Is it realistic to think that 45-60 min. of moderate cardio (stay within weightloss zone, 65%) 5 days a week is enough?
Is 1 to 2 hours too much? Are the bennifits the same?

After reading Dr. Phil, lots of stuff I already knew, I relized that I get very little of the day to day activity, I drive everywhere.
So i am wondering if I add time to my gym time will this help ballence my time in the car?

Wise exercisers everywhere...HELP!!!
-L

I have heard that if you are on a diet and you work out that much it starts working against you and your metabolism slows and you start to burn muscle for energy. For a couple weeks I worked out for 60 minutes 5 times a week because I thought I would burn more calories, but instead my butt and thighs just got bigger, I'm still not sure why. Once I went back to 30-45 minutes and 30 mins weight training, the inches came off.

Also I heard that if you're going to work out that much, you can lose weight, but you need to remember to stay REALLY hydrated, and it works better to work out twice for 30 minutes instead of once for 60, because then you get your metabolism raised twice in one day.

An hour a day isn't unreasonable in any way. Two hours a day (assuming you can afford the time) is a bit much for your body, under certain circumstances.

The key is what you eat, and how you exercise. If you're on a diet where you have reduced your protein intake as well as your overall calorie intake, then doing a lot of cardiovascular exercise is very bad. The extra calories burned often come from breaking down of your muscle mass, muscle mass you need to keep your metabolism high. If you allow your muscle mass to degrade while you're losing weight, you'll have to eat practically nothing forever in order to keep the weight off.

A better approach is to mix up your exercise, half cardiovascular, half resistence training. And when cutting intake, just cut fat and carbohydrate intake. Leave your protein intake alone, or perhaps even increase it a bit, to feed growth of new muscle (to help raise your metabolism even higher). This will guard against the catabolization I mentioned above.

I think banana is right, I just don't have the nerve to test her theory ... I do 45 minutes walking in the morning Monday thru Friday, then go to the gym Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday doing another 45 minutes of cardio and 20/30 minutes of weights. I know that if I cut back to 30 minutes cardio in the am and 30 in the pm with my weights it would be much better for me, so starting November 1 I'm going to do it that way and see what happens ...

This is very interesting stuff guys.

I noticed that myself and didn't think it was logical that I have a much harder time losing now that I'm exercising so much more than I did when I only worked out 30 minutes a day.

Guess I'll have to cut back a little.