If you want to lose weight you should (in order of effectiveness):

- Watch what you eat/count calories

- Lift heavy weights

- Do cardio

#3 on its own is rarely ever going to show results. So many people will jog for an hour or more every day and then eat a candy bar as a reward, instantly undoing all the work, then eventually get discouraged when they see no progress.

seconded. of course, ideally you should do all three as best you can.

the way i always think about it is that humans are among the most efficient runners in the entire animal kingdom; some tribes in Africa still practice persistence hunting. so by extension, cardio is going to be the worst choice for weight loss - but the other benefits still make it worth it.

The lifting heavy weights just ensures you retain muscle during weight loss, doesn't it?

While weight loss is mostly diet, if you did want to use exercise to burn additional calories, cardio would do more than weight training. I burn up to 1000 calories in an hour of very strenuous cycling (from normal weight), which I doubt I could ever do lifting dumbbells and barbells.

I've always used weight training during weight loss to try and tell my body to retain muscle and target fat primarily.

No, lifting weights burns calories. In fact you continue burning calories during recovery, which is something you don't get with cardio.

The muscle you add from weight training does burn extra Calories, but it's not very much, around 6-10 Calories/pound. https://www.builtlean.com/muscle-burn-calories

In order to retain lean muscle mass while losing weight you also have to maintain a high protein intake, something like 2 grams per kilogram of lean body weight. This can be challenging while eating at a calorie deficit: after you consume the necessary protein you might not have much room in your diet for other macronutrients.

https://peterattiamd.com/ama40/

You can't out run your diet. Cardio for weight loss is mostly a waste of time. It has secondary benefits like reducing hunger post work out but it's hard to exercise enough to quickly lose weight. Running a marathon will burn around 2500 calories, less than a pound of fat.

Ish? Yes, you can't just "run off the calories" of food, per se. That said, the more time you spend running/walking/whatever, the less time you spend eating, in many cases. That marathon, for example, is not nearly as simple as eating a burger. One takes several hours for a very fit athlete. The other is minutes for most people.

That is, it is easy to view some exercising as a substitute for some snacking. And, in that job, it works rather well. Is my hypothesis on why the simple walk around the neighborhood has outsized impact on weight loss.

Just walking around is much better for calories burned vs. exertion. It's just worse from a time standpoint. Running has been shown to induce hunger, so erasing the caloric benefit of it with a snack is very easy. Walking, since it's so much lower impact, doesn't really have the same issue, and you can sustain it for much longer periods (especially if you're untrained) than you can with running.

Right, agreed that the time is the important part. If you can sustain a run for an hour or so a day, that is a lot different than a 20 minute one. And, my assertion is that a lot of the benefit of the extra 40 minutes is the substitution effect.

This is a lot of what I think many studies find that show benefits to coffee and such. Nowadays, that is as often a substitute for sodas. And the amount of calories you get from a soda is just flat out absurd. I'm fairly certain even those of us that know it is bad for you underestimate just how bad it is.

Running maybe not, but if you get too into cycling or swimming (or I guess any low-impact endurance sport), it can sometimes be a chore to shovel enough food into you.

2500 calories for a marathon sounds way too low. I do bike rides every weekend that are typically burning over 3000 calories. This is with a power meter on the bike so it's not going to be miles off.

General rule is 100 calories per mile so 2500 calories for a marathon seems reasonable.

I didn't really need to lose any weight, but found I just naturally did when I started swimming once and then later twice a week (for about 40 minutes to an hour/2km to 2.5km per session). I basically didn't change my diet (although I had started eating generally healthier six months or so before just because I thought it was a good idea), and after a while I found I was getting lighter than I wanted to be and actually had to consciously eat more to maintain my weight.

It’s why walking is such a good exercise. 300 cals per hr and doesn’t destroy you. Burns fat (zone 2).

I’d suggest that calorific burn really is but one measure.

Are you sure about that? Walking is great for many reasons but unless you're really unfit it won't get your heart rate into zone 2. It's more of a zone 1 activity.

True. Zone 1-2 depending on topography

Running calories burned varies tremendously by weight and speed. Like if I was to run a marathon in 4.5 hours that would burn about 4000 kcal.

https://caloriesburnedhq.com/calories-burned-running/