The ONE THING you should STOP doing if you want to lose weight- CARDIO!

Cardio – we hear it’s good for you, but is it really? The truth is that cardio is actually making you fat, and if you really want to lose weight- stop doing cardio!

We have all been told for ages that the only way to burn fat is to do cardio. The truth of the matter is that while doing cardiovascular exercise is excellent for your heart, blood vessels and lungs, which are important to your overall health- it is not the best way to lose weight! In fact, doing cardiovascular exercise (like running, elliptical, or dance aerobics such as Zumba) for long periods of time can be detrimental to your weight loss goals. Here’s why:

1. Doing Cardio Decreases Your Lean Muscle Mass- Yes, it is true that doing cardio burns fat. But long duration cardio also burns leans muscle mass, which is the most important factor contributing to weight loss. The more lean muscle mass you have, the more calories you will burn during your workout- and for several hours afterwards. By doing excessive cardiovascular exercise, you are robbing your body of the valuable muscle mass that keeps your metabolism running at full speed. So not only are you not building any lean muscle mass, you are actually decreasing it! While you may burn many calories during that one cardio training session, too much cardio training will actually decrease your overall metabolism due to loss of lean muscle.
2. Doing Cardio Makes You Hungry- Any kind of exercise will make you hungry. But doing cardio tends to cause people to eat more calories than they burn. Have you ever done a cardio training session and just felt absolutely starving afterwards? Well, there is a physiological mechanism that triggers our bodies to crave about 3 calories for every 10 burned. So it’s natural to feel hungry after any kind of workout. This only becomes a problem for people when they think they are working harder and burning more calories than they actually are. For example, if someone spends an hour on the treadmill doing high-intensity cardio and they burn 800 calories, and they leave the gym with either an inaccurate measure of calories burned or a feeling of extreme hunger- and now they reward themselves with 2 slices of pizza totalling over 1000 calories. They have now consumed more calories than burned! Combined with the stress response of cortisol to increase insulin levels (read below) which causes you to crave sugary fattening foods, too much cardio is a recipe for overeating!
3. Doing Cardio Increases Your Stress Response- Any exercise causes some amount of stress on the body, and causes it to release certain hormones. When you do too much high-intensity exercise, your body releases cortisol. Cortisol can actually make you retain more fat around your midsection in response to long-term stress, as it helped our bodies retain fat in times of famine. Additionally, because of cortisol’s role in or primal fight or flight response, it also increases insulin levels in the blood to feed your muscles during a potential with a battle with a sabre tooth tiger. Since we don’t have those kinds of stresses anymore, the increased insulin just makes us craves sugary, fattening foods, which are detrimental to our weight loss goals.

So, want to start losing weight? Then STOP doing cardio! The more lean muscle mass you build, the more calories you will burn without increasing your stress response. Simple as that.