I was told by a fitness instructor that just doing cardio ie the treadmill will not help me with my weight loss is this true?

Willis, you've revived an old thread, but it's always a good question.

"Just doing cardio" will not help you lose weight without a proper diet. You can't "burn off" fat with exercise alone.

However, all forms of exercise will help you maintain good health while you lose weight. Weight training, or resistance training, preserves and builds muscle, which burns energy at a higher rate than other tissue. Building muscle will make your new less-fat body look good, too. Cardio exercise keeps your heart and lungs working well, among other things.

A well-designed low-carb diet is a great partner to your exercise program. The primary driver of weight loss is what you eat. And don't eat.

Best wishes.

Willis here's my 2 cents worth and my philosophy on exercising:

Exercise is good for cardio/pulmonary health and for strengthening muscles and bones. Exercising has also shown to improve blood pressure, and possibly to increase the HDL ("good") cholesterol. However, the "calorie burning" effects of exercise are often vastly overstated. Most low-carb losers drop weight successfully with or without exercise and many here haven’t done any exercising to get where they are!!

Basically, you can’t do enough exercising to burn a significant amount of kcals to affect weight loss... BUT exercising is AWESOME for overall good health, keeps your joints healthy etc...and gosh dare it, it makes you feel amazing that you're doing something more to improve your health, at least it does for me!

Onward, ↓ DOWNWARD & MAINTENANCE 4ever!

Jo

Hi! My name is Jo and I’m a recovering morbidly obese carb addict!

The body adapts to cardio and weight training. That is actually good for the body but not so good for weight loss because as your body adapts it becomes an efficient machine where the cost of exercise is far less than it was when you began exercising. This mechanism is much like the starvation response and likely meant to work hand in hand with it.

Cardio is excellent for the body and for health as is weight training but over time the results will not be the same from when you initially start. Though if you take into consideration that during that time, provided you are using your diet as another means to lose weight, you may lose enough that you don't need that initial weight loss exercise gives you, then it's not really a concern. But exercise alone won't get you the weight loss you want especially over time because the body adapt as efficiently as it adapts to starvation.

Exercise is very beneficial for the body but not always the best for weight loss since you will adapt. Best to rely on diet as well. For weight loss, it is probably best to start slow if you are sedentary so you will not push your body to adapt as quickly and this will allow you to derive the added initial benefit of weight loss for a longer period of time before your body adapts to it and you have to exercise even harder to get that weight loss bonus. Your body will continue to adapt so in the end it will take a lot more effort than it did when you began exercising to help you lose weight.


Here's a very scientific but rather interesting bit of reading:

http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/sgr/pdf/chap3.pdf

In the New Atkins for a New You, the authors discuss the lack of evidence supporting the belief that exercise helps you to lose weight. Some people do lose weigh with exercise, others don't. They recommend resistance training rather than cardio for fat loss. They also suggest delaying starting an exercise regimen until you have adjusted to Atkins (in other words get over the Atkins flu first).