The bike is a great fitness tool, and cycling for weight loss doesn’t have to be complicated. Combining cycling, structured training, and a healthy diet can pave the way for increased performance by dropping the pounds. Whether you have a little or a lot to lose, these tips will help you lose weight and be a faster cyclist.
My weight loss started because I wanted something. It was simple; I wanted to hang with the fast group on my local drop ride. I wanted to be a faster cyclist. At the time, weight was my biggest limiter as I was tipping the scales at 345lbs. Over ten months, I lost 145 lbs, raised my FTP, and became a much faster cyclist.
For more information on weight loss and nutrition check out Ask A Cycling Coach Ep 239
Is Cycling Good For Weight Loss?
There are numerous benefits of cycling for weight loss. Riding can increase your activity level, burn calories, and grow your fitness. Aside from those benefits, riding a bike is fun! However, the key to losing weight isn’t just riding. Combining a healthy diet with cycling is vital for success.
Weight Loss for Cycling Performance
Cycling performance and weight seemingly go hand in hand and for good reasons. Pure watts and aerodynamics reign supreme as long as the road is flat. However, as the road or trail begins pointing upward, weight’s importance intensifies.
A custom training plan, automatically built for your goals.
Try Plan BuilderA key cycling metric is your power-to-weight ratio and is expressed as watts at FTP divided by body weight in kilograms (w/kg). To get faster uphill, there are two ways to attack your power-to-weight ratio. You can increase your FTP or decrease weight. Ideally, you want to do both. Fat does a cyclist no favors when your power-to-weight ratio is concerned, but muscle certainly plays a vital role. Losing weight too quickly will often result in muscle loss.
Motivation and Weight Loss
Before embarking on a weight loss journey, you have to determine the reasons why. Is it for performance or body image? Too often, our body’s view revolves around a perception of should and the thought that “I don’t look like a certain type of athlete.” For this article, we’re going to focus on chasing performance instead of hitting a specific number on the scale.
Start with a Goal
My goal was to be fast enough to hang on my local drop ride, and I used that goal as my decision matrix. Will this make me faster? Having a central goal simplifies your decision making when you are trying to lose weight. If it helps you achieve your goal, do it; if not, avoid it.
When you develop your goal, tie it to an event. By connecting your goal to an event, your goal is measurable and timely. Often when shedding the pounds, the focus can become the number on the scale. Your body is unique. What is a healthy weight for someone else is not what is best for you. Instead, concentrate on living a healthy lifestyle that results in increased performance.
Aim for Consistency
Healthy weight loss takes time and change. Consistency is your greatest ally. A steady approach will help you analyze what is working and what isn’t so that you can develop positive new habits. My success in weight loss was the result of being consistent in my food choices and training over months. In other words, I wasn’t committed to losing weight; instead, I was dedicating myself to a new way of life for the long haul.
Consistency helps you avoid the crash diet cycle. You go crazy, lose weight, burn out, then put the weight back on. I’ve been there many times. The worst part is that not only do you gain more weight, but it can wreck your body composition. You end up with more fat and less muscle.
Once you are committed to a healthy lifestyle, start making changes. Start small. Little changes are easier to manage and will aid your consistency. As you progress, you can add more changes to your diet. Small changes lead to significant results when compounded over time.
Measure Your Cycling and Weight Loss Success
Recording your data not only provides the means for measuring your success but also helps you celebrate progress. For me, that meant weighing-in every morning and observing the weekly trend in both weight and body composition. Analyzing a weekly trend helps because bodyweight fluctuates daily.

Two easy ways to measure body composition are skinfold calipers or a body composition scale. I use a Tanita Body Fat Scale. Having one of these scales to step on every day was massively effective. Just make sure to measure under similar circumstances. For the best data, always measure under the same conditions. Make sure the time of day is similar, that you are not wearing any clothing, and that your nutrition and hydration leading up to the time of measurement are accounted for if not controlled.
Eating to Lose Weight
Losing weight happens primarily in the kitchen. Creating a calorie deficit is what leads to weight loss. The right food choices, coupled with riding, deliver a one-two punch. Generally, a 500 calorie deficit is a good place to start.
The goal is to lose fat and spare as much muscle as possible. If there is too much of a caloric deficit, you will lose muscle. You can use an online calculator or an app to figure out how many calories you need in a day and subtract whatever you feel is a sustainable, healthy amount for you.
Choosing a Diet
With so many different types of diets, it can be a bit confusing, but mostly they all create a calorie deficit. What worked for someone else might not work for you. My advice, pick what works for you. For me, that was a Keto diet with extended fasting.
As with so many things, there are trade-offs to any dieting strategy. I choose keto to help manage my biggest weakness—hunger. The compromise was the inability to complete high-intensity intervals. Gradually, I transitioned my diet to include more carbohydrates to increase performance. While you don’t want to change your diet weekly, you do need to be flexible. Align your food choices with your goals.
Keep a Journal
A big help for me in limiting my calories was keeping a food journal. It can be cumbersome to record everything, but it assists in selecting the proper serving sizes, food choices, and finding all the hidden calories in a diet. For example, I found out that my coffee creamer had 35 calories in two tablespoons. My food journal showed me that I was consuming almost 100 calories a day just in coffee creamer! Even if you don’t record everything forever, do it for two weeks. You will reap valuable data that you can use to make better food choices.
Maximize What You Eat
Now that you know how many calories you should be consuming, you can choose how to get them. When you have limited calories, you want to get the most bang for your buck. You can cut a significant portion of calories by avoiding empty calories like alcohol, soft drinks, junk food, and processed sugars. You will be amazed by how much food you can eat when it is nutrient-dense and low-calorie. These whole foods help when battling hunger.
Eating nutrient-dense was a massive change for my taste buds. I was a typical meat and potatoes guy. Green foods rarely made it on my plate, but over time your taste will change. Remember to start small. For example, instead of just eating salads for a week, replace one meal with a salad. Then the next week, substitute an additional meal with one.
When making your food choices, fruits and vegetables are great additions to your plate. Eat lots of vegetables as they are low in calories but high in nutrients. Include smaller amounts of healthy fats, like avocados, olive oil, and nuts. Finally, make sure you are getting enough protein. Turkey and chicken are great because they are low in saturated fats. Training and losing weight is hard work, so make sure you are getting the proper nutrients.
Optimal Macronutrient Breakdown for Cyclists
When optimizing your diet for cycling performance and weight loss, it’s helpful to think of your macronutrients as a lever. On one end, you have fats, and on the other, you have carbs. At the fulcrum rests proteins. So the first step is determining how much protein you need. Then prioritize carbohydrates because it’s the body’s preferred fuel source when performance matters. The fat content will be the calories you have leftover.
Let’s take a look at an example of a cyclist that weighs 220 pounds (99.7 kg), with a daily caloric intake of 2,000 calories. First, they will determine how much protein they are going to need. Using 2g/kg of body weight (recommend when training and losing weight) comes out to almost 200g of protein (or 800 calories.) The remaining 1,200 calories should focus on healthy carbohydrates. What about fats? Typically those will take care of themselves with the other foods you eat.
But what about when you workout and burn 1,000 Kjs on a ride? This is where finding out the percentages are helpful since that scale-up. Even though you are working out, you still want to keep a sensible calorie deficit. The percentages generally work out to about 44% protein, 48% carbs, and 8% fats in the example above. This is just a general guideline, so you’ll want to adjust based on what works for you.
Cycling Training Plan and Weight Loss
It’s important to remember that chasing performance is the goal. Creating a calorie deficit is mostly about your nutritional choices and off the bike activity. Your training can help you burn fat, but losing weight is only half of the w/kg metric. Let’s talk about how to balance training and weight loss.
Add Structure
When I started my weight loss journey, I was not a new cyclist, but I was new to interval training. TrainerRoad helped me take my fitness to an entirely new level and added almost 100w to my FTP. Structured training is an efficient way to create a calorie deficit and raise your fitness. Raising your FTP will allow you to burn even more calories because you are producing more power. A higher FTP means that you will complete workouts with a higher average power. More power equals more calories. It’s a win-win.
If you are new to interval training, you can use Plan Builder to create a custom training plan aligned with your goal event. It’s best to start with a low volume plan and work your way up over time. This will give you the flexibility to add low-intensity fasted rides to drive fat-burning adaptations. You can go one step further and include strength training too. Strength training will help you maintain muscle mass, improve muscle fiber recruitment, and improve overall health.
High-Intensity Intervals
The best training plans will include the intensity you need to meet the demands of your event. High-intensity workouts have an additional benefit. They increase your post-exercise oxygen consumption, which can last 24-36 hours post-workout. After VO2 Max, anaerobic, and, sprint workouts your body works to replenish fuel store, metabolize lactate, and reduce body temperature. All of this activity boosts your overall metabolism—burning more calories.
Fasted Rides and Two-A-Days
Riding in a fasted or glycogen depleted state can be another way to train your body to burn fat. These rides are limited in that they need to be short or very slow. Fasted rides are good at burning fat, but won’t elicit a large training stimulus. Just be careful to not overdo it. Extend or high-intensity fasted rides tend to catabolize muscle—something you want to avoid.
Adding a second ride with a fat-burning focus is another great tool for weight loss. You can do these either earlier or later in the same day. I used fasted and two-a-day rides continually during my weight loss. Typically I would wake up early, drink some black coffee, then complete an endurance workout, like Carter or Dans. Then I was off to work and would eat a lunch that fueled my evening, high-intensity workout. Once I got home, I’d train before a healthy dinner.
Tips to Lose Fat, Not Muscle
When you are cycling for weight loss, you want to preserve as much lean muscle mass as possible. Since lean muscle requires a lot of energy to maintain, it plays a massive role in your Basal metabolic rate.
There are three key things that you can do to preserve lean muscle mass while you are combining cycling and weight loss. First, create a sensible calorie deficit. Being too restrictive with your calories will do little to help you retain muscle.
Additionally, you are going to want to eat plenty of protein. The general recommendation for protein for endurance training and weight loss is around 2g of protein per kilogram of body weight. Eating lean proteins will help keep the calories lower while ensuring you are getting enough. If you are following a plant-based diet, you’ll likely need more than 2g/kg.
Finally, add in some strength training to help your weight loss. You don’t have to spend hours in the gym to reap some benefits. Compound lifts that work multiple muscle groups, like squats, deadlifts, and bench press, are excellent for this.
Eat Smart, Train Hard, Get Faster.
Since my weight loss, many people have asked how I did it. But I think that’s the wrong question. The how is important, but it’s the why that truly matters. Although hard at times, the methods are simple—make smart food choices and increase your activity level. The means were not my driving force. It was the end goal—I wanted to be a faster cyclist.
For more cycling training knowledge, listen to Ask a Cycling Coach — the only podcast dedicated to making you a faster cyclist. New episodes are released weekly.
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Jesse, this is awesome! Great job. Keep living healthy & please keep writing. You have such a gift for it!
Thanks for the fantastic post, I lost around 20 pounds over the last 3 months and agree with all of the strategies. As well as the embedded section of episode 239 there is a nice segment in episode 231 of the podcast that starts at 37:17. Especially useful for anyone (like me) that doesn’t quite make the arbitrary weight goal, gets despondant and starts to underfuel training. Chad’s observation that significant changes may take more than a season help to reinforce that long terms choices are best. Thanks for the work guys.
Great article Jesse, and congratulations on your weight loss and healthier lifestyle. Could agree more with your goal setting being based on healthy lifestyle hangar not weight loss. I’ve dropped almost 90# over the last two years by making small but significant changes in my eating and training for triathlons with TrainerRoad. Big fan but getting smaller over time. Thanks for the encouragement.
Thank you and congrats to you as well. Keep up the amazing work!
Chimes very much with my own approach. Slowly but surely. Give yourself 3 months to lose the weight. And beware of losing too much weight.
Not sure if this is true “Raising your FTP will allow you to burn more calories because you are producing more power.”
You will be producing more power, but for the same effort as you previously were at the lower FTP. Regardless of your FTP, riding hard intervals at or above your FTP will burn calories more than lower intensity rides. Intensity is the key, not FTP.
Hi Simon, thank you for your comment. I wanted to clarify the point about raising your FTP and burning calories. And I’ve updated the post to make this clearer.
Calories are a function of power, not intensity (percentage of FTP). Finding your energy expenditure in kilojoules (kJs) is simple. Just multiply your avg. wattage by time in seconds, then divide by 1000. A kJ is roughly equivalent to a calorie. Completing workouts with a higher FTP means the avg. power will be higher. For example, if a person completes the workout Petit with an FTP of 238 they would burn about 528kJs. The same workout with an FTP of 295 would be 657kJ. The intensity is the same, but because the average power is higher, more calories are burned.
Jesse!!!! Thank you!!! For the podcast interview. I was 285 and have been as low as 185. Now around 198. I am 50. I really needed your words. I have a ramp test tomorrow. During the past adaptation week I have been eating pretty risky. You inspired me to get the brain back on. Thank you!! I said the same thing to myself. “Will this make you faster?”
I still get the odd look from my cycling mates but when it comes down to watts. Boom I can hang just fine.
Again. Thanks!!!!
Jim
Hi All,
Thank you for this video. I recently joined the cycling community, with roughly 5-6 sessions per week (100 miles/week) at an average of 15 mph. I am 5’10” and I weigh around 190 pounds (lost 20 pounds in the past 4.5 months), but I still want/need to lose around another 20 pounds and gain speed. I am currently at 1900 calories daily (50%c/30%p/20%f) – charted through MFP daily. My weight seems to have recently stalled over the past few weeks, even after a 10 day diet break. Do you have any recommendations on calorie and macro goals with cycling as your primary exercise tool? The information for calorie goals related to road cycling is relatively bare and traditional calorie calculators do not include the level of exercise from road cycling. I am trying to determine if part of my weight loss stall is related to low calorie intake. Thank you for your insight and inspiration!
That’s a great question, and is something we definitely haven’t covered yet! Nutrition is very individualized and there seems to be no ‘one size fits all’ approach, but its certainly worth asking to be covered in the podcast! You can go to TrainerRoad.com/podcast and click ‘Ask a Question’, but in the meantime, there is a TrainerRoad Forum post here you can check out, where our athletes discuss this at length!
Thanks for this article and congratulations on your journey! I Learned a few more things to apply on my weight loss and cycling improvement journey. I haven’t done fasted rides in quite some time, so maybe I need that to help kick me in gear.
However, what I’m struggling with is caloric deficit and completing my works as prescribed by the typical Plan structure of TR. I really struggled with Sweet Spot Base 2 and had to lower my workout intensity constantly. I Just felt like I never had enough in me to push through. During the workouts, they always mention nutrition strategy, but as I am cutting back calories, I seem to be doing the opposite of what I should be doing. (Also between Sweet Spot Base 1 to 2 my FTP dropped a few watts 272 -> 268).
I was looking for a new plan or various workouts to build my own to pick things knowing I’m in a calorie deficit, but I am not sure what to do. I don’t have much time beyond the 3.5hrs/week the Sweet Spot Base needed, and I always thought you needed to spend hours on endurance rides to see any benefit. I did see a High Intensity “Maintenance Plan” and wondering if that is better for me? Or should I just space out my rides to have two rest days between to allow for more recovery on the lower calories? I am thinking of maybe just doing Sweet Spot Base 1 again.
I have been working with a sport certified nutritionist, and I am trying to get my macros at 55% carb / 25% protein / 20% fats. with a max daily calorie of around 2,500. (I started at 258lb now at 248lb). He suggested to not eat back many calories to cover workout because I would not see as much benefit due to some type of body adaptations. So, a 1.5hr Sweet Spot ride is like 900-1000cal for me, and I just don’t each much back (maybe like +100-200 cal). So, I know this is impacting me as I’m not properly fueling to build my cycling performance. The nutritionist said doing high volume and calorie deficit would be conflicting goals. (Recommended I do shorter High Intensity rides perhaps.)
Steven,
Thank you, and here are some ideas for a plan for you.
If weight loss is your primary goal, Sweet Spot Base (SSB) can be a tough go. With Sweet Spot, you have to be closely matched with your caloric intake vs. your output, and that’s hard. Some might be able to swing a 200-300Cal daily deficit and drop a bit of fat over time. But it’s a tightrope for one thing, and it risks under-fueling very metabolically demanding work for another.
SSB isn’t technically HIIT. It does eventually include high-intensity work and will ultimately start to convey the fat loss benefits that come with HIIT, but that’s not until 7 weeks into a 12-week block. Don’t expect much in the way of fat loss over the first 6 weeks unless you’re making dietary changes too, and/or you’re increasing daily activity levels in other ways.
If you want to go with HIIT, the Maintenance Low-Volume is full of high-intensity workouts. If you don’t have 3 hours a week, you can also try the Time Crunch 30 or 45 Speciality plans. They include plenty of HIIT workouts as well.
Another option would be Traditional Base, as it’s far more accommodating in metabolizing fat than SSB. Sweet Spot burns a lot of sugar, and yes, some fat, but low-intensity work is far more forgiving with running a caloric deficit and can even be done fasted or on low-glycogen stores. Low intensity rides also require minimal carbohydrate intake during reasonably short rides, especially if you have a lot to lose. This lends itself in many ways to metabolizing fat during the ride and increase your long-term ability to metabolize fat.
Traditional Base is a dream for athletes trying to adopt healthier habits for the long-term in terms of fat utilization. You can make all sorts of dietary changes & improvements (and mistakes) and probably still get through 100% of your prescribed workouts. At the same time, you can experiment and lay down new habits. I’ve learned the hard way that messing up fueling during Sweet Spot Base and you can derail progress and consistency a good bit. It’s also way easier to add strength training to Traditional Base than Sweet Spot Base, and strength training is perhaps the single best way to ditch body fat.
However, Low-Volume Traditional Base really isn’t enough volume to do much. It’s more of a rehab/recovery plan. You’d probably want to go with mid-volume, but that may not work with your time constraints. So it may be best to go with the Maintenance or Time Cruch Plans.
Jesse –
Thank you so much for the fast, detailed response! I was really debating if I was going to cancel my TR as I wasn’t sure how to try and use it best for me. Your explanations about SSB makes a lot of sense, and I definitely have been feeling the side effects of poor nutrition.
I will investigate the Maintenance HIIT Plans (Low Volume or Time Crunch) and see what that is like. I also will look over the Traditional Base Med Vol to see what the time commitment would be. Lastly, I think I might try tow-a-days with a really easy fasted workout (like recommended in your post) in the morning (assuming I can get up early enough). If I want to do a longer fasted ride, I assume stay in the endurance zone? That is, don’t do HIIT workout without fueling first.
And looks like I need to find some strength training that I can do at home. I did find the TR blog post on some of the basics so will try those out.
Thanks again for the fast response and guidance!
You’re welcome! And for the fasted rides, it’s a good idea to start slow when adding fasted rides to your training. You can give it a try by adding Dans to your calendar. Once you feel comfortable, you can increase the duration, but keep the intensity low with Lazy Mountain. We always recommend having fuel onboard for high-intensity workouts. Personally, I find that if I don’t fuel a hard workout, I’ll be battling hunger the rest of the day.