Originally Posted by
stephtu
You seemed aghast at him doing 40k on a fasting day, like it's unbearable hunger.
The morning leg probably of the commute probably isn't bad but the ride home you have had essentially zero calories in the last 18 hours? That sounds at the very least quite unpleasant. I will concede that perhaps we have different ideas of what constitutes unpleasant...I know what I would feel like just sitting on the couch if I hadn't had anything to eat in 18 hours. These fasting diets strike me as being designed for fairly sedentary folks. Not people burning thousands of calories per week riding their bicycles.
How are you defining calorie restricted?
In the case of the OP, he was asking about your typical <1500 calorie per day diet. If you are fasting for 24H at a time I would say you are calorie restricting during that period of time. IME mixing moderate-to-higher levels of exercise on days that you calorie restrict is just a bad idea IMO. If you're going do it try coordinate to fall on days that you aren't exercising.
Weight loss with exercise only, no calorie restriction at all, is fairly unlikely to succeed IMO, too easy to undo an hour of exercise in a few minutes of eating.
True, but there's a big difference between dialing back your calories by 300-400 per day below your RMR and some of the (frankly) radical diet plans being advocated for in this thread. Since this is a cycling forum I would say some mix of a moderate amount riding + reasonable diet are the best approach maintaining weight loss. If your idea of "exercise" is doing 30-40 minutes on the treadmill 3X per week diet becomes a
lot more important. I burn 5-7k calories per week on the bike which means I don't have to watch what I eat all that closely.