Carbonfiberboy 

I don't count calories, either. I just use the scale. Doesn't say what I want it to say? I change my behavior.

genejockey 

Which is why I couched my entire comment in terms of my own personal experience. The comment even begins with "My personal approach..."

Then chose your grandparents well.

Lots of people are naturally slender - my Dad, and my older brother, for example. Dad ate whatever he wanted, and in good quantities. I never saw him do any exercise just to exercise, and his job was largely sedentary office work, but he was thin all his 100 year life. My older brother, similarly, has never watched calories. He used to exercise a lot - running, orienteering, etc, but since he stopped those he didn't gain weight and he eats well, too.

Me? I got different propensities. If I don't count calories, and just eat "instinctively", no matter how much I ride, I gain weight, or at best don't lose it.

rubiksoval

Easier to go off average watts and time.

About 276 average watts an hour = 1mJ. Ride 3 hours at 276 watts and burn about 3mJ, or close to 3,000 calories an hour.

So yes, steady, high average power. That's the good stuff! 1 mJ an hour is a solid goal for some.

rubiksoval

I'm similar.

I don't count calories as that's heinously tedious and boring, but I do have to ensure I'm feeling hunger at various points in the day, or I'm inevitably eating too much and will gain weight.

So for my purposes, hunger off the bike = losing weight. Contrast that to hunger on the bike = bonking, which is no good at all.

alo

Others have posted good information.

Diet is much more important than exercise when losing weight.

You can burn body fat equally with short intense exercise or long less intense exercise, provided you use the same amount of energy.

Short intense exercise will result in larger muscle mass. You can see this if you compare weight lifters with marathon runners. Also if you compare cyclists in sprint events, with cyclists in endurance events.

Carbonfiberboy 

Cyclists in sprint events are known as weight-lifters who sometimes ride bikes. Sprint specialists in road racing aren't all that different looking, IOW no matter how you ride, it won't make you huge. I do some strength training to try to maintain muscle mass for general living and other sports.

gregf83 

Rule of thumb is normally Cals = 3.6 * Avg Power. For your example at 276W you'd expect to burn about 994Cals. If you use Joules you need to multiply by about 4 to account for efficiency.

alo

In some cases, when people who have not exercised for some time, begin exercising, they may not lose weight in the beginning. They may lose fat, but gain muscle mass. If you are one of those, keep it up. You will eventually lose more fat.

mr_pedro

Maybe a different perspective on the matter: I don't think it is all that relevant what type of cycling burns more calories if you want to loose weight. As others have pointed out, exercise makes you eat more and you can easily compensate for all the calories burned, leading to no weight loss.

On the other hand, my experience is that what cycling does, or for that matter any type of exercise, is it will make it easier to stick to healthier nutrition rich foods that fill you up while keeping a calorie deficit.

The hard part is that no matter how intense you exercise, it then always requires a conscious effort to choose the right foods and most important to eat a bit less than what your appetite tells you. Unfortunately there is no way around it to loose weight, you will need to consistently eat a little bit less then you want to for quite a while. What exercise and the right choice of nutrition will do is make that a bit more tolerable.

rubiksoval

Rule of thumb is 1 kJ = 1 calorie. 276 average watts = 1 mJ an hour.

1 mJ an hour = 1,000 calories.

Zero reason to make it any more complicated than that. 6 calories = 1.5 grams of sugar. Not consequential in the least.

mr_pedro

For completeness, it is not mJ, but MJ what you mean. Small m is used for milli and capital M is used for mega. And it is not calories but k calories, also written as kcal.

But yes, in general you can say that 1kJ of work amounts to 1 kcal of food. (for people that plug these numbers in some type of online converter and get different figures, you also have to consider that there is an additional factor of 4 to account for efficiency of body, i.e. you need to eat 4 times more energie than the energie that was needed to move the bike)

I normally think of it in terms of average power and multiply by 3.5 to get to kcal per hour, as I find it easier when I envision a certain ride to estimate average power than it is to estimate total kJ.

gregf83 

Your formula is the same as mine. I was just correcting your original post which indicated 3000 Cals/hr.

rubiksoval

Eh, okay. I messed up the last part.

Ride 3 hours and burn 3 MJ, or close to 1,000 calories an hour.

rubiksoval

Noted.

mr_pedro

Actually the calorie is a funny one. When speaking about food, it is common to call it a “calorie”, meaning a kilo calorie. To differentiate between the two, a food calorie can be written as Calorie with capital C.

wolfchild

Food and eating is meant to be enjoyable. Why torture yourself and eat things that taste like crap ?? ...It's very easy to loose weight and still enjoy eating delicious tasting foods.

mr_pedro

In part, making the food less enjoyable is exactly what you are doing when switching from junk food to tasty whole foods.
That will then give your natural appetite a chance to actually work and stop you over eating.
Trick is to let your taste adjust itself such that you start enjoying tasty whole foods.

rubiksoval

Or you can, you know, just eat less of the good food.

genejockey 

Your relatives didn't have much choice, because they were poor. If you're affluent, you have a choice, and it you choose boring food in an effort to curb your appetite, it's likely your appetite will revolt and you'll find yourself cheating more.

Better to learn how to make good food taste good, and eat enough of that, which will help you resist the donuts and onion rings and bacon cheeseburgers that are out there. I know that I'm far more likely to go out to get fast food if I don't have a healthy, tasty alternative. Every day you DON'T give in is a victory.

rubiksoval

I mean enjoyable food. Food you like to eat.

Your advice, as usual, is extreme and unrealistic because it's based on entirely different contexts.

Drew Eckhardt 

Low intensity which is forced by enough time riding. I lost over 60 pounds that way without being hungry.

That produces appetite suppressing peptide YY and doesn't deplete your glycogen stores as much leading to hunger.

Working out past your anaerobic threshold reduces hunger stimulating ghrelin production, but is too limited - you can't do that every day, and probably can't accumulate more than 30 minutes total. Instead you end up working somewhat hard which produces what runners call "runger" because you've depleted your glycogen stores without increasing peptide YY or decreasing ghrelin.

If you could ignore hunger you wouldn't be asking about weight loss.

Rob Gray's test results from the Wattage list, with FTP around 300W.

Iride01 

I think you summed up what I couldn't. If the goal of riding is to lose weight, then just ride low intensity. I've always felt that high effort increased my hunger. I have a lot of trouble trying to ride low effort. Every climb, no matter the change of elevation or grade is a challenge for me. So I fail at trying to stay low intensity on short rides.

Longer rides wear me out of some of that energy. And I find that I can stay low effort for a longer percentage of my ride. And therefore I don't eat back the Calories I just rode off.

Carbonfiberboy 

Yes. I'm surprised by my weight loss from this low intensity regimen I've been doing. It's December, and I haven't been this weight since 2 summers ago. I consume maybe 75 calories (or less) in 2 hours and am not particularly hungry afterward or later. I have a apple.

Outdoors, I've been just staring at my stem and gearing down to keep my watts at least close to my supposed goal. Stupid low gears on shallow hills, no pride at all. I'll wind up with average watts below goal because descents. OTOH, that means I can stay out longer because of small partial rests.

BritishV8

Weight loss hasn't been top priority for me... instead I've been focused on getting stronger and faster in hilly terrain. My strategy has simply been to ride faster on hills, more often. For me, it's a happy coincidence that losing weight and climbing faster go hand-in-hand. Happily, I've lost 18 pounds since March (from ~196 to ~178) without any deliberate dietary change. If anything, I'm probably eating more than before - I enjoy eating well! - though my consumption of beer is probably down by several bottles/week.

My advice is this: whatever your goal is - and also whatever path you pursue for reaching that goal - you'll probably get best results by continuously measuring and recording inputs and outputs. What specifically should YOU measure? Choose what you like! Because (seemingly magically) whether you log your weight, count Calories, count Weight Watcher points, or count beers and snacks... logging any of these or any other related metrics will help you keep focused on your goal and committed to improvement.

In my case, I use Strava obsessively to track many aspects of performance. Leaderboards and personal records motivate me to push harder on segments... including specific hills. But yearly progression statistics are also very interesting to me. I get those from the excellent "Elevate" browser extension for Strava. So, it's convenient for me to tell you that so far this year I've averaged 4.35 rides/week, 22.55 miles/ride, 1386 feet of elevation gain per ride. I've only averaged 13.71mph, but I can tell from segment times that I'm certainly getting faster on hills.

Good luck!

Richard Cranium

The post demonstrates a limited understanding of exercise as well as metabolism.

The best exercise strategy for annacaptur is the exercise he/she will continue to practice. Hopefully that could include many kinds of bike rides.