1. Sort of
2. Bleh
I joined Planet Fitness about 9 months ago.
Planet Fitness is better than nothing, but not the place to be if one is serious about strength training, IMO. I feel their equipment, and particularly their policies (the "lunk alarm") discourage it. And what kind of fitness club has pizza nights?
I tried PF for a while. About the time I was feeling I didn't know if I could stand working out in "Barney Land" any longer (the purple and yellow colour scheme), I found out about the lunk alarm. That was the end of that.
I find it hard to do any significant amount of steady state cardio without it compromising my performance/progression in strength (while in a calorie deficit).
First of all one cannot build while running a calorie deficit, cardio or no cardio. Secondly: If it's fat one's trying to dump: They don't need a calorie deficit, but reduced carbs. Some people have found intermittent fasting (aka: interval fasting) two-to-three times per week effective. It's where you don't eat or drink anything (save plain water, or coffee or tea w/o sugar or cream), between dinner and lunch the next day. The goal is 16-18 hours of no nutritional intake. This forces the body into ketosis, where it has to burn fat for energy, but not for such a length of time it goes into "lean times are coming" panic mode and starts
storing fat, instead of burning it.
Beyond that: Aim to eat clean. Avoid simple and processed carbs (white bread, white flour and things made with it, sugar of all types, etc.) to the extent reasonably possible. I'm not saying "low carb," necessarily. Many people are believers. I'm not one of them. Oh sure: It works. I've done it. But, to me, life w/o cookies, cake, pie, pasta. bread, potatoes, pancakes, chocolate, and so-on is boring. Just eat sensibly and avoid in particular the high-carb between-meal snacks.
You can still do cardio when you're weight training. I've found interval training on non-weight-training days effective. Interval training yields a better calorie burn rate, that will last long beyond the end of the session, but it also hits the glycogen stores, which is why one has to do it on non-weight days.
Different things work for different people, but the above has worked well for me.