Exercise is a limited factor when it comes to weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight is mostly about what you eat and how much you eat.

If you want to drop weight to improve your power to weight ratio (and perhaps lose that extra 10 pounds that refuses to budge), you have to adopt a diet that will promote that weight loss.

Most of the cyclists I know are carb junkies and a lot of those carbs are not the good kind; many power gels they sell contain a bad mix of sugars in that they use fructose which does not metabolize like glucose and actually triggers hunger rather than suppress it.

Spend a day bombing it on the road where you are putting back gels or other fructose loaded supplements or foods and you will come off the bike hungrier than you really are and this can lead to over-eating. A lot of people do not realize how fructose is different from glucose and how it does not trigger the hormones that let us know we are full and fuelled up. The extra fructose that does not get burned gets turned into fat while extra glucose is converted into glycogen.

The folks who down a candy bar and a soda on a ride are probably getting more glucose than they need and half of the sugar in those foods will be fructose which will end up as fat since it was not required for the level of activity.

On an evolutionary perspective, fruit consumption was an excellent way to build fat stores for times when food sources were limited... our bodies can produce all off the glucose / glycogen it needs for normal levels of activity and we are not designed to be sprinters or high speed animals, we are built for endurance.

I practice a low carb diet / lifestyle and it is not some crazy paleo or Atkins diet... we avoid all processed foods and don't eat sugar, and limit to carbs according to our needs and goals.

I have not been riding nearly as much this winter as I have in past years and am still at my race weight... I got there by eating a lot of higher fat foods and keeping my carbs under 100 grams a day.

My wife stays under 20 grams a day (with no calorie restriction) as she has been working to lose post surgical weight and has lost almost 50 pounds since summer during a poeriod when her activity levels have been reduced.