steelcity_ballin wrote:For anyone that lifts regularly, lifting is not only cardio, it's better than cardio with respect to fat burn over a 24 hour period. When you're done running you're done burning. Healthy is a relative term really.
This is a true story.
My biology is weird due to a congenital birth defect (which I don't like talking about in specific terms because people make a lot of wrong assumptions), and one of the results is that, for whatever reason, I'm almost entirely unable to store body fat. I'm not as bad off as Lizzie Velasquez (who is literally unable to store fat) or people with
complete lipodystrophy, but my energy level fluctuates heavily and I have to be careful about where, when, and what I eat.
I don't have (and have never had) medical insurance and so I have never had my condition examined too thoroughly, but in an attempt to put some more weight on my skin-and-bones frame, my aunt, who is also my GP, had me begin working out so that I would have some mass to me. The results were immediate and all too effective; I gained 11 pounds in just two weeks and I LOOKED much healthier than before. However, my energy problems became horribly more severe and my appetite, normally ravenous, became literally insatiable; I felt like I was
starving all the time until I'd stuffed myself to nausea -- and I was hungry again in just an hour or two. Believe me when I say that between starving due to a lack of food and starving despite an abundance of food, I'd choose the former any day.
I've always been more athletic than I had any right to be given my level of physical activity; some of this is genetics and some of this is simply that being light makes it easier to move (and I love running, jumping, and active play like this), so I quit the weights and went back to gymnastic and more dynamic exercise. I started practicing my TKD again, I found a small group semi-locally (it's a bit of a drive, but not too far) that does parkour on an indoor course, and where I live now we have a decent approximation of a proper gymnasium set up in one of the backyard garages. I've managed to maintain a healthier weight, I don't feel like I'm starving to death, and I don't have to eat like someone four times my size; everything is better. (I just eat like someone twice my size.)
Anyway, this whole personal sharing session was really just to reinforce what steelcity said: if you want to lose weight, lifting is the way to go. That old story about doing cardio to lose weight is just hogwash.
I initially had "that old jag" above, but Google can't verify the existence of this phrase outside of talking about Jaguar sports cars. I changed it, but isn't that a phrase people used to use?