Originally Posted by Maelochs

Good luck. You will find that there are a lot of people on this site trying hard to lose weight ....

I will say this: You Might be gaining muscle to offset fat loss. Muscle is much denser than fat and a little muscle gain can offset a little visible fat loss. It depends on what you eat. You might be simply eating to replace the calories you are burning, so gaining fitness but not losing fat, or you maybe replacing fat with muscle .... no one here knows, no matter how much we pretend.

If you really want to lose weight and gain strength, you will need to totally revamp your diet, and eat very little or nothing before working out (to maximize fat metabolism (which gives you less performance but more fat-burn)) and then eat lean protein after a workout to fuel muscle growth. And the rest of the day eat super lo-cal, with a huge amount of water.

Less extreme versions of this work, they just take longer.

if you are Really serious, you might want to track how far and how fast you ride, how much you weigh mid-day or mid-morning and before bed (depends on when you work out---after a workout you will probably be light due to water loss.) Notice if your performance is really improving---are you going faster? Are you going farther?

Don't even look at the computer while riding---you can hurt yourself trying to ride to numbers when you are starting. Look later on. If you really are burning more and more calories with each passing week, you will eventually see it. It could be equally that you are tiring yourself out by riding too much and feel like you are making more effort while actually you are doing the same work or less because you body just can't provide the power.

It could also be that for the first couple weeks you really didn't work "hard," except compared to not working at all, and really didn't even get your metabolism shifted into high gear, so that while it Felt like you were going hard, you just didn't realize what your body was capable of doing---you really didn't know what "hard" was, for you.

Or ... maybe none of the above. When I said no one here knows, that includes me.

My suggestion? Be really careful about what you eat and when. Find a balance between riding hard and riding long and enjoying .... don't burn out. If you want this to work you are going to be at it for probably the rest of your life.

People tell me it takes about 45 minutes of aerobic exercise to kick your body into high fat-burning gear for about six hours, and at least 15 or 20 to do any good at all. Also, some folks find that they cannot risde 45 minutes a day hard right away .... which means that a lto of the time they are breaking down their bodies, not building them up.

I like to ride daily---that's how I do the best weight control. But I can't do it. Three to five days as a rule ... sometimes six, sometimes two ... but then I need a day to rest.

No matter how hard I work, weight loss comes down to diet. I can burn 1200 calories ... and eat two big sandwiches and a can of Mountain Dew and I am at zero, no weight loss.

One more thing ... don't let the numbers determine your actions. if your weight doesn't go down as far or as fast as you'd like, or if it comes back up now and then .... or if your mileage or speed plateaus ... whatever ... it doesn't matter. Persistence in the key. If you keep exercising and keep eating fewer calories than you burn ... you will lose weight. You can't help it.