You're going to hate me, but I have to eat so much when I'm training hard to avoid losing too much weight (including burning off muscle) that I just get sick and tired of eating. So, I have to eat a lot more when I ride my bike. I struggled with 5 extra pounds or so of college flab for a long time before I got into cycling. It was a full year before I really lost any weight, though my body composition did change some. Within another 6 months I had gotten a lot faster, a lot more fit (finally seeing big changes in my resting HR, faster recovery times, etc.), and I dropped about 10lbs from my starting point (only about 3 lbs dropped that first year). Now I'm nearing 2 1/2 years of road cycling, and I have definitely gone down a size in clothes. Pants are still a challenge because of the thighs, which have always been muscular for me, but I'm still down.

When I started training to race, I gave up on all the dieting and watching what I ate that I had tried for years. I still have a fairly structured diet because I have IBS, but cycling has helped me control those symptoms so I can eat some foods and amounts of food that had previously been too risky.