Phil_gretz

Preposterous assumption. Most modern maladies and morbidities are caused what people choose to do and what they choose to eat. Clean up what and how much you eat. You should begin there and nowhere else...

bargo68 

Not mentioned yet are abdominal exercises like sit-ups, crunches, etc.... While it has not been scientifically proven that these exercises specifically target waistline/belly fat, they are great for building core strength, which is very beneficial for overall health. They will also help your cycling form and stamina.

fietsbob

Sun up to sundown in the northern summer for 3 months?

at an age of about 40..

Drew Eckhardt 

One hour is good and two hours are better.

Double that on Saturday or Sunday and take one day off each week.

Add 10% to your weekly duration except for your 1 in 3 rest weeks.

dennis336

Well, since late spring I've been getting in probably somewhere between 120 - 160 miles a week. Don't know the answer to how many miles needed to lose belly fat, but it's definitely more than 120 - 160 miles/week :-).

Anxious to hear the answer!

wolfchild

The causes of fat gain or fat loss are the same for all humans. It all has to do with hormones in your body and your genetics....The hardest part for most people is to find the "genetic triggers" which cause your hormones to send signals to your body to either gain fat or loose fat.

wolfchild

Cortisol is essential, the problem is when we get too much of it. Anything in excess is bad for a human body....Exercise can also produce a lot of stress on the body. It's a well known fact that long duration exercises such as long distance running, cycling, triathlons can release huge amounts of cortisol in the body...That's why interval training and sprinting workouts need to be kept very short, to prevent too much cortisol release....The stress for exercise is no different than any other stress in life and the human body deals with exercise induced stress the same way as any other form of stress in daily life.

wolfchild

The more you ride the more efficient you become and the less energy, less calories and less fat you will burn.

ZHVelo

As long as you feel like.

There is no point going over that, you will just start to resent it and quit. That is the main reason diets fail, people quit. Be it 3 months, 6 months or a year. At some point people go back to old habits and gain the weight back.

jimmyodonnell

PERFECT . . . START WITH THIS basic premise . . . and see if you can refine it or expand it based upon your goals.



KNOW your goals. If you don't yet know your goals, give it some real thought.
Have a realistic first goal, something you might expand or extend to bigger goals and bigger gains.
Losing belly fat is a goal, but losing 3 pounds by (date) is for me a better goal because you know based on the numbers whether you're succeeding and or / have succeeded.

I lost 30 pounds between early April and mid-July . . . and I started with the GOAL of losing 5 pounds in my first 2 weeks.
If I succeeded, I would graduate to the next goal of losing another 5 pounds in the next 2 weeks, for a total 10 pounds in the first 4 weeks.
If I failed to lose 5 pounds in the first 2 weeks, my planned next move was to extend my target time to 4 weeks, to lose the first 5 pounds.
I just figured I'd better prepare for either outcome, I hadn't dieted or even weighed myself for over 10 years for sure.

So for DIET, I decided to cut my daily calorie intake to 1000.
I had to plan what I'd eat each day, shop that stuff and stick to the plan, no last minute changes to the food plan for these 2 weeks.
I didn't make my targeted calorie count, I kept ending up having consumed about 1200 per day, but I was close enough to daly target I thought let's see how it goes.
And on Saturday nights I dropped the diet, ate whatever, and drank a little beer too.

For RIDING, I planned out a one-hour route and a two-hour route, rode as many days each week as I could, just choosing the route based on how much time I had that day or night.
I couldn't ride every day, but knowing my experiment period was only 2 weeks long yeah I felt compelled and motivated to ride several days each of those weeks but mostly on the 1-hour route.

After 2 weeks I had lost 6 pounds.
I was thrilled I'd made my goal and even surpassed it by a pound. I was so excited I immediately wanted to continue it, and I'd already decided the 2nd goal would be to lose another 4 pounds in the next 2 weeks, so 10 points total in 4 weeks. I had just done the diet + rides for 2 weeks, and figured it would be easy to repeat for another 2 weeks . . . it was, and I'd lost 10 pounds after 4 weeks.

I just kept renewing this goal and these methods in two-week increments until I lost 30 pounds . . . at this point, I've kinda tabled and I'm not likely to lose much more without changing up these routines. And now my weight goes up a couple pounds then down a couple the following week, I no longer have a current goal to lose weight but I do watch carefully not to gain back what I've lost.
For riding, the one-hour ride is still my go-to goal, which I know I can accomplish almost any day (not even day, but most) . . . I only accomplish the 2-hour route maybe twice a week and that's fun for variety. But keeping the realistic goal of the one-hour route, I am less likely to blow off riding altogether.

I've since learned that a 5-pound loss in 2 weeks is an aggressive target and might not work for everyone the first time. If I knew this at the onset I might have set a different goal.
But 5 pounds in 4 weeks might be a more accessible goal, and I think the important part is finding what's realistic for your goals, your diet and your riding so you can see results and stick to it / expand upon it.

GlennR

Just ride longer and farther

downtube42

I can eat in three minutes more calories than I can burn in four hours. Only when I've toured for over a week, sunrise to sunset, have I been unable to eat enough calories to maintain my weight. And that only because for most of the day I was hours away from a food source.

Cycling no doubt burns calories, but the appetite, it adapts.

rnothog

Ride the 150 miles next week here in the Valley of the Surface of the Sun, Arizona. If you live, you will probably be lighter.

If not, you will probably be lighter.

Win-Win

zen_

Get a heart rate monitor and get your zones semi-correctly set with a max heart rate test. The big "mistake" (depending on your perspective) I see cyclist making that are trying to lose weight and / or improve is that they either spend way too much time doing nothing in zone 1, or going too hard in zones 3 and 4. You want to become highly efficient in zone 2 for general base fitness and metabolizing fat. Metabolizing fat is important because those are calories you don't have to replace with food, unlike glycogen (carbohydrate) which is metabolized at a higher rate the higher the intensity. Doing that with a good diet and some strength training so you maintain or gain lean muscle mass is ideal, although it's obviously very hard to do all three (training discipline, lifting, and diet).

livedarklions

The op's question was how much cycling do you need to do to trigger belly fat loss. Obviously, that's going to vary wildly from person to person.

Those triggers, as you call them, are enormously complex and really poorly understood. They appear to be affected by epigenetics as well as genetics, so your fat storage can be affected by things such as what your grandmother was eating when she was pregnant with your parent. That's why these types of threads tend to degenerate into people who find it relatively easy to keep fat off lecturing people who find it difficult, and are so utterly useless.

jimmyodonnell

yes it's a different equation for different people but most of the constructive replies do emphasize that diet is critical and that no practical / realistic amount of cycling exercise will lead to significant loss unless you adopt a diet that reduces intake so the exercise can shed weight. ideally you can increase the exercise and reduce the intake, measure the results, and continue to adapt further for better results. it doesn't have to turn to preaching

livedarklions

The balance of diet and exercise varies so much from person to person that what you are saying is essentially meaningless. Yes, trial and error is how I learned to take off 140 pounds, but I have to say that virtually all advice I was offered was just wrong or useless. BTW, there's about a 45 pounds difference between working out me and not working out me and I eat a lot more when I exercise, so at least for me, all of these blanket statements are wrong. My current diet would probably be awful if I was sedentary, but my weight is quite stable where I want it with the rather large number of miles I ride.

Roobz

this is a fantastic response, I recommend everyone reading into heart rate zones. and spending the correct amount of time in the correct zone. zone 2 is where you want to be to burn fat most effectively. Training in the higher zones and your body will look to burn carbohydrates first.

50PlusCycling

When you get older, the belly fat doesn't burn off so easily. When I was racing in my 20's I could eat as much as I wanted of anything, and never gain an ounce of weight. In those days I ate much more than I do today, but never had to worry about my weight. But today I find myself unable to burn off fat so easily. I can keep my resting pulse low, and my blood pressure today is the same as it was when I was 18, but the belly fat is stubborn. I was finally able to get rid of the fat by cutting sugar from my diet.

Thomas15

Lots O' good sage advice here. The main reason that I restarted riding bikes after a 25 year stop was to lose some gut. I've never been anything other than skinny but have hit the age (60+) where I was starting to put on a few. Last Thanksgiving day I hit 159 pounds the heaviest I have ever weighed. I usually hover around 150 pounds.

When I started riding I actually put on a few pounds. Then, with longer and more intense riding it started to go away. Currently, I ride 100-150 miles/week and I'm down to 138 pounds. I still have some gut, less than before though. As others have said proper diet. I also think it is helpful to limit eating before bed. I go to bed hungry rather than eat more than a simple snack before bed. The most obvious benefits of cycling to me are the leg muscles and increased lung capacity. I can say without guilt that I do push myself hard, more so on the hills.I think I would lose more gut if I started doing some weight lifting and/or ab work plus a little more diet discipline but there is only so many hours in the day and I still work full time at a desk job.

wilson_smyth

Carrying weight in general is almost entirely diet related. As the saying goes "ab's are made in the kitchen".
The simplistic view is that a person can work out/cycle aggressively for hours, but if the diet is taking in more than is burned, weight wont go down.
This is not entirely correct however as it does not account for body composition, i.e. putting on lean muscle while fat is burned off.
Muscle is denser than fat so takes up less space, so one can be getting smaller/leaner but not really losing weight.
This is why the scales is not always an accurate measure of what is happening.

At its most basic, reducing junk food while increasing lean protein intake and getting carbs from healthy sources like fruit and veg will work.
What this looks like is reducing candy, sweets, cakes, biscuits, pizzas, fizzy drinks, breakfast cereals etc and eating more of what common sense says is healthy.
Planning meals for the week, although initially seems overkill, really helps as youre not hunting through the presses looking for snacks which will just end up with you seeing cookies and eating them!
Try for 3-4 meals a day and some healthy snacks (fruit, nuts).

I said above to "reduce" junk food, as it does not need to be cut out completely. We are the things we do long term, we are our habbits.
If we eat well 90% of the time, and exercise, that leaves 10% of the time/food allowance to eat the less healthy but still tasty stuff!
To put that in perspective, if we budget 4 meals a day over 30 days, which is 120 meals, 12 of them can be the junkiest tastiest takeout you want!
I cant speak for everyone but i do not eat 12 takeouts a month!

Key is consistency, just make the plan and stick to it, make it habit so that its not "dieting", this is just how you live. Dont pay the scales too much attention either, give more attention to how you feel and how your clothes are fitting.

People make losing weight more difficult than it needs to be, mainly because they want a quick fix, or they want to make money from people who want a quick fix.
There is no quick fix unfortunately, but its not complicated and does not require giving up the tasty junk food, just being reasonable with your intake. 90%/10% rule along with exercise works for me.

Garfield Cat

I did not have time to read all the above posts on fat burning.

Here's my approach, not that I try to burn fat.

Listen to your body. It works on the fuel that you give it. Then that fuel eventually starts to go on "low". You take in an energy bar or a gel. Before that you may feel "hungry"; your stomach tells you "its time to eat". But you don't eat except for fluids and energy gels. The body then takes "plan B" and begins burning stored energy, the fat.

You might ask yourself, "How long will that take?"

First you make sure you can do a long type ride, not just 45 minutes or an hour. And then the intensity may not need to be so great that the muscles in the legs and the heart rate cannot take the punishment. And yes, its a form of punishment mixed in with pleasure, excitement, and fun.

In short: ride up till you feel hungry, and then some more. After the ride, avoid stuffing yourself with two hamburgers and fries with fries or a large bowl of chili. Just take more of that electrolyte drink and maybe one peanutbutter and jelly sandwich. What you are doing is "tricking your body" to believe the main source of energy is the stored fat.

Flip Flop Rider

3 hours a day should do it

xroadcharlie

Unfortunately the only way to target belly fat is with invasive procedures like cutting it out or sucking it out Even then, the body will likely rebalance itself soon after. We can do some core exercises like sit ups and leg raises that will lean up the stomach muscles, But like any resistance training can also increases the stomach muscle size, So don't over do it.

As for overall weight loss, The bottom line is burning more calories then we consume. Whether we burn them by biking the 4 hrs per week I might do, and combine it with other physical activities like the 40 minutes of weight training followed by 40 minutes on the treadmill mon, wed, and friday, or only bike 7 - 8 hrs per week, the total calories the way I train will likely be close.

The biggest difference is by combining weight training with cardio we retain more overal muscle mass then biking alone. It is also a very good cardio excersize, good for circulation, ballance, coordination, and of course strength and flexibility. All very important to overall fitness for those of us over 60.

With a reasonable ballance of excersize and permanent diet changes expect to lose 1 - 2 lbs per week for the moderately overweight (bmi of 26 - 28). Perhaps more initially.

jimmyodonnell

oh bull****. The OP has asked the forum how much riding might be required to lose fat, and my post #37 detailed for the OP's benefit what worked for me when I faced a similar question. I don't presume to know the OP's habits, genetics or capabilities, nor does any reply I've posted in this thread suggest that I do. I did, however, suggest to the OP that it can be helpful to identify a goal and figure out how to measure the results . . . you claim that's meaningless, and then immediately follow in saying that's how you lost 140 lbs. The advice you were offered was wrong . . . your weight swings 45 pounds . . . what does this have to do with the OP's question?