Cardio Doesn’t Cause Weight Loss

If you do 3-5 days a week of 30 minutes or more of cardio, over time you will lose weight or burn fat, right?

WRONG!

If doing cardio burns fat or causes weight loss, how come so many people do cardio every week, multiple days a week, but still struggle to lose weight or burn fat?

or

If they have lost some weight or burned some fat by doing cardio, once progress stopped, why didn’t they lose more weight or burn more fat by doing more cardio?

The answer to both of those questions is because doing cardio does not cause you to burn fat or lose weight.

Being in a caloric deficit causes weight loss, not doing cardio.

Yes, cardio burns calories and can help put you into a deficit, but if you do cardio and you aren’t in a calorie deficit it’s nearly impossible to lose weight.

There’s a statistic out there floating around that claims that a large percentage of people who begin to workout don’t lose weight. This is because the additional calories they burn from working out, causes your hunger to spike, and they end up eating an equal amount in additional calories. This cancels out the burned calories and keeps you at status quo.

This proves that calories are the culprit and not cardio.

Yes, cardio burns calories and can cause you to be in a deficit but, you must be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. This means if you do the cardio and don’t end up being in a calorie deficit, you won’t lose any weight.

You can’t lose weight doing cardio without being in a calorie deficit, but you can be in a calorie deficit and lose weight without doing cardio.

This shows that doing cardio is just a tool to burn calories, not to lose weight, BUT the question is:

Why are you trying to burn calories on a treadmill, cardio boot camp or Orange Theory if you have no clue how many calories you’re eating or burning outside of the gym?

In order to know and guarantee you’re in a calorie deficit, you must know how many calories you burn and consume each day.

The first step to permanent and continuous change is to figure out how many calories you consume each day. Without knowing how much fuel you consume each day, you will never know how much you are able to safely burn.

Would you want to fill up your car blindfolded with a pump that has no automatic stop, then drive your car without knowing how much gas is in it and expect to never to run out or overfill the tank and always get to your destination?

Of course not!

So how can you expect to always get to your destination of weight loss by doing cardio, (aka burning fuel) when you have no idea how much fuel you put in?

Your body isn’t a car though. If you overfill the tank, you store the extra fuel as fat. If you under fueled, your body is more resilient than a car and will do everything possible to not run out of gas and die.

Figure out how many calories you are consuming and burning each day, then do cardio to be in a deficit and you will continuously lose weight, right?

Wrong!

How many times do you hear of someone losing weight from cardio, but when they stopped, they gained it all back faster and even more than when they started?

This happens mostly in part because if you under fueled and are in too much of a calorie deficit or are in a calorie deficit too long, your body will adapt and prevent itself from dying due to under fueling.

Your body will slowly start to burn less calories throughout the day, lower hormone production, energy production, brain function and every other function in the body to make up for the prolonged or extreme deficit.

The longer and more extreme the calorie deficit is, the more damaged your body will become and you will be setting yourself up for a huge rebound of weight gain and other health and mental problems the moment you stop the activity or eat more than you usually do.

If you eat too much or do too little activity, or if you eat too little or do too much activity you won’t be able to lose weight, and, if you do, you will be setting yourself for major weight gain back and other problems. This would mean you didn’t lose weight, rather you did something for a short period of time and went back to status quo and became physically and mentally worse.

The answer isn’t cardio because cardio only burns calories. And, as we learned, burning too many calories can be harmful and eating too many calories even with cardio doesn’t help lose weight or burn fat.

The only way to effectively and efficiently burn fat is to have the proper balance of activity, rest and fuel. In order to change your body in any way you must pay attention to all three details or you will not sustain results and will cause major health and mental problems in the long run.