RH Clark

I knew you were joking. I'm glad you have a good doctor. I live in a small rural town and have never had a doctor who gave a rip about anything except prescribing meds. I suffered conditions I never realized I could treat differently until I started researching on my own.I'm a firm believer in getting your information from more than one source. Of course it's necessary to confirm information from multiple sources. I am glad we live in a world where information is so free. Yes, there's always going to be some misinformation out there but I feel we have a better chance of learning what is and isn't misinformation if we get our information from multiple sources.

It's not that I think doctors don't care, or aren't qualified but they are restrained by certain regulations that make them the last to be able use a different treatment than what has become the standard of care. In our world the standard of care has been engineered to be prescription drugs. A doctor would be operating outside standards to treat with diet and lifestyle changes, though the better ones may very well discuss those issues. Just as a FYI, I never have had a doctor suggest diet or lifestyle changes even when I was pushing 400 lbs and on pain pills and injections.to keep going. That's why I am a bit vocal about looking at multiple sources for health information.

genejockey 

This may explain why riding more and tracking caloric intake actually worked for me - because I am lazy AF when not riding, and it would be REAL hard for me to do any less after riding than I would have if I hadn't ridden.

surak

I understand the theory, but it doesn't really apply to me in the sense that I don't count calories, eat what I feel like (plenty of carbs and desserts), and lose weight without any intentional actions other than cycling more.

It seems that the common pitfalls are overreacting to being slightly hungry or trying too hard to create a calorie deficit rather than approaching weight loss less intensely. I've never dieted. Obviously I'm eating less than I burn, but I'm not ravenous afterward nor am I somehow more active than expected the next day so I'm not dramatically underfueling nor have a magical metabolism that doesn't compensate by running slower. I can easily gain weight, especially on vacation - at the beginning of the year after returning from one, I weighed 148 lbs. After ramping up the saddle time since the end of January, I've steadily gone down to my lowest weight since a 2020 underfueled vEveresting at 136 lbs today.

I believe the reason that I'm naturally eating less than I burn is similar to why sleeping longer can also lead to weight loss, in that I simply eat less due to less time/opportunity to eat. I don't eat a full meal during a mid-ride lunch stop because it would just sit in my stomach, and I don't eat twice as much for dinner to make up for that + the deficit from the rest of the ride. Sometimes I eat a lot and feel quite full all night, other times I'm slightly peckish before bed, but I don't worry or fuss over any mild hunger pangs. My eating habits may not be optimal for gaining peak fitness, but it's not like I'm training for results, so I'm happy just to keep a decent level of power without much extra unnecessary weight.

boozergut

Exactly, after a long ride I think I'd could eat at least 1/2 a horse, maybe 3/4 of a smaller horse.

bruce19

I think I'm giving up on losing weight. I've counted calories, I've offset calories burned on rides, I've changed the foods I eat.....nothing changes. Not even a little. I stay between 189-191 lbs.

surak

Today I'm down below 132 lbs / 60 kg / 19.5 BMI after not weighing myself for a week where I didn't manage as much riding and my dinners included frozen pizza, hot dogs, and cheesesteak, figuring that the salt-bombs would add a bunch of retained water to my weight. I peaked at just under 24 hours of riding time 2 weeks ago but average around 12 hours a week since spring.

I'm at the lowest weight I've been at this millennium. When I started regularly bike commuting in 2018, I had to punch a new hole in my belt because it wasn't short enough. Now I'll need to punch a new one.

My energy levels are good, haven't been sick since Covid at the start of the year. My new bike came last week and I spent most of the week setting it up and doing a long-delayed reorganization of my garage to tidy up the mess of bike gear I've piled up.

RH Clark

Try keeping calories lower than you burn but carbs under 20 grams a day and I bet you drop weight. Good luck.

kinnessa60

Exercise alone is a limited tool for weight loss due to increased appetite and metabolic compensation. The net effect is often smaller than expected, so diet is crucial I guess. But not gonna lie a lot of kinda on ozempic or wegovy now. Everyone can buy wegovy online now or another one med. But it is as for me bad af.

RH Clark

The thing to think about is adaptation. The body quickly adapts to any new activity to do it as efficiently as possible. Less calories can often mean a lower metabolism if exercise levels drop, and greater activity will lead to increased appetite and likely greater calorie intake. That's why it's a difficult proposition to evaluate by calories in VS calories expended. Yes, that is scientifically true but it's like saying the best way to get wealthy is to make more money. There's just a lot going on that's better viewed as the question, what adaption am I wishing to reach, and what nutrition and exercise do I need to reach that adaptation.

terrymorse 

Increased muscle mass raises basal metabolism, increasing the amount of calories burned per day. This can lead to further weight loss.

Jughed

Quoting myself - I wrote this during a time of near starvation as I was training for riding the ALPs.

Essentially starved myself all winter - eating only whole foods, limited calories, small meals - and trained my ever loving ass off. I got down to 179#'s - felt like poo, my efforts on the bike sucked...

I've eased up on the diet just the slightest bit - 2 months and I packed on 10#'s. Some of that is water as I go up and down 2-3#'s here and there, but I did that at 179#'s as well.

I'm fueling properly - and as predicted - gaining weight.

prj71

Consume less calories than you take in...POOF!!! You lose weight. It's really that simple.

RH Clark

That works if losing weight is your main concern. If your diet isn't properly balanced though, a lot of that could be muscle rather than fat, and in the extreme you might create a diet that causes far greater problems than the fat you were trying to lose. There's lots of variations between individuals as well. It's not quite as simple as it may seem.

It's sort of like saying if you don't want to have a money problem, then it's as simple as making more money. Yes, that's essentially true but not useful to the individual trying to figure out how to do exactly that.

elcruxio

I always feel comments like these are equivalent to such as "flying a plane successfully requires only for you not to crash!".

Ie. idiotic and low brow. And also extremely unhelpful.

But more on the topic, the difficulty with the whole concept of eat less than you burn is that no one actually knows how much they're burning at any given moment. You can't be on a gas monitoring system 24/7 and if you're not, you just have no idea how many calories you're using.

Then there's the false idea that the human body functions like a combustion engine, which kinda gives rise to that whole "eat less than you burn" -fallacy. Everything always revolves around mobility and the idea that if you move more you burn more calories. However the human body has a lot of other functions other than mobility such as brain activity, nervous system activity, hormone production, heat production, etc.. How much those systems are able to be suppressed in order to compensate for a calorie deficit to prevent weight loss is still a big unknown.

Of course one could limit their intake to such low amounts that there would be no other choice than for them to lose weight. If you eat less than 1000 calories a day, some weight loss is bound to happen. That is however not viable as a long term solution. Nor are there many people who have such mental fortitude or suppressed hunger signaling that they are able to achieve that.

terrymorse 

I don't think metabolism estimates are that bad. Stating that you have "no idea how many calories you're using" seems an exaggeration. You have some idea.

Just a quick scan of the research: The equations for predicting basal metabolic rate were accurate (±10%) for about three-quarters of obese subjects. That's not so bad. Equations tend to overestimate BMR for masters athletes, but then those aren't the folks looking to lose much weight.

prj71

Idiotic and low brow? It's common sense...which doesn't seem to be so common these days.

It's easy to track calories consumed just by looking at the labels on the food we eat or doing a google search. And with fitness watches and bike computers available these days it's easy to track calories burned.

Since you didn't like my idiotic low brow truncated version of "Consume less calories than you take in" you can read the wordy version of that statement here:


Even with all the diet plans out there, weight management still comes down to the calories you take in versus those you burn off during activity.

Popular fad diets may promise you that not eating carbohydrates (carbs) or eating a pile of grapefruit is the secret to weight loss. But it really comes down to eating fewer calories than your body is using if you want to lose weight.

Calories are the energy in food. Your body has a constant demand for energy and uses the calories from food to keep working. Energy from calories fuels your every action, from fidgeting to marathon running.

Carbohydrates, fats and proteins are the types of nutrients that have calories and are the main energy sources for your body. No matter where they come from, the calories you eat are either converted to physical energy or stored within your body as fat.

These stored calories will stay in your body as fat unless you use them up. You can do this by cutting how many calories you take in so that your body must draw on reserves for energy. Or you can add more physical activity so that you burn more calories.



https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-l...s/art-20048065

prj71

No matter what type of diet you follow, to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you take in each day.

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patient...ons/000892.htm

Peevess

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