Originally Posted by
Iride01
You have to burn upwards of 3500 Calories to lose 1 lb of fat. Of course that's only if fat is supplying all your Calories expended on the ride which typically it isn't.
Any weight loss you see after even a two or three hour ride is going to be mostly water loss from sweat.
So my advice if cycling is for weight loss it to ride long and ride low effort rides. When I ride hard, I tend to want to eat more.
Weight is still Calories in vs Calories out. Don't get too wrapped up in what your device says you burned. If the scale is going the wrong way then consume less Calories or burn more Calories. But don't worry about the device accuracy for Calories burned. Worry about the trends.
If you track your food, do you really think those Calorie figures are accurate for every item every time? Calorie content widely varies among those food items and the charts and stuff are just averages. If we had a Calorie meter we could stick in them, then we'd have a whole new set of threads wondering why they got this reading from this apple and another reading from another apple and someone else will be answering about plums.
I'll let you in on a secret - it's not about how accurate the calorie counters are. It's about thinking about how many calories are actually in what you eat, and putting that in the context of how much you can eat and still expect to lose weight.
If you're trying to only consume a net of 2000 calories a day, that Coke you're thinking about is about 8% of that. That "Small" Whopper meal at Burger King? 2/3 of your calories for the day. Go for a walk around the block? Maybe you get back 100 calories, so it won't "make room for" the pie you want to eat. Sure, you can look at the nutritional info on anything you buy to eat. But mostly, people don't. When you have to enter everything you ate, and you see the total going up with every snack, you begin to understand how you gained weight and how much you can actually eat and still lose weight.