IAMAMRA

You can ride 10k miles a month but if your still eating more than your burning you won't loose.

brianogilvie 

Yep. Data from three cohort studies of health care professionals show that there's no correlation between amount of exercise and changes in weight. (D. Mozaffarian et al. in the New England Journal of Medicine.) The abstract is here, but it's misleading: it claims that physical activity is correlated with lower weight gains, but the text of the article indicates otherwise:

"Across quintiles, participants with greater increases in physical activity gained 1.76 fewer pounds within each 4-year period. Absolute levels of physical activity, rather than changes in these levels, were not associated with weight change (data not shown)" (p. 2396).

In other words, for exercise to lead to weight loss by itself, you need to keep increasing your activity level. Obviously there's a limit to that!

nkfrench 

My experience is that even just eating "healthy foods" I still have to pay attention to calories no matter how much I ride.
Overdoing it on rides to the point of feeling sick cuts my appetite, but it misses the overall objective of improving my health and improving my life.
(I'm referring to heat exhaustion, bonking, dehydration, injuries. Some time in Z4 and Z5 is good.)

adrien

None.

Calories in vs. Calories out. Calories in is much easier to count than calories out.

How I did it, after a lot of silliness:

1. Figure out what you (really) need to sustain a healthy lifestyle.
2. Switch to that amount of calories in, immediately. Note this is not a diet, it's the new normal.
3. On big-exercise days (for me, I counted that as more than 750 calories of additional burn), replace HALF of the additional calories burned
4. Weigh yourself daily, at the same time. Correct volume in if the weight is creeping up

…and that's it.