EliasGoodman

Hi everybody,
cycling can lose weight or not? My friend cycled daily around the area where she lived but did not seem to notice the weight loss but also tended to increase slowly. Do not know where the problem lies? Can someone point me out the problem?
Thank you very much for your interest in my matter.

downhillmaster

It’s a scientific fact that regular cycling causes you to gain a slight amount of weight because you are sitting down most of time.

HTupolev

What is she doing besides riding? Typically if somebody wants to lose weight, eating patterns and/or diet need to be at the core of the strategy. This is because, if someone let's their body regulate its own food consumption, it will naturally try to compensate for calories burned by being hungrier more.

Outrider1

There's a formula for losing weight which is actually quite simple...eat less, move more.

yamsyamsyams

Any exercise combined with the right diet can help you lose weight. Question is how much exercise and what type of diet. There are plenty of internet articles on this.

Shay Howe 

Absolutely. I'm on an organ transplant list, and have spent the last 3 years with a strict weight limit (221 pounds is the line- 221.5 and they'll weigh me and send me home with no chance of surgery) and I've found that I can slip up by very little- half a sandwich, say- and notice the gain over the next 24-36 hours with my required monitoring. Simply "eating when hungry" quickly became my bane and I had to discipline myself to regulate what's enough to keep me nourished without eating to (even the slightest bit of) excess. Not saying I've got to walk around hungry all the time, but once one begins paying attention it quickly becomes apparent how much habit eating one does that can be eliminated to good effect.

Of course I'd say that what kind of riding and how much also figures in. A leisurely turn around the block at a nice casual pace versus running a fitness monitor to stay at aerobic exercise levels to maximize energy usage would also likely produce different effects on the amount of calories expended.

alo

The most important part of losing weight is diet. With the right diet, cycling can be very beneficial.

indyfabz

Yes. Cycling helped me lose 90 lbs. in nine months.
But eating an entire pizza after a relatively tame ride probably won’t help with weight loss. See what I’m getting at?

bwilli88 

Yes, it can but you will also gain from building muscle mass.
Diet.
you lose weight by reducing intake.

Jno

It can. I cobbled together excerpts from a couple articles (below) that helped me when I was trying to lose weight, and helped me understand why weight loss isn’t necessarily the same thing as improved cycling ability.There are different schemes with different heart rate zones, and people use them more or less deliberately when they train but the following scheme is common enough: Zone 1: Very light, 50 percent to 60 percent of MHR (maximum heart rate) Zone 2: Light, 60 percent to 70 percent of MHR · Zone 3: Moderate, 70 percent to 80 percent of MHR · Zone 4: Hard, 80 to 90 percent.

To be in the zone that burns most fat per minute, you want your heart rate to be approximately 70 percent of your maximum heart rate (upper end of zone 2).

DorkDisk

Eating less is the best way to lose weight, exercise adds definition to muscle and helps you look better.

freeranger

My wife is petite. But at one point, she was gaining weight, and couldn't seem to lose it. She was eating "rabbit food", lots of salad, food high in fiber, was exercising, and nothing worked. Turned out it was a thyroid problem, which is now under control with medication. Her weight is steady now, and on a "regular" American diet. She eats healthy foods (for the most part), but isn't dieting. Your friend might want to have hers checked, to eliminate that possibility.

pdlamb

Can bicycling help you lose weight? Absolutely! Either go on a bike tour, where you're riding for 6-10 hours per day for weeks on end, or else reduce your food (calories) intake. Either will work, though the former is more fun. Just be careful with those "well-earned" brownie sundaes after a long day's ride.

scottfsmith

There was a recent article studying children in the Amazon which concluded diet is much more important than exercise for keeping low weight:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/w...in-amazon.html

If you read the article you can get an idea of what kind of (permanent) diet kept weight down: no processed sugars or carbs (that means no white rice or non-whole-grain flour), limited meat and dairy.

I bumped up my exercise big time at the start of the pandemic. I lost 10 lbs at first, but gained it all back as my body caught up and decided I needed to eat more.

WhyFi

They say that you can't out-run a poor diet and that is (for the most part) true. Intake is more important to weight loss than output - as has been mentioned, if you exercise more, your body will tell you to eat more, so you need to pay attention to intake. That said, I've gone through stretches where I'd average 4000+ calories burned per day, and I just couldn't stomach consuming the calories necessary to maintain weight (I wanted to continue to drop weight, anyway).

wolfchild

90% of cyclists that I see are slightly overweight in their belly area...They have an overall skinny appearance ,except that they have extra fat in their belly area. That right there tells me that cycling is not enough to loose fat. Sure cycling can make you loose weight but most of that weight loss will be muscle tissue and water weight, to burn fat you need to do more than just cycling.

MRT2

Not a problem. Your friend is probably eating back most of the calories she is riding off. Weight loss is mostly about what, and how much you eat. And it doesn't have to be a huge amount of food. Maybe your friend just has a slow metabolism. Maybe she isn't burning off as many calories as she thinks she is riding. Or somehow balances out the time she rides with periods of inactivity the rest of the day. Or maybe she is eating more than she thinks she is. It doesn't have to be huge binges, like they show on reality TV or those Youtube mukbang videos.

Say your friend rides 3 times a week for an hour at a moderate pace, burns, say, 500 calories a ride. So 1,500 calories a week. All she needs to do to negate those calories burned is to eat back and extra couple of hundred calories a day. If she isn't really controlling her eating, an extra 200 calories is nothing.

hubcyclist

I started cycling in the fall of 2013, at the time I weighed I believe 215lbs and by cycling (and of course cutting back portions and what not) I got down to 155 in a few months. Without cycling to facilitate I don't think I would have lost so much so quickly. I'm currently around 160 and I train pretty seriously, and I credit cycling for being able to sustain a healthier weight.

One thing I like to note when it comes to cycling/weight loss type topics is that the amount of calorie burn the average newer cyclist *thinks* they're burning during a ride is likely to be far less in reality. As an example, I, a pretty well trained amateur, burn about 700 calories/hr at an endurance pace. A newer person might be half of that, so I think people eat because they think they burned a lot, but really the key is to realize that beginner rides aren't going to make a big dent in creating a caloric deficit. So cycling can help if you do it properly, either working to increase intensity in workouts or increasing duration. Really both need to be done eventually, I think. But that's my experience.

MRT2

Cycling is not a full body exercise as you don't really work the upper body much in most types of cycling. At the highest level, you see professional cyclists with thighs like tree trunks, and arms like a 10 year old girl.
But that is not what we are talking about here. The problem is, a lot of folks overestimate how many calories they are burning and underestimate how many calories they are eating. Go for a 2 hour ride and you might burn 1,000 calories, 1,200 or 1,400 if you are really working hard the whole time, climbing hills, doing sprints, or riding into the teeth of a 30 mph headwind. Maybe you ate an extra couple of hundred calories for breakfast before the ride, stopped and ate a 250 calorie energy bar in the middle of the ride, and came home and rewarded yourself with a big meal after the ride. Congratulations. You earned it. But if you are not careful, you might end your day with a calorie surplus.

Cycling is a terrific form of exercise, but it isn't some miracle weight loss cure.

70sSanO

Cycling in itself won’t cause you to lose weight. However, cycling, as well as any other tangible motivator, can be the reason to eat less and lose weight.

I think for a number of people, health is not a great motivator to lose weight, but needing to lose weight to be able to ride a trail, or make a climb, or even able to enjoy a physical activity can be.

For me, mountain biking was the motivator. On pavement, depending on the terrain, you can get by being overweight. But those extra pounds really take a toll on mtb trails.

John

caloso

Only if you eat less than you burn.

rydabent

Yes. I live in the snow belt so I am off the bike and trike 4 to 5 months. I hate riding in the cold. So----------I gain weight over the winter. After a couple 3 months into the riding season I lose 10 to 15 pounds.

guachi

I think people grossly overestimate how many calories they burn from exercise. People can lose 1 lb of fat (3500 Calories) per week from reducing calorie intake but most inactive people would blanch at burning 3500 Calories on a bike in a week.

Riveting

I also started cycling in 2013, starting at 225 lbs and within 18-24 months got down to 168 lbs, by riding approx. 6k- 8.5k miles per year, with commuting 25 miles per day, and weekend warrior stuff. My loss was mostly attributed to trying to keep up with the cycling group(s) I joined, which meant being at my very best on Saturday and Sunday mornings, which meant no drinking alcohol on Thur, Fri and Sat nights, and also simply watching what and how much I ate. No real diet needed when riding that much. In theory, 100 miles of moderate to high intensity riding burns about 1 lb of fat (3,300 cals.), especially when you do rides of 50+ miles, since your stored glycogen in muscles and liver will be depleted after about 1.5 hrs of riding, and then your body will rely more on fat burn to fuel you.

rydabent

Not so at all in my case. After about 3 months into the cycling season I lose 10 to 15 pounds.