Cycling is rubbish for losing weight, but we should do it anyway

I know right, disappointing.

Here we are doing all this riding and training, bashing out the endurance miles but our weight remains stubbornly the same. Shocking isn’t it? Feels like a betrayal for those of us who ride whilst watching what we eat but remain bewildered and frustrated that we carry more fat than we want despite mammoth efforts.

Why might this be?

Being charitable, it appears we’ve been misled about the contribution exercise has for weight loss. A cynic may say we’ve been lied too about how exercise and weight loss works by clever people in the food industry who are after our money. Some myths are busted below. 

We don’t burn as many calories as we think

A power meter will give a very accurate measurement of how many kcals a rider burns during training. A heart rate monitor will provide a decent estimate too. Logically we should be able knock this off daily calorie count, have a couple of biscuits and still be well under. Not so fast. A thing called the Energy Compensation Effect means because, knowingly or not, we take more rest after exercise so that consumption figure is reduced to 72% on average (Careau et al, 2021).

We’ve adapted to our energy expenditure

A seminal study on a hunter gather tribe, the Hadza in Tanzania, showed despite their very active lifestyle, they range over huge areas to collect food fundamentally taking a huge amount of exercise, their actual energy expenditure was no greater than people in developed Western societies. They adapted to the activity and have become efficient at a metabolic level. What makes them slim and have low body fat is the amount of food they eat, not how much they expend (Pontzer, H et al, 2012). As cyclists, we have also adapted to our way of life and have rebalanced our energy expenditure. 

We take energy from other biological systems

Train frequently and, yes, the energy will come from readily available stores – glycogen from the muscles and liver and an element of fat. However, it will also take energy away from the immune system, the brain (the biggest burner of energy at about 20% of all the energy we ingest), the reproductive system, the menstrual system in women and the digestive system. If you’ve ever tried riding hard after eating something significant, or tried to eat too quickly after a hard training session, you’ll probably be familiar with the uncomfortable consequences. The blood that should be in the gut digesting food has been diverted to the muscles. The rise of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) can affect both sexes but is particularly pernicious in women athletes who risk the effects of amenorrhea and a reduction in bone strength. A good reason for making sure we're properly fuelled when training.   

We probably eat more than we admit

Consciously or sub-consciously, we eat more than we should because we’re being healthy and righteous and therefore deserve a treat. Alternatively, we’ve done a lot of riding and we crave more calories because our biology tells us to return to homeostasis – to refill our valuable energy stores for future emergencies.

It's easy to drink a lot of calories without really noticing too. 

We eat the wrong things at the wrong time

Fast sugars like gels, bars, even bananas rapidly increase blood sugar levels and trigger an insulin response. Insulin removes unused glucose from the blood and stores it as fat. It does a cracking job at this which is why we have an obesity epidemic, a huge rise in type 2 diabetes and far more cases of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. 

To make matters worse, we put the body under stress when we exercise which triggers the release of cortisol. This is useful because we interpret that positively as excitement when exercising but the body doesn’t get the mental model and it will use cortisol to store fat if it can.
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Eating sugar rich food in the evenings or first thing in the morning – the worse culprits seem to be breakfast cereals and fruit juices - and there a good chance it will be stored. Bottom line is aerobic exercise like cycling requires carefully planned fuelling to ensure we get enough of the right stuff at the right time to help the system work optimally but no more than that.  

...the effective variable is food, not exercise...

But, calories in equals calories out, right?
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Yes and no. This is the partial truth the food, fitness and health industries rely on. ‘CICO’ still holds broadly true insomuch as if you take in more energy than you expend it will be stored as fat, eat less and weight will be reduced. However, the effective variable is food, not exercise.

Research suggests how we take the calories in is increasingly important. Nutrient dense whole foods – foods that don’t have ingredients labels like chicken, fish, fruit, vegetables, salad and nuts are more filling so we tend to eat less of them. They are the original healthy alternative to Ultra Processed Food as nutrients enter the body more slowly in the transport system matched to our digestive system, not stripped to their raw components and effectively injected in the form of sugar rich liquids.

By way of example, measured by a boffin with a calorie bomb, 100kcals worth of pure white sugar has an actual absorption rate of about 95%, meaning the ingestion of 95kcals. Measured in the same way, 100kcals of almonds has a bioavailability of about 80kcals because some of the fats go undigested. Each food has it’s own bioavailability level when it makes contact with the human digestive system.
   
So, we’re screwed then?

If we’re aiming to lose weight by training it off, yes, we’re wasting our time although it does help maintain any weight loss already achieved. However, there are so many other benefits to cycling, and exercise generally, that it’s a no brainer to either continue or to start.

Activity is a vital part of human health – mental and physical. You almost certainly live a longer, happier life by taking regular exercise, just don’t rely on it as a weight loss mechanism.

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Rich Smith is a psychology graduate and a British Cycling qualified Level 3 Road and TT coach supporting riders nationally and internationally. He is coach to the Great Britain Transplant Cycling team. He launched RideFast Coaching in 2015 to lecture people on how they should live their lives. This has so far proved unsuccessful.