Weight Loss

Nutrition Tips

A Calorie Counter to Calculate Calories Burned When Cycling

February 16, 2016 by Adam Farabaugh

Use this calorie counter to calculate calories burned when cycling. Select how fast you’re riding, your weight in pounds, and your duration in minutes to calculate calories burned while cycling.

How Calories Burned While Cycling Are Calculated

To calculate calories burned cycling the first metric needed is the intensity of which you are riding. Simply, the harder you ride the more calories you are going to burn in a set amount of time. The second aspect to how many calories you burn when cycling depends upon your weight. First, the more weight you have to propel forward, the more energy that is going to be required. Secondly, an increased body mass requires more energy even when you’re at rest because there are simply more muscles cells, and cells in general, that require energy. The final aspect to calculate calories burned is the amount of time you are riding. The longer you ride, the more calories you will burn.

More is Better? Or High Intensity?

An interesting fact of physics and calories burned is that if you ride 1 mile in 3 minutes at maximal effort, you will burn the same amount of calories if you were to ride that same mile in 10 minutes at a leisurely pace. Higher intensity gives you a “better bang for your buck” in that you can burn more calories in a shorter amount of time. However, when riding and working out in general, you can’t go hard all the time. You need to balance longer, lower intensity workouts with shorter high intensity workouts.

Calculate Calories Burned Everyday You Ride

Use the calorie counter to calculate calories burned while cycling each day you ride. Keep track and see if you can continue to increase the number of calories you burn cycling each week. Using a journal to keep track of your calories burned along with what you did for a ride is a great option.

Foods that Help Burn Fat

October 13, 2015 by Adam Farabaugh

Eating certain foods at certain times can, in a round-about way, help you burn fat. Food in itself will never directly result in your body burning fat. Your body simply doesn’t work that way. To reduce fat build up on your body, you need to burn it off.

Certain foods can help by giving you less energy, causing your body to need to burn fat stores to convert to energy. While other foods can increase your metabolism. Also certain foods will help you to feel more full causing you to eat less resulting in less calories being consumed, again resulting in your body to resort to fat stores for energy.

Fat Faux-Pas

Fat has received a lot of miss-press particularly that of being able to burn it with other food as well as that eating it causes you to get fat. Both of these simply are not true. In fact, not eating fat can help contribute to weight-gain due to you actually eating more food as a result. To burn fat you simply need to consume less calories than you burn along with exercising regularly. Exercise is an important element because it requires more energy to complete and fat can be burned to obtain this energy.

Fat, particularly in the 1990’s, was labeled as causing you to become fat so a lot of foods tried to drop their fat content. This would result in foods tasting bad, so to make them taste good again, sugar would be added which actually can make you pack on the pounds, particularly since these foods are often highly processed. Fat does have a higher calorie content per gram, nine to be exact, whereas carbohydrates and protein each have four calories per gram. The thing with fat however is that it makes you feel more full and satisfied so you don’t have to eat as much. If you were to just eat carbohydrates instead, you would eat more calories because it would take longer to become satisfied.

Foods to Eat to Feel Full

The trick to eating foods that help you lose weight are to eat those that cause you to consume less calories. This can be done in any number of ways, but the best is to eat a diet high in vegetables as there is a lot of bulk with fewer calories, helping you to feel full.

The second is to eat more fat, as fat has high satiety. You don’t just want any type of fat however but rather healthy fats. These can be found in foods such as nuts, olive oil, coconut oil, as well as in meats. Foods like eggs and bacon previously thought of as fat-causing and artery clogging are things of the past. Eating a balanced diet including foods such as these will help you to eat less while still having the energy you need to ride and perform your day to day routines.

According to Health.com – Certain foods have a very high thermogenic effect, so you literally scorch calories as you chew. Other eats contain nutrients and compounds that stoke your metabolic fire. Feed your metabolism with these:

Whole grains
Your body burns twice as many calories breaking down whole foods (especially those rich in fiber such as oatmeal and brown rice) than processed foods.

Chicken Breast
Protein has a high thermogenic effect: You burn about 30% of the calories the food contains during digestion (so a 300-calorie chicken breast requires about 90 calories to break it down).

Low-fat dairy products
Rich in calcium and vitamin D, these help preserve and build muscle mass—essential for maintaining a robust metabolism.

Green tea
Drinking four cups of green tea a day helped people shed more than six pounds in eight weeks, theAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition reports. Credit EGCG, a compound in the brew that temporarily speeds metabolism after sipping it. To up your intake, keep a jug of iced tea in the fridge.

Lentils
One cup packs 35% of your daily iron needs—good news, since up to 20% of us are iron deficient. When you lack a nutrient, your metabolism slows because the body’s not getting what it needs to work efficiently, says Tammy Lakatos Shames, RD, co-author of The Secret to Skinny.

Hot peppers
Capsaicin, the compound that gives chili peppers their kick, heats up your body, which makes you melt additional calories. You can get it by eating raw, cooked, dried, or powdered peppers, says Lakatos Shames. “Add as much cayenne or hot sauce as possible to soups, eggs, and meats.”

Tips on Burning Fat

Along with eating the right foods to help you to feel full and eat less, riding and eating in certain ways can also help to spur fat loss. To burn fat more efficiently on the bike, start a ride without much to eat prior and only eat small amounts throughout as needed. Only follow this advice for medium to low intensity rides, if you are going to go for an intense ride make sure to eat enough food (especially carbs) to fuel you through the ride.

Everyone knows the Golden Rule of weight loss: burn more calories than you consume. Most people also know that riding at lower intensity is when you do burn fat and when you ride at higher intensity is when you burn carbs. So most people believe that in order to lose fat cycling they need to ride at lower intensities; unfortunately, this is not the case. Do you remember the Golden Rule? Well, if you ride at higher intensities you will burn more calories, so at the end of the day you will end up burning more fat.

Losing fat off your body isn’t easy and takes time, but with the proper know how you can start tackling your fat issues from the right angle. If you take the wrong approach, you’re not going to have the results you’re looking for.

Eat the right foods to feel full along with less carbohydrates on easy rides. And one thing to watch out for when you eat fat is not to combine it with simple carbohydrates and sugar as your body responds by converting these to fat on your body. These two combinations are not found in nature and release “feel-good” hormones in your body causing you to become addicted to them thus making it harder to get them out of your diet. Eat the right things and with will-power and sufficient riding your fat will burn away like you were eating something to get rid of it.

Does Cycling Burn Fat?

September 30, 2015 by U.M.

For many people, the main reason that they start any form of exercise is because they wish to lose a little bit of weight. Whether you want to shed pounds from your frame or just get rid of those pesky love handles, burning fat is often the main aim.

So how can cycling help? In short, cycling is one of the most complete body workouts, which means that you can burn fat from all over your body if you do it right.

How Does Cycling Burn Fat?

Cycling is a form of cardiovascular exercise, which means that as long as you cycle at a quick enough speed or on a steep enough gradient to get your heart beating faster, you will start to burn fat and lose weight.

Furthermore, because you are engaging so many different areas of your body, you will also find that you burn calories a lot quicker than you would with other cardio activities. After all, your legs, arms and entire core are constantly engaged whenever you head out for a ride, a combination that serves you well to burn more calories and help you get leaner.

How Much Fat Can I Burn?

A lot of it depends on the distance that you ride and the speed that you ride at. Furthermore, you will burn more fat riding uphill than you would on a flat or going downhill.

However, assuming a 185 pound rider riding at moderate pace for an hour the rider can burn approximately 654 calories. Upping the speed also ups the lost calorie count, so if that same rider starts to ride faster it is entirely possible to burn as much as 1,000 calories every single hour or higher. That’s not a bad rate for something that’s fun as well as healthy.

Calories Burned Biking and How It Compares To Other Forms of Exercise

Of course, there are many different forms of cardio out there, so if you are looking to lose weight quickly it’s only natural that you would attempt to search out the most efficient one. Here we’ll take a look at some other forms or cardiovascular exercise and how they compare against cycling.

Running – Assuming you are a male of about an average weight of 185lbs, you should be able to burn about 800 calories if you run at a constant speed of 6mph for a full hour. Of course, maintaining that kind of speed over such a long distance is taxing, plus those who are carrying a little extra weight may have to be wary about the effect that running can have on their knees in the long term.

Swimming – Heading off for a dip in the pool is often a great idea, as swimming is another form of cardio that requires your whole body to properly execute. If you swim for an hour with a moderately-paced free style stroke, you will find you lose somewhere in the region of 650 calories, with the numbers going up the harder the stroke. Interestingly enough, the temperature of the water will have a lot to do with how many calories you burn, the colder the water the harder your body is going to have to work to stay warm, meaning that you will burn more calories.

So What is Better Cycling, Running or Swimming for Burning Fat?

At the end of the day the best way to burn fat is doing whichever sport is the most fun and the one you are going to do the most! A good mix of the three, taking into account your own current health, is possibly the best recommendation. It is a good idea to mix things up and keep your body guessing.

Does Biking Burn Belly Fat?

Biking does burn belly fat, in fact, it burns fat from your thighs, your butt or anywhere you have it for that matter. As long as you have a calorie deficit fat is going to melt off! Aim to expend 500 more calories than you consume each day, this is a healthy weight loss plan and works out to approximately 1 pound each week. Hopefully that is 1 pound of fat, but remember you may not lose it that fast as you are simultaneously building muscle. But, muscle burns fat faster, so really it is a vicious win/win cycle when you bike to burn fat!

What Happens to You When You Stop Cycling

September 3, 2015 by U.M.

Cycling is one of the best forms of exercise around for boosting your overall fitness and dropping those extra pounds that you have been finding so difficult to shed. It is excellent for your cardiovascular conditioning and the fact that it is a low impact sport means that you don’t need to worry about suffering injuries in the same way that you would with weight training or running.

As the amount of cycling you do increases, your body’s fitness levels improve with it. As such, if you choose to stop cycling regularly you are going to find that everything that you worked so hard to achieve is going to come under threat. Here we look at just a few of the things that will happen to your body if you choose to stop cycling regularly.

Your Mood Dips

Every time you exercise your brain is improving. In fact, exercise is considered to be a key way of keeping the brain healthy and active even into old age. Exercise also triggers the release of serotonin, which acts as an anti-depressant and generally keeps your mood positive. That great feeling you have after a good workout? That’s the serotonin at play.

Your body becomes used to having this shot of happiness on a regular basis if you are exercising, so if you suddenly stop cycling regularly you are going to find that your mood starts dipping as a result, making you even less likely to start exercising again.

Your Metabolism Drops

Exercise causes your metabolism to speed up, which is one of the key reasons why you can burn so many calories when you are cycling. In fact, it is believed that your metabolism works at five times the speed when you’re on the bike than it normally does. This accounts for about 400 to 500 calories every hour.

If you stop cycling regularly, your metabolism is going to stagnate and you are no longer going to lose weight if your diet remains the same.

Blood Pressure Rises

Cycling is an aerobic exercise, which means that it encourages your body to release hormones that keep your blood vessels in check and ensures that your blood pressure stays at a healthy level. Cycling on a regular basis has been found to lower your blood pressure somewhere between 8 to 10 points every single month, which reduces the risk of heart issues and other ailments caused by high blood pressure.

If you stop cycling regularly you lose all of these advantages very quickly, and you will find that your blood pressure starts rising again. It will start after about a week and in just a few weeks you will find it is back to the level it was at before you started.

You Might Put On Weight

It should go without saying that when you stop cycling regularly you are going to put on weight if every other aspect of your life remains the same. There is a misconception that the gains you have made will last a long time even if you stop.

In fact, that simply isn’t the case. As mentioned previously, your metabolism stagnates when you stop exercising, which means your body’s ability to burn fat is reduced. This means that if you stick to the same diet you are going to start noticing that your body is getting a little softer in areas that used to be lean and trim. Even if you reduce you calorie intake, you are going to notice your tone softening and your waistline increasing. Over time, the effects will only increase, so be sure to keep getting out there and exercising to keep yourself in top shape.