Short answer no. Long answer, it depends.
There’s several factors that go into answering this question.
How Much Food Are You Eating?
First we need to start here. If losing weight is the goal, lowering your calories is going to be the most effective tool at doing that. If you are eating too much food, you can’t outwork a bad diet. A surplus, is a surplus.
Try This: Figure out your maintenance intake. Subtract 20-25% off of that, and start there as your initial protocol. That should be enough of a deficit for you to lose weight for the first couple weeks (no cardio needed). Once you find your weight loss hitting a plateau, then you can either lower another 200-300 calories, or start adding some cardio in. I’d recommend increasing your NEAT first and shooting for adding 5,000 steps over whatever your baseline is. If you do choose cardio at the gym straight up, start with 2-3 days of 20-25 minutes of steady state jogging or elliptical.
**Important Note** - Before you start ANY diet, you have to be at a healthy caloric starting point. Male or female, if you are eating less than 2,000 calories going INTO the diet, it’s already too low. I would recommend pausing the dieting goal for a bit, and focusing on reverse dieting, and slowly bringing the calories up to 2,500-3,000 calories. The reason being, when you do eventually diet now you have an extra 500+ calorie surplus to subtract from when you do start dieting. Your body will adapt over time, and if you are already under 1500 calories, less than a month in, you will have a hard time losing weight, keeping your hard earned muscle, and recovering.
How Much Cardio Are You Already Doing?
Another big point. If you haven’t been doing any cardio, then obviously it isn’t a problem. Just make sure you are going at a pace you can handle and not overwork yourself. If you choose to do HIIT training, don’t add too many sessions. Yes, you burn more calories in a quicker time frame, but it’s also harder on the body. When we are in a deficit of calories, we risk not being able to recover or hold onto the muscle as this adds unneeded stress. The intensity should be coming mostly from the lifting sessions but 2 maybe 3 days TOPS of HIIT is okay.
On the flip side, if you are STARTING the diet already doing cardio 4-6 times a week, this may be a problem. Similar to starting a diet with too little calories, I recommend maybe pulling back on the cardio first before entering your dieting phase. Again, your body will adapt to the cardio you give it. If you’ve been doing a ton of cardio, not only are you not burning as many calories as you think you are (your body as adapted and became efficient at burning less in the same session), but you are now putting yourself in a situation to have to add MORE if that is the case. Cardio is a tool we want to implement far later into our diet, when the plateau is hitting more often. If you’ve added too much out the gate, what can you possibly add once the fat loss stalls? Do you really want to do 1-2 hours of cardio a day? That’s no good.
How Much Resistance Training Are You Doing?
During a diet, when we are in a deficit of calories, we risk losing muscles due to insufficient nutrients coming in. One way we can help offset this is through resistance training. Muscles are expensive to keep on your frame. In a deficit when supplies are low, your body needs a damn good reason to keep it on there. Adding 2-3 resistance training sessions a week provides that external load stimulus that gives your body that reason. Remember, your body wants you alive. If it feels 100lbs coming down on you, it’s going to want the muscular frame to support that attack.
Have You Tried Increasing Your NEAT?
Lastly, I wanted to share a more convenient hack for increasing that deficit without having to necessarily do cardio. Not everyone wants to spend their entire time on a treadmill in the gym. We want options, our lives are busy, we got shit to do. As an alternative, and in my opinion, the most sustainable option in the long run, try to find ways to increase your movement throughout the day.
Go play with your kids, or go for a walk a couple times throughout the day. Find reasons to enhance your life and be more active. This will pay dividends not just for the diet, but as a positive lifestyle change for long after the diet’s over. We need to stop looking at cardio as this begrudging task for losing weight. Pick up a sport and go play with your friends. There's many ways to expend those calories outside of the gym.
If you need a way to track this, use your step count. As mentioned earlier, once you find your baseline, add 5,000 steps. Aim to lose 1-2lbs a week, and if that slows down or plateau’s, add another 5,000 steps.
Losing weight isn’t about quick fixes to lose the weight in the next 3 months. I’m assuming you’re going to want to keep your new look, and the only way to do that is coming up with tools that you know 6 months from now, you can still keep up with. That’s not to say you’ll forever have to do cardio (you should be able to taper off once the diet is done), but it doesn’t hurt to pick up some positive habits that get you moving over sitting on the couch all day.
