Cardio works for some people, but I think a lot of people go run for 20 minutes and then decide they've earned a Big Mac with Behemoth Fries. Data has completely freed me of that delusion - I've learned that I'm not willing to do enough cardio to outrun my diet. I'd rather just not have cheese on my salad than have to go hate the world for an hour on the treadmill. There are the people who run 10 miles on a daily basis because they enjoy it - I am not one of them! :)
Lifting for me is less about weight loss than it is just about personal improvement, though. I want to be strong (and hey, if I'm losing this weight, I want to look good!), and lifting moves the ball towards that goal. I've found that I really enjoy it, too - it's not something that I tolerate as some grueling price I have to pay to get the body I want, it's a hobby that I genuinely enjoy and derive a lot of satisfaction from. The fact that it helps me lose weight is a great bonus, but I've found that lifting lets me hack my internal tendency to "try for a high score" by giving me a whole suite of metrics that I can rate, rank, and compare myself on. I love it.
Yes in general. What I meant to say is for someone like me, I had trouble with what I ate, for example overeating after a cardio session. Understanding this and changing behaviour is a lot harder as compared to building more muscle which is "sustainable" in terms of a larger TDEE that's evenly spread out. Unless I'm mistaken building muscle is far more efficient than bursts of cardio. HIIT seems to work on a similar idea.
I wasn't sure how big that "larger TDEE" really is, so I googled around for some values. I found some claims for between 10 and 30kcal per day for each extra kg of muscle mass. If we assume that most people will not build up more than 10kg of extra muscle mass that will not be a lot (but neverthless it's a nice effect).
Cardio training can burn lots of calories. But you have to take it seriously and should not assume that moving around for 20minutes was already a big workout. My current personal workout is about 10hours of biking on average per week. Calculating with ~500kcal/h of energy consumption that sums up to 5000kcal/h. That's a quite nice number, which can also be interpreted as: Enough to lose nearly 1kg of fat if calory intake stays constant. Or at least enough to compensate for a lot of non-perfect meals. In the end it's a compromise between ones diet and the amount of workout. One can lose weight by increasing consumption or by reducing intake. For some people the first thing works better, for others the second.
> One can lose weight by increasing consumption or by reducing intake. For some people the first thing works better, for others the second.
I complete agree here. I don't think popular advice seems to be doing a good job of explaining this.
Going on anecdotal data. On my wrist HR monitor I seem to be easily hitting around 500 Kcal per weight training session. Assuming on the worst case that the monitor is off by about half, I have burned 250 Kcal per session. This in addition to a easily achievable cut of 250 Kcal with my diet leads me to ~500 Kcal a day. Which would fall in the realm of the calculation you make with biking. I find this easier to perform than an hour of biking :) Plus an additional goal is to increase muscle mass. So as a tradeoff it seems to work.
I'm a little confused by what you mean. I'm not a nutritionist, but I am very active in both running and weight lifting (in other words, I have a lot of personal results, but take my opinions as qualified observations, not educated prescriptions). They're targeted to sufficiently different goals that I wouldn't agree you can make an efficiency comparison for weight loss. Realistically I wouldn't prescribe either for weight loss, and I'd personally suggest anyone looking to partake in one of those activities reach a healthy weight first. The likelihood of injury in distance running, sprinting and weight lifting is far higher for someone starting with a poor base weight.
As for the specific exercises: HIIT will train fast twitch muscle fibers, which is more similar to weight training than long distance cardio is, but neither is really comparable to weight training (precisely because of the TDEE increase, which you mentioned). Sprinting and weight training complement each other but quickly diverge in outcomes if you do one or the other.
If I understand you correctly, you're talking about the way in which additional muscle on the body increases daily energy expenditure overall, which cardio does not achieve in the same way. But that's (in my opinion) a poor way to calibrate your training - if you're optimizing for weight loss and you find yourself hungrier when you exercise, you're likely going to find yourself hungrier when your caloric needs increase in general. This will happen regardless of which particular exercise you engage in, which means it's a problem to be conquered independent of the exercise.
Controlled weight loss (or gain) is most effectively achieved by understanding what your body actually needs for survival and strategically increasing or decreasing that. Exercise is helpful for altering the composition of your mass, but it's relatively negligible (hundreds of calories per day) for controlling the amount of mass you have.
> if you're optimizing for weight loss and you find yourself hungrier when you exercise, you're likely going to find yourself hungrier when your caloric needs increase in general
What I'm observing is that with a cardio session there's an increased craving for food in that moment that is quite intense. While in both cases (weight training and cardio) there is a need for additional energy, its easier to manage through weight training is my point. Building muscle overall would need me to consume additional calories but over the period of a day, which in turn makes it easier to manage what I eat.
Taking one step back, to lose weight I really only need a caloric deficit. What I'm trying to achieve is to follow a diet about 5-10% lower than what I would need to maintain my current weight, and add on weight training on top of this to increase TDEE.
This to me seems more sustainable and something I can easily follow, given that I love weight training and find it easier than monotonous cardio.
> Controlled weight loss (or gain) is most effectively achieved by understanding what your body actually needs for survival and strategically increasing or decreasing that. Exercise is helpful for altering the composition of your mass, but it's relatively negligible (hundreds of calories per day) for controlling the amount of mass you have.
I'm not sure I agree here. A deficit of about 4000 calories a week is healthy for a loss of about a pound. I would think those hundreds of calories would easily help hitting a deficit of 500 odd calories a day.
> A deficit of about 4000 calories a week is healthy for a loss of about a pound.
There isn't really a hard and fast rule here, it depends on the person. If you are obese enough, you can engage in an extended fast with no food whatsoever (just water, vitamins and electrolytes) and lose up to a pound per day in ketosis.
But obviously that should only be done with the supervision of a doctor.
Lifting for me is less about weight loss than it is just about personal improvement, though. I want to be strong (and hey, if I'm losing this weight, I want to look good!), and lifting moves the ball towards that goal. I've found that I really enjoy it, too - it's not something that I tolerate as some grueling price I have to pay to get the body I want, it's a hobby that I genuinely enjoy and derive a lot of satisfaction from. The fact that it helps me lose weight is a great bonus, but I've found that lifting lets me hack my internal tendency to "try for a high score" by giving me a whole suite of metrics that I can rate, rank, and compare myself on. I love it.