Is there a number of calories needed for a ride before you start so you don't "bonk" for heavy people? Most stuff I found on the internet was for skinny people..like 150 pounds. At 220 I know I need more but haven't found the right number. By about 16-20 miles at 10 mph I'm done for.

When I used my Endomondo app yesterday after 16 miles it said I'd burned 1192 kcal. Don't know how accurate that app is and not worried about it, but even if it's relatively close, I need more food. I just don't want to gain weight by stuffing myself after a ride. I also know I'm riding heavy bikes, my Salsa Fargo and my Salsa Mukluk on rural gravel and hilly highways adding to the workout and probably skewing the numbers on the app. I use the app because it verbally lets me know my miles while my phone is in my pack. I have several others like "My Tracks" that I use as well. Fargo has a cadence sensor and keep about 90 rpm.

I also want to ride faster than 10mph. Mostly that's an oxygen thing as my legs/body are fine, I'm just dying for oxygen even with an inhaler. This is my second summer of cycling so I figured I'd be faster and go farther by now. Last year was terrible as I didn't know about the exercised induced asthma and could only do 6-8 miles before fizzing out.

Weight wise, I haven't lost anything. Healthwise, the fact I've even gotten that many miles out of a trip blows me away and I even managed a 4 mile hike a local state park. I've never done that before. It nearly killed me with the steep hills, but I made it.

Just could use some encouragement.

Thanks!

That's great you're trying to improve your performance. It takes time, and when you're overweight, it can be hard to do. Seven years ago, I weighed 45 pounds more than I do now, and going 10 miles was a real chore. Yesterday, I went on my typical weekend ride of 65 miles, and felt fine afterward. So keep at it -- barring serious medical problems, you'll get there.

But make sure there are no serious medical problems you have to deal with first. You have to have a realistic expectation of what your body is capable of.

I wouldn't worry about the accuracy of your app just yet. Sure, it's overestimating your calorie expenditure, probably by a significant degree, but so what? As long as you don't use that to justify an extra piece of cake, you'll be fine. Exercise to get fit, not to lose weight.

You should be able to go a couple of hours without eating a thing beforehand, but you may need to get to a higher level of fitness before you can. Try eating a banana before your ride. And during the ride, be sure to drink enough (around 10 oz. per hour). You might want to try some electrolyte replacement tablets in your water -- just avoid the ones that are full of sugar or other carbs.

Good luck and keep on cycling!

That number is nowhere close to accurate... I'm around 175-180lbs at the moment. If I ride for an hour at 16-17mph, I burn 500-550 calories according to my power meter.

The standard suggestion is to consume 200-250 calories per hour while riding. For 1-2 hours rides, I often don't eat anything before and very little during the ride. When I do eat before a ride, it's generally something like a Clif Bar or Clif Builders Bar which have 250-270 calories. If I eat something before the ride, I'll usually skip eating during the first hour of riding.

Riding farther is often about practicing to ride farther, not about what you're eating at the time. Two things helped me: 1) focusing on either riding farther or on riding faster but not both at the same time, and 2) taking breaks. When I'm riding all day on my touring bike, I try to take a 5-10 minute break once an hour. I also don't try to hammer along at 17-18mph; I slow down and ride at a more comfortable "all day" pace.

There is a big difference riding on dirt and gravel roads from pavement. A 20 mile ride on gravel with my heavier bike wears me as much as a 40 mile ride on pavement. I don't do better than 10mph in those conditions either. Look at how far you have come since last year!

It is hard for me to guess how many calories you were burning as it depends on how hard you were working. But you do not need to replace all those calories as you exercise. My guess is that you will need about 200 calories per hour. Your body can take up only so much food in an hour and any more than that probably won't do you much good. Some say for rides of less than and hour and a half or two hours you don't really need anything, but people vary a lot. I found that as I was getting fit I really, really, needed a snack to get me through an hour or two ride. I often brought raisins and a few nuts, that was enough. Sometimes I would take a banana but they don't travel well. An energy bar would be easy to take. They often have about 200 to 250 calories. Don't eat it all at once, maybe break it into thirds and eat it during your ride. I usually keep one in my tool kit bag for just in case. If you are doing 16 miles at 10mph you are only going for a bit more than an hour and a half so you won't need much. If you ate a meal within a couple of hours before you ride you probably don't need anything else before you ride. Otherwise, have a banana or some other carbohydrate if it has been longer or if you are really going to be working hard on the ride.

It might help with appetite and with recovery to have a snack like chocolate milk right after your ride.

Here's what works for me. Try to eat 200-300 KCal Complex carbs an hour before the ride. Small serving of chili beans works, though the wife acts disgusted because it is not "breakfast food". (eggs are considered "breakfast food" only in North America.) An apple and a banana are good too.

If the ride is under an hour, I don't eat any extra. Longer than that I'll eat a quarter of a clif bar every half hour to hour, depending on how I feel.

I use MyFatSecret to track intake, and set my daily base to 2200 KCal (5'9-240) and add about 1/4 of the cals Endomondo says I burned as my daily target.

As has already been stated by Sstorkel and Goldfinch, 200-250 calories per hour is about all the body can make use of regardless of how much you weigh or how much you're expending. I might have a banana or granola bar before a ride. Or, like Sstorkel about 1.5-2 hours into a ride if it's going to last at least that long again.

With regard to up'ing your mileage, it's a matter of adaptation not just caloric intake. Your muscles and circulatory system need regular and gradually increasing load to adapt and normalize to . Keep at it. It will come.

With regard to loosing weight. The best thing Mrs. Fred and I ever did was to start religously logging our calories. We really saw where we were getting empty calories from that didn't add much to our diets and where we could bulk out our menu without adding much energy. It is a simple equation.

Several things to do here.

I don't know what time you ride, but try not to have heavy meals within 2 hours of your ride. Light meals, give yourself an hour to digest them. (light equals a banana and some water)

Somewhere around 45 minutes into your ride (assuming you are going for 1.5 -2 hours, eat around 200-250 calories. Mostly carbs with a little protein.


If you are trying to do a no carb diet....well good luck trying to do 2 hour hard effort.

Try this, of it doesn't work for you, no problem. I know it worked for me.

I would seriously question the calorie burn rate from most of those calorie counters. I think they tend to be extremely high.

For me (today in fact) if I'm going on a long, hard ride, I'll get up early and have a small bowl of oatmeal and a clif bar. During the course of my ride (88 miles) I had 4 more clif bars (240 kcal each) and about 5 gatorades, so that's about 1 clif bar per hour after the first hour.

If I ride less than 2 hours, I don't eat a thing and frankly, I don't count the calories burned into my daily total either. They just go away. I typically only go for long rides on weekends and my weekday rides are all less than 2 hours, so YMMV

I'm going to be honest here. Under 30 miles, you do not need food. You may feel like you do, but you should be able to wait it out until the end; especially if you're only going 10mph average.


I've been doing my 35 mile rides this year with nothing but water. Haven't bonked on one of those yet. It gets tough, for sure. Your body screams for food, most definitely. But you'll make it just fine without. I've found, at least for myself, that eating food is greatly counterproductive to my goal of burning fat.

I don't bother to bring food unless it's a 35+ mile ride. I don't bother eating any of it unless it's 50+ miles (bring on 35's in case I have a major mechanical and lose lots of time fixing it)

+1

From what I have read, most of your fuel will come from food eaten well before your ride. Your body just doesn't have the time to process food properly in a short period before your ride. Focus on eating well the day before or in the hours before a ride.

For me personally, I don't do long k's and if I do a longer ride, it is usually at a higher pace but still only around 50-60km. I get by with a muesli bar about an hour or so before a longer ride, but nothing if I'm doing 40kmor less. I would stay away from gatorade, etc, as you really don't need it. More specialised additives less the sugar are much better, and I would then only use something like that on a long ride in hot conditions where you would be sweating a lot.

Looking back at my post, I could see reading it as saying go ahead, have a banana before the ride (100 calories) and bar during the ride (240 calories) and chocolate milk (140-200 calories) after the ride for a 16 to 20 mile ride. Um, that is too many calories unless you subtract them from what you ordinarily eat. If you are trying to lose weight and maybe eating 1800 calories a day, that would be a big hit on how much you would get to eat at meal time. If I had the snack before the ride, I would skip the during the ride eating if possible. Post ride maybe have some skim chocolate milk or just time your ride so that it is time to eat a regular meal.

Miles are not relevant. Time is. Exertion is. The average beginning exerciser (read not trained, and working near their maximum capacity) has about 45 minutes of glycogen storage in their muscles and liver. Through training, replenishment, and conditioning, you can extend that to about 2 hours.

I still notice a significant slow down after two hours if I don't eat, and a more difficult recovery. No, I don't bonk, or die, but I can tell when I have run out, by watching my power output o down for a perceived exertion, and my hr go up.

On the other hand, you don't need a 500 calorie muffin an hour either. I eat about 200 calories per hour on longer events. Again, mostly carbs with a small amount of protein, and I personally stay away from sugar all together.

There is no simple rule. My typical rides are 18-25 miles. If I ride in the morning I will eat a light breakfast of around 200-300 calories like a bowl of oatmeal or a banana and a yogurt, then nothing during the ride. If I'm riding after work I usually don't eat anything. I will go ride then eat dinner when I get back. I say play around with different combos and see what works for you.

I have a different view: I don't eat to avoid bonking. The idea right now is to lose weight and enjoy riding. Later, after arriving at my ideal weight, I'll work on riding performance (if I feel like it).

When it comes to weight loss, I firmly believe that it's 95% diet and 5% exercise. If I have to eat more to sustain exercise while I'm losing weight, then I need to exercise less, not eat more. That doesn't mean no exercise, it just means MODERATE exercise. I budget my daily calories as if I didn't exercise at all, and don't deviate from that budget, no matter how much exercise I do.

If you're a person who has been obese, it's important to remember that your body is NOT your friend when it comes to getting to and maintaining a lean weight - if it were, you wouldn't have gotten fat in the first place.

I usually exercise about 5 days a week, for 45 minutes or so. But lately, on the weekends, I take a much longer ride. I rode for a couple of hours yesterday morning, after eating my usual 275 calorie breakfast at about 8AM. By 12:30, I was done - but I was still a few miles from home. Hit the wall, big time - was using my smallest gear on an incline (it would be really insulting to hills to call this a hill) that I normally take somewhere in the middle, or higher.

When I got home, I was ravenous. But I didn't eat anything other than my normal lunch (about 300 calories). That's what's been working for me - kind of learning to ignore my body's signals, and doing what my brain knows is the right thing to do instead.

In the future, I'll either ride closer to breakfast, or ride less. It would be totally counterproductive to eat an extra several hundred calories just to be able to ride an extra 10 miles. Plenty of time to work on that after I'm at my target weight.

EDIT: Just wanted to give an idea of results to indicate how my system works: I was 227.5 lbs on January 2, when I started this program. As of today, I'm 170.0. Still on target to reach my goal of 155 by late July, early August.

I think this is a worthy topic for debate.

I think going beyond the OP's question into why do we ride bikes, and why do we diet is a valuable discussion.

I think if your sole goal is to lose weight in x time, as in lose 10 pounds this month, then much of what tony says makes sense to me. If exercising causes me to need to eat more, and the resulting exercise does not make up for the additional calories, then that would in fact be counter productive.

On the other hand, what other benefits might we assume we are gaining from increased exercise, and do they in some total way offset the slower weight loss.

For instance, if I am able to eat and exercise more, and that makes me only lose 5 lbs a month, in a given year, and I better off with my significantly increase cardio capacity, and muscular strength, and lesser reduced weight, or am I better off with my increased weight loss, and reduced cardio capacity, and muscular strength?

Or is some hybrid (vs the two extremes) a reasonable goal.

I keep going back to the point of just because you can do something, doesnt mean its best or even good. for instance I can go on a hunger strike, and not eat for 20 days. I can still function at the end of those days. Doesnt mean its furthering my goal of prolonged weight loss and physical fitness.

I realize all our info is anecdotal. As in this worked for me. What we dont know is what worked best, as we only have our data to analyze.

Then we have to rely on studies, or articles we read. Many of them are trying to sell us something, or promote something, so I question many of those. What I try and do is read a lot, and compare and contrast what I read.

Based on my reading, and my comprehension of what I have read, I believe that for an extended period of time, lets say the rest of your life, the best overall solution is to eat to a level that allows you to either lose to, or sustain a healthy weight, and exercise a minimum of an hour a day.

To me the slower weight loss, or at some point weight maintenance, is worth the increased cardio and muscle. In fact most any study will show that increased muscle mass will help with weight maintenance.

Just because you need to eat to exercise, doesnt mean you need to eat more overall in a day. I am simply spreading out my calories during my exercise periods.

Here are a few links.

Forget what the product is, read the facts behind the product about how much you can process in an hour (food, water etc) and what the body uses when. You can easily use real food in place of these, hammer stuff is simply easy, not better.

https://www.hammernutrition.com/knowl...wledge-section

https://www.hammernutrition.com/knowl...wledge-section

Also realize that these are written from the perspective of well trained (or want to be well trained) athletes.

You have to adapt to your level of fitness.

I don't worry too much about detailed calorie counts on my morning rides. If it's going to be under 30 miles I usually don't eat anything before or during the ride, and save breakfast for when I get home. If it's over 30, I'll have a bowl of cereal with a banana and some berries and low-fat milk about 30-60 minutes before leaving. If the ride's going to be approaching 50 miles, I'll do that, plus bring something to eat with me (or plan on a stop someplace to get something to eat). My only goal is to avoid bonking. After the ride, I'll use the rest of the day to balance out my total calories as needed.

If the ride is in the evening, like the Tues/Thurs shop rides I do, I won't bother eating anything in prep other than my usual lunch. And those rides are limited by available light to no more than 30-35 miles or so, so I don't bother bringing any food or energy supplements along.

As others have mentioned, your level of fitness will dictate your choices on this. A brand new rider will work very hard to do 20 miles at 10 MPH. Just because it's "only" a 20 mile ride doesn't mean they don't need anything before or during the ride to keep from bonking. You need to gauge your own abilities and limits and fuel yourself as needed.

A cardiologist once told me that, from the point of view of cardiac fitness, 20 minutes per day of cardio exercise (like brisk walking), 3 times a week, would get you there. Of course, that won't make you an athlete.

When I started this program, I decided that I would break the problem into two parts: The first was to lose the weight, the second was to get more athletic and fit.

Why in this order? For one thing, attacking the fitness angle while still obese creates all sorts of other problems. Even walking/hiking was doing a number on my knees, ankles and feet. The damage I did to my feet is still causing me pain now, even though the weight is gone - it's healing slowly. I hope I avoided knee damage - I can't tell you how many fat people I know that have had to have knee replacement surgery because they were asking their joints to do what no joint should have to do.

As far as cycling is concerned, I had to customize a bike to accommodate my belly (I needed a really upright position, because I couldn't catch my breath if I was leaning over). I had to stand up in my seat every minute or so, because the upright position was putting all my weight on my seat, and it was causing numbness in areas where I really don't want to be numb.

So I figured, If I can primarily diet and get the weight off fairly quickly, and then work seriously on conditioning, I'll probably get to the point of being lean and good shape more quickly, and with less structural damage, than if I try to push my body very hard while it's carrying much more weight than it should.

So far, so good. I've lost nearly 60 lbs in 5 months. The effects of the weight loss on my ability to exercise have been dramatic. When I used to hike with my son last summer and fall, I was panting on the slightest uphill, and the pain in my feet and knees caused me to lumber along. After losing the first 20 lbs or so, I was able to do the same hikes with a lot less effort, and in a lot less time, with a lot less pain. Now I can almost keep up with my son, and I'm jumping from rock to rock the way I used to when I was much younger and thinner.

The effects on cycling have also been dramatic. I can cycle longer, faster (though I'm still pretty slow by my old standards), and with much less discomfort. I still need a slightly more upright position than I used to years ago, but that's because of arthritis and stenosis in my neck, not because I'm too fat to bend over.

And what this means is that my muscle conditioning, because I'm exercising more effectively, is improving faster than it would have if I'd lost the weight more slowly and had tried to push the exercise more. We're talking about a few months here - the total elapsed time between starting to diet and arriving at my ideal weight will have been on the order of seven months. So, if I look at where I'll be at the one-year mark, I believe I'll be in a better place than I would have if I'd stretched the weight loss out, because I'll have had the benefit of a good part of the spring, all summer, and all fall to really work at the conditioning part of the fitness program, without having to make accommodations for trying to do the exercise while still obese.

Anyway, that's my take on it. It's working for me so far. YMMV.

Thanks for the information. It really helps. I don't use the app to count calories. I know it's way off, so not worried about it. I also know my weaknesses when it comes to food and it's getting better.

I also don't want to hurt myself as Tony is saying in the attempt to do more than what my body says. I had to sell my racing style road bike as I couldn't bend over and ride. The Fargo has been perfect for the rural area I live in and I can ride in comfort along the highways. I don't hurt when I ride now. I fell in love with the Mukluk as it makes the gravel roads easier to ride. I'm not worried about sliding down steep hills now and it gives greater freedom in route choice. However; even that means miles before you can get to another road. The nearest trail is 15 miles away and I get there when I can. It runs 10 miles up making it a 20 mile round trip. I wish it was a loop so I don't feel like I'm backtracking over and over again. Anything else is an 80 mile trip to civilization.

Again, thanks for the responses.

To continue beating this just a little more, here's another data point. When I started participating on BF, specifically here on C&A, I weighed about 210 lbs. That was, according to the BMI charts, nearly 50 lbs overweight, and it was 60 lbs more than I used to weight when I used to ride regularly, up until 15 years ago.

I had lost some weight - about 15 lbs - by dieting earlier in the summer, but my diet had crashed and burned. I decided I would lose the weight and get in shape at the same time by exercising. So I pulled out the old Specialized HardRock (there was no way I was going to get on my road bike), and started riding.

After an experience that made me think I was having a heart attack - which sparked a visit to the cardiologist, a stress test, blood work, etc - I discovered that the problem was that my belly was just too darned big to ride in a normal position. So I invested the money to convert that bike to an upright, with a stem raiser, trekking bars (to bring the bars closer to me - I didn't want to mess with the stem because, on that bike, the brake cable passes through the stem, so it would have involved more work to change it...), etc, and started riding more regularly. I also started hiking and walking regularly.

I would make sure to be fueled up properly, would take snacks for hikes, and would reward myself with a good meal afterwards, maybe even some extras - after all, I'd earned it! I knew I wasn't losing any weight, but I was "getting healthy", right? I even found myself thinking things like, "Well - maybe I'm meant to be fat, but I'm going to be one of those healthy fat guys!" Right.

By December, I had what are probably two stress fractures in my feet from hiking on uneven trails while carrying all that weight, and that 210 lbs had grown to 227.5. I decided it was time to get serious, and that's when I came up with the two-step program, where I'd lose the weight as quickly as was healthy, while exercising moderately, and then would focus on conditioning once I got to my target weight.

This time, I was determined not to kid myself, so I developed some Excel sheets to help me track my weight and my trends, and to determine my own body's "transfer function", that expressed, for ME, what the relationship between exercise, calories input and weight was. This lets me determine how my body is converting fuel, and what my excess or deficit is, based on my current activity level.

The phase three of the program is maintenance, the part that always defeated me before. But I'm hopeful that keeping up with the daily monitoring, plus focusing on developing more strength, increasing speed, being able to climb more, etc ... will keep me motivated to stick to the program.

I get very leery when I hear about someone saying "I'm going to work on my eating someday, soon, but for now, I'm going to exercise..." I think my experience of actually gaining weight and hurting myself with that approach is not unique. Again, YMMV.

I sort of disagree with the first sentence, and the reason is derived from the next two. First I base my model on the assumption that the rider is at least pedaling full time, and not coasting a lot. If you ride ten miles at ten miles an hour, you will burn X amount of calories in an hour. If you ride that same ten miles at twenty mph, the time will be shorter by a half, but the exertion will be higher. The "ideal" case would imply that both are equal in terms of calories burned, but of course I realize that isn't true. What it does tell me is that as a rule of thumb, miles can be used to approximate the calories burned. Not perfect, but I believe it is more reliable than most, if not all, on-line calculations I have come across.

If you can find an accurate way to measure elevation gain, that can be factored into the equation too. I use 10cal/100 ft climbed.

I don't believe it's linear. Take any given speed or any given distance and put an out of shape guy riding next to lance....you get the picture...it's exertion percent of max over time in my opinion

I honestly have to disagree on this, especially if you are working hard. I do agree that what you eat the day before makes a huge difference but we should all be eating a well balanced diet anyway. If the ride is anything over 2hrs long it's a good idea to put something back in but just small ammounts to keep energy levels up. The body only stores so much glycerin and uses it's stores up in an hour and needs to be replaced to work at it's best, why risk bonking! I always carry some form of calories on a ride cause you just never know, plus if I don't feul on the bike I tend to over fuel when I get off it.

*nods*

The main thing I find is if I'm riding a lot I do need to actually eat. At 180lbs, I needed around 1800-2000 calories to maintain my weight. It was a lot more important for me to eat regularly and go out and have fun on my bike than it was to fret over the exact calories burned. That's actually not a lot different from how I ate at 120lbs... much of the weight gain for me was medication induced tho (really, still is... trying to get back down to 120 would be pretty seriously unhealthy for me - no muscle).

Maybe even more important for me as an asthmatic is to drink enough. The more you drink, the harder it is for your body to make that nasty thick congested mucus. I usually want to drink about 2-3L over the course of a day, even if I'm not doing exercise that makes me breathe hard. If I'm exercising hard, it might be more. On a really hot day, it can be closer to 1L for every hour I'm out in the sun. If I don't drink enough, I am absolutely wiped the next day.

If I'm doing a loop ride, or riding a rail trail that's pretty lacking in scenery, I'll often listen to music or work on my French homework. French because I'd like to go visit my long lost ancestral homeland someday . Other people like podcasts, or even to listen to podcasts designed to help you work out. Audiobooks can work too. Try different things and see what does it for you. (I can almost predict what will work for me just based on a podcast's format and length at this point)

Bethany, the calorie calculators are notoriously off. But that said, the people who insist that calorie burn should be the same for a 150-pound rider as for a 220-pound rider are missing a basic concept. Who would expect the average SUV to get the same gas mileage as a subcompact car going the same speed?

Gravel sucks the speed out of my rides as does rough chipseal. The MUP I ride 15mph on I rarely go faster than 10mph on the unpaved sections. Part of that is my skinny bike tires and poor traction. I'll generally pick up 1mph when going from normal pavement to silky-smooth and even more when coming off rough chipseal.

If you are riding hills, likely you are exerting much more than the 150 pound rider on the same hill; or another 220-pound rider on flat terrain.
Likely you are not riding efficiently - your muscles aren't able to use all the oxygen your blood is carrying to them and you will tend to burn proportionately more sugar than fat at a given intensity level. That will improve as you get more fit.

My suggestions:
Carry some food on rides, but if you are riding at a conversational pace you probably don't need to pre-load or eat during the ride if you're out less than 90 minutes. More than 200-250 calories an hour is counterproductive, and if your digestive system is busy processing food you will have less bloodflow to your bicycling muscles. Fluids - always carry water bottles and keep well hydrated. If you don't drink enough, you will fatigue and it will take experience to tell the difference between dehydration and low blood sugar.
If you are doing intense riding or if it has been a while since your meal, do get a very small snack pre-ride.
If your muscles are fine but you are out of breath, upshift and slow your cadence to compensate. If your knee joint hurts, downshift. If your legs burn, downshift. It is good to switch cadence and gearing to develop both strength and aerobic fitness.

The tricky part is trying to combine high performance and losing weight at the same time. I seem to ride better when I am in a slight calorie overconsumption mode - good for short term but bad for long term. It is also tricky when you ride with faster friends to enjoy companionship and you don't fully control the intensity and pace of rides. I have had most success losing weight when I was riding fewer times each week and focusing on calorie deficit on days I did not ride, calorie steady state on riding days.

No, its not linear, but put one fat, 55 year old on a decent road bike doing a leisurely 12mph for ten miles, against the same fat 55 year old doing the same route at 17 mph, Mr fat and furious will burn calories faster over a shorter time.


"it's exertion percent of max over time in my opinion"

%exertion@17mph/35min ~= %exertion@12mph/50min is what I'm saying (17mph/35min=12mph/50min=10 mi) assuming % exertion correlates to heart rate (I use that metric in my calculations), QED, calories burned are approximately the same. Actually exertion for the faster rider will be higher since by my observation, at 12 mph, air resistance becomes noticeable, at fifteen it becomes significant.