“People who try to train harder to make up for a poor diet end up exhausting themselves, and their workouts become unproductive,” Lipowski says. “It’s a double-whammy.”
The moment you surpass your body's caloric threshold, even if it’s by one measly calorie, that calorie gets stored as fat.
“Exercise can make up for some extra calories, but the way most people eat, the number of extra calories goes beyond what they’ll burn during a workout,” he says. “And if you tried to burn all of those extra calories — say, 1,000 or so — doing that would escalate the degree of stress on your body and make it more difficult to recover.”