Quote:
Originally Posted by Zofia
Thats when I understood they are not kidding when they say muscle weight more than fat.
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I'm sure you meant to type "muscle is more dense than fat"
Great results, everyone! I'm impressed!
My 2 cents. Strength training can help you retain muscle while dieting, which avoids the skinny-fat / anorectic look. Cardio burns some calories and can help with adherence to a diet, unless you're the type who says, "I just spent 1/2 hour reading Shape magazine on the elliptical, so I deserve a cheat meal."
But the sad fact is that exercise burns less calories than we think, and certainly much much less than the cardio machines tell us. A beginner or intermediate trainer can expect 5-7 cals/minute (including what we would have burned anyway) of active work (HT Lyle Mcdonald, whose site I really recommend). A half hour stint on the treadmill at a moderate pace is thus likely to burn 150-200 calories. A half hour of lifting may burn even less, depending on how intense you are lifting and what proportion of the half hour you are spending at rest. Post-workout metabolism is also pretty trivial for both.
150-200 calories adds up, of course, but it's also easy to wipe out with distressing little additional food. Half a bagel a day would about do it.
Which is a long way of saying what everyone else has alluded to as well, in one way or another: weight training and cardio both help, mentally and physically, but for the purposes of losing fat, table-pushaways are key.
Sorry, was that too lecture like?
// b. strong