yjuosj said:
So you guys are saying that losing weight on a bike depends on what your diet is?
That's been my experience, and that of almost everyone replying here. I racked up three years of about 8-10000 miles/year, only losing 3 or so pounds. When I changed my diet, BOOM, 20 pounds in a year, with no significant volume increase. This also depends on where you're starting from, and what your goals are. A lot of people do experience some initial weight loss, without dieting, when starting an exercise program.
This initial loss will level out eventually. Your appetite is a very well-designed evolutionary mechanism. It tries very, very hard to keep you in a neutral to slightly-positive caloric balance. Unless you ride positively HUGE volumes of miles (we're talking >20 hours/wk, here), your appetite will just ramp up to meet your higher caloric needs. For most people, the only way to achieve a negative caloric balance is to deny your appetite some of what it wants, by restricting caloric intake. So, once your weight levels off, you'll have some decisions to make.
Are you losing weight to be healthier? Well, then, unless you're obese (as opposed to merely overweight), current available evidence indicates that it's much more important to be fit than light.
Are you losing weight to look better, or feel better about yourself? If so, the odds are excellent that you won't find what you're looking for in the readout of a scale, no matter how light you get. Dieting to fulfill emotional needs is a dangerous game; most people do it to some extent, but disordererd eating, with its attendant psychological and physical problems, are not too far down this road.
Are you losing weight to improve your performance on the bike? Again, proceed with caution; caloric deficits can be very stressful on the body, and the body can be extremely reluctant to "build up" when it detects that it's being starved. This can lead to difficulty with the sort of intense training that is most effective at improving cycling fitness, or impaired recovery, or reduced gains from the same training load. You also have to know when to stop. When you first start seeing performance gains from reducing body mass, it becomes tempting to see how far you can take it. Resist that urge. (You may hear the recently bruised voice of experience in this paragraph...).
