First, I am 6'2". I was 256ish lbs about a month ago and did nothing at all as far as exercise. I bought a bike and started riding. I was doing about 30 min a day then 45 is and now I try to do at least an hour a day which puts me a little over 13 miles. I have started watching how many calories I eat and trying to eat healthy calories. I am now about 244ish lbs but have been stuck in this area for about a week or week and one half. I felt like the first three weeks I was losing weight fairly quickly but now it has halted. I try to eat no more than 2000 calories a day (I think that 3200 a day is supposed to keep me the same weight). So, what do I do to make the weight start coming off again?

When I ride for an hour I estimate burning around 700 calories (not sure if that is right) so for that day my over calories would be 1300. Is this wrong or to low? I would not think I could be eating too little but I just don't know.

Ideas?

Sometimes you hit plateaus. Don't worry too much about it, just keep improving your cycling. More time is better for weight loss than going faster for short time is, but if you are time limited, going faster will burn more calories than going slower will.

700 calories for a hour is a pretty good output, and if you are riding 13 miles in that time you're not going fast enough to burn that many calories (unless it's a very hilly 13 miles). If you are using an on-line calorie estimator, be aware that they are almost always high, sometimes by quite a bit. If you are eating to that, and your estimate of your caloric input is lower than it really is, then you could not be running a deficit.

You should be aiming for about a 500 calorie a day deficit. More than that is too tough on your system, making recovery more difficult. You want to be building up your cycling muscles too.

I prefer to lose wieght by paying attention to how hungry I am. I cut down on dinner and cut out post-dinner food. If I wake up really looking forward to breakfast, then I didn't eat too much the day before.

You still eating too much. Knock off a couple more hundred and eat good, clean foods and keep the excercise the same or ramp it up a little. Got for the long, flat routes that allow you to spin rather than having to mash those pedals, spin easy but fast, make some sweat.

You can do it.

So about how many calories a day should I eat then... about 1800?

Also, should I eat more if I ride so that at the end of the day my net calories is 1800 or just eat 1800 and if I burn 500 yay for me because I would only net 1300 that day?

• Buy a heart rate monitor if you don't have one, use it every ride
• Cut yourfat/saturated fat intake way down--hint Cheese is an easy one to cut
• Eat poultry products with beef only once or twice a week
• Cut Sodas and carbonated beverages fully including any foods with HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). If you're sitting idly around the house, keep it to water or tea or coffee with low/no-fat creamer
• Increase vegetable/fruit/fiber intake.
• More smaller healthy meals instead of huge ones.
• Try protein recovery drink like MetRX after hard workouts. This has the added benefit of displacing your appetite, so you eat less when you have a meal a little later while still giving your body the components needed to build lean muscle mass.
• Add in a few days a week of sustained gym time. This will increase your sustained calorie burn while building muscle mass in areas of the body.
• Get plenty of sleep, as deprivation has been shown to negatively impact body weight.

G'luck--you're doing great!

A few comments ...

-- 3200 calories per day is a lot of calories.
-- 2000 calories per day isn't bad, but that should probably be a maximum amount.
-- When you ride, estimate that you burn about 500 calories per hour
-- Always over-estimate what you consume and under-estimate what you burn, you'll end up with more realistic numbers that way.

-- Riding for an hour a day is good ... but make an effort to be active throughout the day in other ways. For example:
---- during your lunch or coffee breaks, go for a walk.
---- if you go home in the evening and watch TV, lift weights while watching TV rather than just sitting there.
---- if you've got kids, walk them down to the park and toss a ball around with them in the evening (gets them active too!!).
---- if your kids are involved in soccer or swimming or something ... while you watch them, pace up and down the sidelines, or if they swim at a local rec centre, go lift weights or walk around the track there while they swim.
---- park at the furthest point from the shopping centre when you get groceries so you have to walk further.
---- take the stairs.

If you have an iPhone or a Touch try the free app Lose It. I use it to track calorie intake. Dropped 44 lbs since May. I am 6'4" and now 250 it gives me about 2100 calories a day to eat with the object of losing 2 lbs a week. I too have plateaud for about three weeks. I am moving stuff around on my body though so it will come off eventually but the ease of the first 40 will be a contrast to the struggle for the next.

Good Luck

Dont worry about net this and that. Eat 1500-1800 a day and ride your ass off. Like the other post, dont get into alot of climbing. Spin at 90 rpm and sweat it out.

If you expend more calories than you eat - then you are losing weight.

Your problem is that you know so little about nutrition that you have no idea how much your weight can fluctuate due to hydration status. If you knew what you were doing, you would be able to use a scale to detect these weight changes due to water - as well as your actual - real - weight loss.

3200 is a fairly high maintenance level. If you're large framed, muscular and active that can be a reasonable level; however, if you're more normally composed you will want to adapt to a lifestyle where a lower calorie intake maintains your weight. If you don't prepare yourself for smaller portions more often and eating nearly only natural and healthy food, you can expect to gain back weight. I'm sure 2000 calories right now feels like you're limiting yourself significantly, but after you get to where you want to be, you aren't going to be able to start eating lots more and still maintain your new lower weight. Your overall lifestyle will dictate your health and weight and weighing 200 pounds involves a totally different lifestyle for someone 6'2" than the one for weighing 250 pounds.

You mention that you were previously exercised not at all. Part of why your weight loss has slowed is probably due in part to your gaining muscle. As you ride harder and longer, your legs are going to build up muscle you may not have had before. Ultimately this is good and will help you burn more calories, but it might look bad on the scale in the short term. What you need to do is look at your health overall. You probably notice going up stairs is noticeably easier; your body fat percentage is probably noticeably lower. Realize that whatever the scale shows, you are certainly much healthier now than you were a month ago.

The key to it all is having a broad, long term view. Being thinner isn't the result of a diet, it's the result of living a different sort of life. To get there you need patience and to stay there you need discipline. If you stick to it, it will work, though it may take a little time.

I have found that, even when I exercise regularly, I cannot lose weight (and often I even gain weight) if I do not meticulously keep track of my caloric intake every day. There was even a study published last year concluding that people who keep a "diary" of their caloric intake are significantly more successful at losing and managing weight than those who do not.

The way I keep track of my caloric intake (and the calories I burn through exercise) is by using the "Daily Plate" feature at livestrong.com/. It is free and very easy to use. Basically you just enter some basic information about yourself (height, weight, age, weight loss goal, normal activity level, etc). Then you enter the foods you eat and the amount of servings for each through the course of the day, and also record your exercise. The web site does all the math for you and keeps track of the number that really matters, which is your net caloric intake each day (calories you consume minus calories you burn). There's also a page where you can track your weight, and it has a graph so you can visualize your progress (which is a great motivation tool).

Just to give you an idea of how my program is configured, I wanted to lose one pound per week. At my height and weight, 2500 net calories per day would maintain my weight. To lose one pound per week, I had to reduce my daily net caloric intake to 2000 calories. Let me tell you right now that doing that is not easy. I often find that the harder I exercise, the hungrier I get. There have been many days when I have exceeded my daily calorie limit even after exercising vigorously for a full hour. It takes a lot of discipline.

One more important caveat: Be honest with the entries you make in your Daily Plate. The only person you'll cheat is yourself if you fudge the numbers. But it sounds like you're off to an excellent start, and I wish you all the best. You will really thank yourself if you stick with it and get yourself to a healthy weight.

Make sure the majority of your diet is made up of fresh fruits and vegetables, i recently loss a substantial amount of weight on a diet of nothing but fruits/vegetables (about 50-60 pounds in a month).

Another forum that may helpful with dieting tips as well https://forums.menshealth.com/eve/, I'd particularily refer to success stories for tips on what works. Although there is also a cycling forum.

Although I think your calorie intake is high for someone that is trying to lose weight. There is also another aspect that I haven't seen mentioned.

If you weren't excercising before, you probably don't have alot of muscle mass. Muscle weighs more than fat, so you could initially be losing body fat, but not weight. In the long run, the added muscle will be beneficial to your weight loss. Due to the fact that muscle burns more energy than fat, even at rest, there is a 3:1 calorie/per hour burn ratio when comaring muscle to fat. The more muscle mass, the more calories needed to sustain your energy level and if the calories aren't being provided by your diet, than your body will burn stored fat for the needed calories.

I encourage anyone that is cycling to lose weight to also compliment that with some core excercises. The added stregnth in the core will benefit your riding and the added muscle to area other than your legs will further benefit your metabolic level allowing you to burn more calories.

Where did your protein come from? Losing weight doesn't always mean losing fat, if your protein level was insufficient, you lost muscle mass as well, since your body would leach the protein stored in your muscles to compensate for the lack of protein in your diet.

There isn't a credible nutritionist in the world that would tell you losing that much weight that fast is healthy.

It's remarkable that something as simple as diet, or "weight-loss diet" is too complex for many adult human beings to understand. Would it be easier to just say: "eat and work like third-world poor people."

Really it is a sickening subject.

Track your calories. Progressively lower your daily intake until you start loosing weight.

Actually, that brings up another point. A lot of people enter their current weight into the online calculators and base the calories they think they should be consuming, and the calories they think they should be burning on that. That might be OK if they want to remain their current weight, but my suggestion would be to enter the weight they want to be ... the goal weight ... into the online calculator and base the calories burned and consumed on that information.

Fruits and vegetables contain a substantial amount of protein, i was meeting the rda req. with just fruit consumption alone most the time. I should have added that i ate nuts and seeds aswell but i could have easily got all the protein i needed from fruits/veg.

Nutrition science is outdated imo, losing that much weight would have only been dangerous if i was starving myself (which i wasn't, easily ate 3000 cals a day). I wouldn't recommend a completely fruit, veg, seed diet long term but i think at least 60-80% of your food consumption should be whole fresh uncooked foods(i.e fruits/veg)

Anytime you go on a diet you will lose a lot of weight in the very begging usually water weight.

Losing weight is a marathon not a sprint. if you lose more than 2 pounds a week you are usually losing muscle not fat. you want to burn fat not muscle, there's a difference between losing quality weight and losing muscle. Ideally you'd like to preserve as much lean muscle as possible while dropping as much fat as possible.

the best thing for you to do is to write down what you typically eat and drink every day and post it on here. also post what you did that day, i.e rode X amount of miles, work (desk job, construction, etc).

another thing dont worry about the number on the scale, use the mirror as the judge. if you like what you see than you're good.

remember, the weight did not appear suddenly. You probably gained it over time. Losing it will also take time. Be patient with yourself. I went from 335lbs to 255lbs 2 1/2 years ago and it was a great experience. It just took some time.

Also, if you have been inactive, your muscles have probably atrophied a bit. Some of your plateau that you are seeing could be muscle growth. You are probably shedding pounds but gaining muscle. Keep spinning and enjoy it. The weight will take care of itself.