pvillemasher

I've lost 30+ lbs. since September 2013 riding about 100 - 125 miles a week.
If I go to bed hungry I don't sleep, so I never go to bed hungry. In fact, I'm almost never hungry so I do not agree with the "hungry" comments above. I don't believe you need to starve yourself to lose weight. I watch what I eat and I watch how much I eat, and I eat proportional to how much I exercise.

If you take in more calories than you burn you gain weight, and visa versa. Pretty simple, really.

The only thing that makes it more complicated is that it's better to choose foods that deliver more nutrition per calorie, and it's better to choose your macro nutrients (fat, carbs, protein: those are the only 3 unless you count alcohol) in the proportions based on what activities you're doing. This will help (or hinder) performance.

You don't ever need to eat salads (I don't like salads). Salads are just a certain amount of protein, fat and carbohydrate calories. No magic. Same as any food.
For breakfast I eat cereal with skim milk, eggs, pancakes usually (not all the same day obviously).
Lunch - Sandwiches (PB&J, turkey, tuna, chicken), humus with wafers, greek yogurt, fruit, leftovers from dinner.
Dinner - Pasta with chicken and/or veggies, steak with potatoes and veggies, pork chops, Asian style stir fry with rice, beans and rice with pork, lots of stuff.
I just eat the amount I need to lose weight, or maintain at this point.

gregf83 

Yes, stop eating. Just water. Your body will adapt over time and burn relatively more fats than carbs. Start going out with water only and a clif bar in your back pocket. If you start to get weak you can always eat the clif bar but you're eating far more than you need to on the bike.

If you are really serious about increasing your fat oxidation you can easily increase it by going on a low carb/high (limit carbs to <2.5 g/kg/day) fat diet for a couple of weeks. Personally, I wouldn't bother but you might try an experiment for a while.

Machka 

If you are eating normally during the day, you should not need to consume any calories at all during a ride that is 2 hours or less. Drink water ... and bring a small granola bar just in case you really feel you need it.

On your 2-4 hour rides, bring two+ large bottles of water, and limit your calorie consumption to about 200 calories per hour.

Also, be active throughout the day. If you're only active 1 hour a day, that leave 23 hours of inactivity. You don't have to run a marathon every day, but just consciously include things like ... taking the stairs whenever possible; parking at the far end of the parking lot when you get groceries so that you have to walk further; going for a brisk walk at lunch; if you've got kids, take them to the park in the evening and run around with them; when you're at home watching TV in the evening, have some weights nearby and do some reps; get up during all or most commercials and walk around the house, jog up and down the stairs, do some core work, do some housework ...


And ... eat lots of veggies. Raw or lightly cooked, to your taste. But without sauces etc. most of the time.

Machka 

+1

It's OK to feel hungry.

Sometimes I think people fear hunger ... at that first hunger pang, they've got to eat something lest something horrible happen. But most of us have enough in storage to be hungry for a while before we'll notice any ill effects.

Sailor73 

Have you tried keeping a food journal? Or using one of the many fitness apps like myfitnesspal (they have an index of over 4 million foods)? Did you have your thyroid checked? I'm no doctor and I didn't stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night but if you're riding as much as you say then there is something in your diet that maybe you're overlooking. Lastly, are you in a normal weight category now and trying to drop the last 20 or are you significantly overweight?

znomit

Your body can survive 40 days without food, most people don't last 40 minutes though.

Rich Gibson 

Not sure that's the answer. If you bonk protein isn't what you need, easily processed carbohydrates are. I regularly ride 2 to 2-1/2 hours a day and experienced numerous episodes of fatigue and disorientation after about 1 -1/4 hours when I began riding at that level. I started carrying a couple of baby ruth bars and ate them after 45 minutes or so and this disorientation quickly resolved. Now I carry a pack of blueberry/pomegranate Chomps chews and two 100 calorie raisin boxes just in case.

Me, I can't understand the repeated advice to drink only water. Yuck. The advice to burn more calories than you consume makes great sense. As for the eating only healthful foods...yeah right! I'm 72 and stopped taking blood pressure medication (the only med I had prescribed) once I began riding again (after a 43 year hiatus..) and lost 20#. Right now my RHR is 51 and I enjoy a Coke a day ('hecho in Mexico...no high fructose corn syrup for me!), a Ledo pizza once a week and a burger and fries at Glory Days each Monday. Yes, eat reasonably, but diving into the deep end, diet wise seems like a dreary existence.

Just sayin... Rich

Johnny Rad

+1 for the MyFitnessPal (or similar) app, which is free. It was eye-opening to see how much I was really eating each day. Not to mention, how many (and how few) calories my favorites contributed to my daily intake. I lost >20lbs about two years ago and attribute it to the eating changes I made based on MyFitnessPal. My only caveat with this app is that it seems to over-estimate the calories burned on the bike.

It bears repeating: to lose weigh, take in fewer calories than you expend. There is NO magic pill.

Norrick

lost 15 lbs in a month and a half, most of it in the last 3 weeks when I started riding 40 miles a week (20 miles round trip, twice a week). Currently @ 178 lbs (6' even). I go to the gym 2-3 time a week as well (weights). Still losing weight, albeit slower now. I think 170 is a good stopping point for my build.

i've bounced up and down +/- up to 30 lbs a few times in my life (mostly fat weight). I'm really good at losing weight reasonably fast, to stupid fast, depending on my motivation, and then slowly gaining it back over the course of a year or two.

diet really is the key, if you aren't losing weight its because your diet sucks. Finding motivation will keep your eating and exercise behaviors in check. I find that anger is the most effective motivator, but its different for everyone and you can't always find a reason to be mad.

ideally I would stay active, but the reality is, I have a lot of idle time followed by short spurts of high intensity physical activity.

you really need to look at it as a form of sustenance, not "it tastes so good." this is why its hard to maintain the lifestyle if you aren't blessed with a high metabolism, eating is fun.

less active? eat less. Know you are going to go on a ride? eat for fuel so you don't burn out, but when you finish, don't "reward" yourself with another meal.

don't eat too close to sleeping (if you sleep at midnight, i'd eat no later than 8:30pm).

I track my progress with an app, and I can see the trends in weight to my diet, most of them happen when I can consistently keep to that behavior for 3-4 days in a row. It does you no good to eat healthy one day, then binge the next.

I eat mostly lean protein (egg whites, tuna) and fruits/vegetables/carbs high on glycemic index. Whey protein shakes for gym. I happened to accept a challenge from a friend to see if I could mirror their pescatarian diet, and I don't think it has had any detrimental or beneficial effects on my progress, but I would say it has made it easier for me to "not enjoy" eating. I really miss chicken.

my general rule of thumb is: "if you are SLIGHTLY hungry" you are doing good. Don't starve, but don't stuff.

things I do that are slowing me down: drinking wine before bed, lots of diet soda, not getting enough sleep

also go on hikes. if you can find ones with a lot of elevation change its mad calorie burn, in less time than it takes w/ cycling, and its low impact for those runners out there w/stress fractures or joint pain.

Machka 

A granola bar is not protein. It's complex carbs. I'm not talking about protein bars ... I'm talking about oatmeal and dried fruit, pressed into a bar with honey as a binding agent, possibly with a few nuts and a drizzle of chocolate on top.

And you shouldn't let yourself get to full bonk stage ... consuming a granola bar when you start to experience the very early bonking symptoms will ward off a full bonk.


As for water ... I used to like sweet drinks on a long ride, but then I started developing mouth sores when I drank them ... and discovered that plain water not only tastes better, and quenches thirst better, but is better for my mouth. That said, I will drink coke, iced tea, or 100% pure orange juice when I take breaks on long rides.

carpediemracing 

There's no real trick, it's reducing calories. For me I found that losing weight and training hard were two mutually exclusive things. I raced for 25 seasons without ever going on a diet per se (if I did I was following along with someone else's diet, like a girlfriend's, and just ate more of what they had). I would lose 5 or 10 lbs in the summer, fine, but nothing significant. I raced at pretty high weights - 180, 190 lbs - even though I'm only 5'7". In 2009 I was doing 3 races and one hard group ride every week, yet I wasn't losing weight.

Then in 2009 I was off the bike in the fall (first time I ever broke a bone, Aug 2009). I decided to diet in Oct 2009 while I was off the bike. I lost about 30 lbs in a few months (Jan 2010 end diet, 155-ish), doing nothing but counting calories. I started training a bit in December, more in January, and in March I was flying on the bike. By the end of 2010 I had upgraded to Cat 2, something that I'd been trying to do unsuccessfully since 1983.

I basically gave up looking after what I ate by May of 2010. It took me a couple years but I gained back all the weight. To be fair the Missus and I had a child so I purposely had no cycling goals in 2011-2012, so my training suffered a bit. However I'm back to 175 lbs or so and my cycling has suffered predictably.

I normally train about 20-30 hours per MONTH in the winter, 8-15 hours per month in the summer. All my training since May 2012 has been logged in Strava and you can see it all here.

For me it's about calories. I know two people who are very conscious of what they eat (vegan, etc). They are some of the most overweight people I know. It's not what you eat, it's how much you eat. If you're riding 9-13 hours a week you're realistically burning 4500 cal (500 cal/hour) to, I'm guessing, 10,400 cal (800 cal/hour). If you're riding super hard it'll be closer to the 800 cal/hour.

BTW if you get a powermeter that might help a bit in figuring out exactly what you're burning on the bike. The power estimates given by diet sites like MyFitnessPal etc are really high. I did a little under 2 hours yesterday, 18 mph (for me that's a hard ride when I'm solo). Strava says 1300 cal. MyFitnessPal says, for moderate cycling (12-14 mph) 1150 cal, but for the actual speed (16-20 mph) it says 1730 cal. My powermeter says I did 1000 cal worth of work. Since the powermeter measures how much work I put into the cranks (and the rest of the work supports it) it's realistically the most accurate.

Finally age matters a lot. If you're in high school or college it might be that you can eat/do anything and it's all good. I started gaining weight that I couldn't easily shed when I was about 30 - it's when I finally broke into the 150s, and, a few years later, the 160 barrier.

carpediemracing 

I did read somewhere that you can alternate light and heavy food days, meaning if you eat significantly less on one day and then a sort of normal amount (not excessive) the next, you end up with a net loss. However I don't have any first hand experience with it.

To give some numbers on the food intakes, I was eating 1800 cal per day at 160-180 lbs. There were days where I forced myself to eat 500-600 cal in the evening to bring myself UP to 1600 cal, which I considered to be minimum before my body went into starvation mode. I went over maybe 5-10 times, I think once over 2000-2100 cal. During the diet months (once I could ride, which was November 2009) I struggled to ride 30 minutes, slowly, every two-three days. I did have an outdoor labor type job and it was a cold winter but still, I obviously lacked energy. In December 2009 I rode 2 hours for the first time and it wiped me out (week long visit to Florida, rode 4 or 5 days). By end of January I was eating much more (stop counting at 2400 cal) but doing 3-5 hours a day on the bike. I have to check my log but I'm pretty sure I did a 25-30 hour week. Even at 500 cal/hour that's a lot of hours/calories. This was during my then annual 2 week visit to SoCal to visit friends and do a training camp.

GoRacers

I'm down 22 lbs since march 30 using this method. I ride hard, avoid breads, and make good food choices when possible.

etw

This book may be helpful

Ride Your Way Lean: The Ultimate Plan for Burning Fat and Getting Fit on a Bike: Selene Yeager, Bicycling Magazine Editors: 9781605294063: Amazon.com: Books

dave1442397

I just cut back on food intake and cycle and go to the gym as much as possible. I usually take off one day a week.

In the past 9 weeks I've lost 15lbs (168 to 153) and cycled 1,955 miles.

The only thing I really tried to eliminate from my diet was chocolate.

MikeD1

1) I think everyone's body is different, so you have to experiment to find what works for YOU. A great book that addresses this very well is "Eat Right for Your Type" . When I followed that process faithfully, I think I was pretty much optimum. My current system is pretty close to what the book recommends.
2) I think a lot of people confuse normal athletically induced fatigue with bonking. I regularly ride 2 hard hours with nothing but water, have gone as long as 3 with only water. Yes, I get tired and hungry, but no bonk. Last fall, my son and I did an unplanned hr. hike in Rocky Mountain National covering over 13 miles and many 1000s of vertical our only fuel was one apple each plus water. Tired and hungry at the end, yes, bonk, no.
3) Forget diet soda, best to forget all soda but there is evidence that suggests that the diet stuff is no better than the good stuff, maybe even more harmful long term.
4) Mustard is your friend. A teaspoon of mustard before hard workout and another after seems to be virtually 100% at preventing muscle cramps. Google it. (learned back in Cat 3 days almost 40 years ago)
6) If I could just stop enjoying beer so much I could get those last 7-10 lbs off . . .

linnefaulk

During meals, eat your protein first. Protein breaks down the slowest and will get you sated, longer.

indyfabz

Also evaluate how your food is prepared. You can take something that is relatively lo-cal and change that in a hurry by soaking it with butter or covering it with al fredo sauce. Even the excessive use of olive oil can drive up the calory count of a dish.

bbeasley

^ For me that's it. I'm down 60 lbs over 4 years.

cafzali

Cycling, for many, is a sport that's better at building muscle than losing weight. Since it's energy intensive, many people will overeat after a hard ride because they feel as though they're starving. Add to that, your body gets more efficient at burning calories the more you exercise, so not only does the effort have to remain consistent for you to have much of a chance, but over time, you're going to have to either increase what your doing or further modify your diet to keep the weight off.

There are some relatively easy things you can do, such as ditching red meat mostly and replacing it with salmon. Salmon has natural Omega 3s, which is good fat, and it helps keep you from getting hungry. It does come down to effort and calories, but it's very important to note that it all comes down to the mix of those, not merely starving yourself and exercising more. If you do that, you will actually see a decline because your body will go into "preservation mode" of sorts.

Germany_chris

Run more or start running..

Run at lunch ride after work or if you're pressed for time run after work too.

On nice days I'll run at lunch and ride after if I know I have time I'll do a shorter run and ride after. pressed for time I'll just do two runs.

Hammondc

This is something I have struggled with lately too. I am 5'7" and about 188lb. I want to get down to 165 or so. My main issue is balancing eating enough to fuel the ride, but not overdoing it. I also wear a HRM to get a somewhat accurate count of calorie burn. While off the bike, the issue is scaling calories back enough to lose weight, but not so much as to trigger fat storing.

I just ordered that book referenced on this thread- Racing Weight.

PaulRivers

One thing I would mention is that in weight loss, they say that doing endurance activities aren't as good for burning calories as doing intervals. Are you only doing a 2-4 hour ride on the weekend to lose weight, or are you also trying to train for something else? My dad bikes with a bike club, and knows a lot of guys who ride 6 days a week at a relatively leisurely pace who don't lose weight. The body seems to be pretty efficient at optimizing itself to handle long endurance activities, which means less calories burned.

I know that in jogging for me, doing some intervals actually made both my endurance better and seemed to burn more calories.

Rich Gibson 

Yes, I misspoke. I meant to say bars which contain protein (Power bars which I use afterwards) aren't the answer. However granola bars with their complex carbohydrate aren't either when one is facing light headedness or bonking. You need simple carbohydrates to get into your system quickly. Unfortunately in the middle of a ride I find that I (and I suspect most folks) don't actively monitor their condition vis-a-vis bonking....rather as a precaution I consume the chomps or raisins (100-150 calories) every 6-7 miles. That said there certainly is no harm downing a granola bar just before a ride but it's not something I could consider consuming at that time. Personally a Coke is my choice before a two hour or longer ride.

Rich

lyrictenor1

Try spinning on the trainer or outside on the bike for 20 minutes before you eat breakfast (or any other time of the day you have fasted for a while). This supposedly helps train your body to burn fat as an energy source since you'll be in a fasted state. I started riding July of 2013 (did not exercise at all really before that), and before most days where I would ride, or if I couldn't do a proper ride later in the day, I almost always did my 20-minute fasted "warmup" in the morning. I'm now down to 176 from 240 in a year with minimal changes in diet (just a slight decrease in intake) (I usually ride between 150-200 miles a week these days; it wasn't like that at the beginning of my journey, though).