Trying to lose weight and putting it in numbers is demoralizing. I’ve started riding a stationary bike for 5 miles and then doing minor weight lifting after and I maaaaybe lose 200 or so calories. Is that not a good exercise? I’ve been doing this almost everyday starting 2 weeks ago. But it’s starting to feel useless if it’s such a minor amount of calories burnt. Is this a good trend to continue? What am I missing?
Edit: everyone here has been incredibly helpful, and surprisingly consistent with one another. I feel much more confident about what I’m doing and what I need to do. Seriously, thank you all.
In: 209
It’s not minor.
First you need to figure out your maintenance calories, or the calories you need to intake to maintain your current weight. There’s calculators online for this.
To take myself for example, I can eat 2500 calories a day to maintain my BW of 170 lbs.
To lose weight you need to be in a caloric deficit *over a period of time*. This means you eat a net amount of calories less than your daily/weekly/monthly amount required to maintain weight. You obviously have to keep recalculating this number as you lose weight.
So say you need, for example 2500 calories a day to maintain weight, and you bike 10 miles a day to burn 250 calories. Over the course of 7 days that’s 1750 calories burned. Over 30 that’s 7500 calories burned – about 3 full days of eating. That’s a couple of pounds you just lost.
Two weeks isn’t really that long to “see” results. Maintain a caloric deficit for a month or two and you’ll see the difference. Watch some YouTube vids on how pro body builders cut to see very legible examples of this in action.
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