here I am at 285lbs eating crappy and not working out.

Here I am 1 year later at 265lbs after having lifted 7x a week for 1 full year while still eating crappy and not doing cardio.

Here I am 5 months later weighing 225lbs. Still lifting 7x a week and now eating healthy and doing HIIT cardio

Here I am 7 months later at 265lbs. Lifting 7x a week but but stopped eating healthy

Here I am 7 months later, weighing 200lbs. Lifting 7x a week, continued to eat well and do HIIT cardio:

2 years later, continued eating healthy and being active while lifting 7x a week.

Edit: My measureables in the last photo have been asked a few times so I’m just over 6’1, 205lbs and 32 years old

Edit 2: It’s been asked how I eat / lift while I went from 265–200. So here is a really long response:

Eating: I eat alot of food. So i try to still eat a lot of food, but just foods that are more filling and less dense in calories.

I try to get 190-200g of protein a day.

Wakeup: I always drink protein shake

Breakfast: instant oatmeal or scrambled eggs or fruit (eggs can be a lunch / dinner too. Somtimes I’ll mix eggs with lean ground turkey and rice sort of as like a healthy stir fry.

Lunch: large salad with chicken breast (or other lean protein) in it. Sometimes for lunch I’ll eat a cambell soup choices that were < 400 calories for a can.

I’ll routinely bring left overs from dinner to work for lunch. So with that we’ll have chicken / salmon / shrimp with some sort of healthy side. There are a million recipies for healthy eating and it’s not hard to cook it. Some side options I typically eat are quinoa, cauliflower mash (so like mash potatos), baked sweet potatos, skewers with pinneapple/chicken/onion/mushrooms. There are a million healthy options. It’s really about cooking your food.

I feel you can have unlimited fruit / vegetables or lean meats (like chicken salmon etc..). Obviously there is a limit but like 1 pound of chicken breast is 750 calories. That's a ton of food (or a big mac is 500 calories..). So it's just choosing the right foods and then googling recipes. I mostly tried to stay around 1700-1800 calories and tried to get a lot of protein. I tried to still eat healthy, so just because chips fit within my 1800 calories I still avoided it.

I did sometimes eat bad foods, but i kept it to a minimum and being fit isn't anything special. Everyone can do it, it's just consistency. The different between someone that's fit and someone that failed is 1 person gave up and the other decided to go even when they feel tired or unmotivated.

Snacks: I like yogurt, oreanges, pinneapple, bananas, lunch meet, sometimes i'll make a protein shake, etc..there are a lot of dessert like meals you can make by googling protein powder recipies.

Lifting:

I've always found myself to experiment but i end up with the same ideas. I like to lift many sets of low reps reps. So i do heavier weights at 2-5 reps and i'll do 6-8 sets of this and then i'll do one last set with a higher range to try and get additional hypertrophy. When I first started I decided I wanted to lift 7x a week and I've done that pretty much ever since. A lot of reading tells me you need off days so I say take off days but my ego says i'll still go 7x.

I lift like this:

Day 1: back/bicep:

Back: dumbbell rows, pull ups, dead lifts

Bicep: alternating bicep dumbbell curls, straight bar curls, preacher curls, dumbbell hammer curls

all 3 back exercises, 2-3 of the bicep and then every 4 weeks alternate the order. Sometimes i add other random exercises, but these were the majority.

Day 2: Bench / Triceps:

Chest: Flat Bench, Incline Bench, Dumbbell Flys, Dips, decline bench

Triceps: Inside grip incline bench, skull crushers, inside grip flat bench, tricep pull downs.

3 chest, 2-3 tricep excercises, same as above.

Day 3: legs / Shoulders

Legs: various squat, lunges, leg press, leg extensions, leg curls

shoulders: front raises, over head press, side raises, arnold press, shrugs

choose 3-4 of each.

Every other day i do abs. Abs i do hanging leg raises, V-Ups w\a dumbell between my legs, Ab pull downs (so pulling down on a pulley). so with the last 2 excericses i continually try to increase weight to make it more difficult.

Days I don't do abs I do calves. I do calf extensions on the leg press machine. I start high rep: 20-25 reps, then 15-20 reps, then i start to get heavier and go to weight i can only do 2-5 times. When I finish up I will do 1-2 sets of high reps again.

For cardio I believe all you need to do is 15 minutes a day of HIIT cardio. Which means you do something really hard for 30 seconds and then walk for 30 seconds and repeat. Run at a sprint for 10-20 seconds, do squat jumps for 15-20 seconds, do burpees at a fast pace for 15-20 seconds, jump over your couch for 20 seconds, just something that really gets your heart going and is somewhat physical.

Then if you're running, just walk at 3mph for 20-40 seconds, if you're doing one of the more in-home exercises I mentioned then just sort of keep your body moving a little bit, nothing fast, just don't stand still though, for the next 20-40 seconds as you get your breath back and then just repeat this for 15-20 minutes and that's it. I would do that 3-5 times a week. If you really want to kill it, immediately after that walk and do steady state cardio, a normal paced walk maybe very slightly fast (or if you're on a treadmill at a slight incline) for the next 20-35 minutes after your HIIT and that will boost your results even more.

That's it though. You can do as little as 1 hour of cardio for an entire week. The eating part though is what will really guide your weight loss.Running for 15 minutes is great, but that only burns 200-400 calories. Eating an extra large candy bar is similar or more calories. So always consider: is X item worth running for an hour? Maybe that's an unfun way to look at it, but sometimes it helps me rationalize out of bad food