How Many Calories Do You Eat? (Weight Loss)

[DarcyInOregon]

With respect to cycling and losing weight, we can classify our calories to 1) calories consumed on the bike, 2) calories consumed off the bike and 3)calories burned while on the bike.

If you are an active cyclist who is counting calories and trying to lose weight, my question is how many calories do you eat per day and do you count your bike calories as part of the total?

I ask this question to see if there is a better method for what I am doing. I am sincerely interested to learn what others do, particularly because it takes a lot of diligence to eat nutritionally so as to replace the nutrients the body burns while cycling. I want to avoid diseases brought on in my senior years due to not eating enough nutrients because of my cycling.

I have to look at my weekly average, not my daily average, because of the days when exceptional amounts of calories are burned. I have total calories consumed (including bike food), less calories burned on the bike, and that leaves Net Calories Consumed. It is this weekly average that I keep around 1200. I use a HRM to estimate calories burned because it is more accurate than any chart.

I am wondering if the 1200 should be lower. The reason is on my longer rides I may burn 2500 calories or more and it can be difficult to eat enough to get the weekly average to hover around 1200.

I should say I am losing inches, but the scale doesn’t move much. I suspect I’ve burned out the fat around the organs, which is critically important to long-term health, and I believe I’ve burned the fat out that marbles the muscles, and so I am left with surface fat. The doctor says I reversed my hypertension and insulin insensitivity.

Please tell me what you are doing and if you are having any success, and maybe we call all learn from each other and adapt our own procedures for how we calculate our calories.

Darcy

[divingbiker]

Interesting. I've never thought about calories in terms of net consumption, and until last week I would have had no idea what my net consumption was. But I've been tracking my food and exercise on Sparkpeople for the past week so now I can figure this out.

I've been eating about 1650 calories per day during the work week, and Sparkpeople says I'm burning about 750 calories on my daily bike commute (I don't have any other way to estimate this), so that makes my net calorie consumption about 900 calories per day. Yesterday I ate about 2550 calories and Sparkpeople says I burned 2300 calories on my 40 mile bike ride, so my net was obviously lower.

I've only done this for a week, so I can't really say how it will work for weight loss, because as you know the first week is not really indicative of how things will go. But I've been happy with my progress on the scale this week.

I'll keep tracking this and see how it goes.

[Veronica]

To lose 30 pounds several years ago I kept my calories around 1800 a day, regardless of how much exercise I was doing.

For exercise I was doing an hour class in the morning -spin, aerobics or weight lifting. Two or three afternoons a week I was swimming a mile.

V.

[Bikingmomof3]

To lose weight I was eating about 1800 calories. My exercised varied, my calories did not.

[Zen]

There are two types of abdominal fat, the stuff on the inside of the abdominal muscles (bad, bad, bad) and the stuff outside (still not great but not as harmful as the sub-abdominal fat) . You've probably burned up the bad bad bad fat and thats good good good.
When you lose weight its usually in the reverse order that it's gained. When a person begins to gain weight the first thing they probably notice is their waistline.

Keep in mind you are building muscle as well. A single fat cell is much larger than that of a muscle cell.
Another way of putting this-
You have two boxes of the same size. You can put 125 muscle cells in a box but you can only put 25 fat cells in the same size box. Both boxes weigh the same.
This is why I tell people not to focus so much on the scale.

If you really want to get involved with numbers to determine workout intensity and caloric needs you'll need to determine your basal metabolic rate and start using a HR monitor.

Take a look at this site or do a search with key words "cycling nutrition".

[DarcyInOregon]

Maybe I overthink everything.

Before I started cycling again last year, when I was merely walking 5 miles a day, I kept my calories to around 1500 a day with a ceiling of 1800.

But with the cycling, as my fitness level continues to increase, which is the muscle density referred to in this thread, my ability to cycle for longer distances increases, and thus my cardio time increases and my calories burned increases.

Yes, I want to lose the excess body fat. However, at the same time two other things are important to me, and that is my long-term health and my desire to be able to recover from my rides quickly and get on the bike again the next day. Therefore, every day, I eat to nourish my body, to help my muscles recover and repair, and to restore nutrients I lost during cycling. For example, I don't want to be cycling for a lot of years and the doctor says, well you have osteoporosis because you didn't replace the calcium you burned when you were cycling.

So the whole calorie thing gets confusing. I need to eat enough calories to replenish what I burn and to recover and repair - and still burn body fat - yet exactly how many calories is that? I've read a lot of books on cycling, and Zen gave a link to a good site in her reply, but there still isn't a real forumla I can grasp that I know I can adhere too, a formula that will adapt to my diet as my distances increase. In other words, I used to be a person who ate too much, and I now worry that I may not be eating enough for sustained long-term health, which is a complete reversal for me and quite ironic.

I should add I rarely weigh myself anymore, at the end of each three-month period is all, and when I do, the body weight hasn't gone down a significant amount, just some. I do use the tape measure and I continue to shrink, so I know my body composition continues to change for the better. And last week I had to spend most of a day cleaning my closet and ruthlessly taking out all the clothing that was too big for me, which is something I seem to need to do about twice a year now.

Darcy