Losing weight without cardio

[zekester]

Im working on losing weight, I am over-weight, would like to lose about 25-30 more lbs. Ive lost 12 in the last month. Ive done so by continuing my workouts but cleaning up my diet, and have done very little cardio. In the past when adding regular cardio to my routines, I lost strength as well as weight.
My question is, can I continue to lose weight by continuing with better eating habits and my workouts, without the cardio?, and will this help keep me from losing strength?

[rickhussey]

in my opinion yes. you'll just have to continue to tweak your diet.
cardio tends to backfire on me, because it causes me to eat far to much.

[zekester]

yes, I found that to be the case with cardio as well...I have a lot of room for improvement in my diet...One thing thats helped is I found a salad dressing I like, I use a minimum amount of salad dressing, but could never find one i really liked...So far Ive traded a lot of my starches for vegetables and fruits...

[Deleted]

You should prolly just work on losing bodyfat. If your using the scale to lose weight then you might be losing muscle too. I think you do need cardio to stay healthy, since your muscles require a good set of lungs and heart.

[zekester]

I rarely use the scale, I go by how my pants fit...lol...

[dbunch]

I like to eat. I’ve never been very good a portion control or eating the “right” foods. So tweaking my diet is more or less out of the question. I have to lose weight by burning calories.

As far as I’m concerned cardio is a bad word. I prefer conditioning – and I think it is vital just for overall health. I don’t want to be the guy who can squat 500+ pounds but gets winded after a flight of stairs and there are a lot of them out there.

And I agree about the scale – clothing is a much better measure of how you’re doing or got get a body fat measurement if you want to do numbers.

[zekester]

I actually prefer to say fat loss instead of weight loss and conditioning instead of cardio, but when I do 95% of the people dont understand what Im saying, and Ive fallen into that habit...They think doing excessive cardio without resistance training and seeing thier weight go down on a scale means they are losing fat, not understanding that a lot of the weight they're losing is muscle, thus making it more difficult as time goes on to lose fat...I think lifting weights is even more important for older people as they are naturally losing muscle anyhow and need to maintain as much muscle as they can...

[rickhussey]

dbunch - agreed on cardio being a bad word.

I like some of conditioning ideas in this article.
articles.elitefts.com/training-articles/training-for-the-fat-guy/

[Deleted]

Yeah but 99% of the people at the gym don't know what conditioning is. How about we just go with 30 minute of physical activity that elevates the heart and lungs.

For me I only count the minutes where i m force to breath through my mouth.

[osu122975]

I actually employed Matt Kroc to help me down from the 242 class to the 198 class. It started out w/ 3 days 30 min cardio and after about 6 weeks, I was already up to 7 days 45 min per day. I never made it to 198 mostly because I didn't have the time or patience to do the cardio that often. I hate cardio. I don't mind going for a walk around the neigborhood once in a while. I've ran hills and that seems to be ok.

But for weight loss, I just try to have a couple days during the week (normally off days) where I try to cut back the calories. Some might argue it hinders recover, but upping the protein and cutting back on the carbs will keep that from happening. Remember, if you're able to burn 3500 calories in a week more than you take in, you lose 1 lb per week, which is ok in my book over the course of a year.

It also helps after your main sets doing high reps of light weight keeping up the intensity (aka: 30-60 sec rest between sets). I like a lot of band work for this as it seems to be easier on my joints.