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FAT LOSS Anonymous
hey /fit/, could you please clarify this for me?

Do I have to do cardio to lose fat?
Can I not just reduce my calorie intake to lower than what I normally use (or my BMR)? Or would that only eat at my muscle and keep my fat?

Background info: 21 years old, 5'10", 145lbs. Slim build, but fat stores around midsection. Very good diet, no soda, chocolate, cakes, treats, fried foods. Healthy fats, almost a gram of protein to every kg of body weight a day. Fruit, veg, oatmeal.

I have been doing cardio for the past 2 months, about an hour 3 times a week. And there's been progress. But I'm taking on a job this summer that will make it very difficult to get any exercise in, except for Sundays.

So can I simply take in a few hundred calories less than my BMR (which is around 1700) and continue to lose this fat, or would I only lose muscle?
>> Anonymous
You don't have to do cardio. If you reduce your calories below BMR, you will lose fat. You may also lose some muscle, but it ought to be mostly fat.

To prevent this, you should lift weights, even if it's just on Sunday, and do bodyweight exercises on a couple other days.
>> Anonymous
You'll lose both fat and muscle...and water weight. As you burn fat for energy, your body starts to dehydrate itself as it needs water to work the chemical reactions required to tap into stored fat and burn it off as energy. Basically, any time you are losing fat, you are also losing water, thus drinking more water is beneficial to the overall process of burning fat. And it also makes your complexion look good.

As for muscle, you'll lose it along with the fat provided you are taking in less calories and you are not actively working your muscles. That's just how the human body works, it's biology. Your body gets energy from non-essential tissues first, those being fat and muscle. Fat's only purpose on the human body is to be an emergency energy source and to help break down certain vitamins (and, well, it helps keep you warm). And we all know that muscles are the tools that allow you to move your body all around when working in conjunction with your nervous system.

As important as these tissues are, they are not required to keep your most vital organs functioning, so they get burned off for energy when you are not taking in enough calories to run your vital organs. Even if you worked out your muscles while on a calorie restricted diet, you'd be fighting mostly an uphill battle to maintain them.

tl;dr: Lowering calories will not exclusively target fat.
>> Anonymous
>>117732

As far as cardio goes:

Aerobic exercises require a lot of energy. Running, jogging or walking, for example, is probably the best form of aerobic exercise because it stresses almost every muscle in your body at once and for extended periods of time. Stressing your leg muscles (quads are the largest single muscle group in the body, thus anytime you run or jog or walk, you burn tons of calories using these large muscles) requires lots of energy. Requiring energy means it either has to come from food or stored tissues. Your body will be reluctant to burn off muscle tissue if it gets used to cardio utilizing most of your muscles, so it will be more willing to let go of fat, since you're actively stressing the majority of your muscles.

That's the simple answer as to why cardio is so effective at burning fat. It simply requires a lot of energy, much more so than controlled weight lifting or start and stop sports like basketball and soccer.

Do you have to do cardio to burn fat as energy? Absolutely not. Your body will naturally burn fat for energy provided you are not taking in enough caloric energy via food. Is cardio extremely effective at burning fat as energy? Absolutely yes.
>> Anonymous
>>117739
your entire post is wrong. weightlifting burns more energy than the same period of aerobic work, and for longer periods too. this is an established fact. the reason is not just the energy expended in effort, it is also the energy expended in recovery. weightlifting causes teh body to start protein synthesis, which takes a long time and uses an enourmous amount of energy per gram of resulting muscle. so go learn something before you come here and give people bad advice.
>> Anonymous
>>117753

Nope. Running is proven to utilize the most muscles at a single time, second only to intense cross-country skiing. Using more muscles at once means you burn the most calories. And then consider that people typically run for at least an hour or more without stopping...can't say the same for lifting.

Idiot. Just because you want to believe your high school gym rat method of exercise is worth anything does not make it true.
>> Anonymous
>>117753

Also, your body does not expend many calories recovering from muscle tears. This is a total myth. The calories burned in muscle repair are about the same burned in digestion or a quick jackoff session. Miniscule at best.