I did my first post a couple of weeks ago, hoping to inspire at least one person. The reception was better than expected. So today, I want to share a bit more about my health and weight loss journey of cycling regularly on Zwift.
It’s been a rewarding, eye-opening experience, and I learned a lot along the way that might help others who are trying hard to shed some weight or event just thinking about trying it.
Here’s some key take away that worked for me…
1. Set Small, Achievable Goals
It’s easy to get demotivated when you think about the long-term goal (losing X kg). Especially the first days when your butt hurts so much and you can’t do more than 13 km without feeling like dying.
What helped me was breaking it down into smaller weekly or monthly goals. For example, I set weekly goals like completing 5 rides or riding 10 hours and made sure to reach those consistently. I also had non-scale goals like completing every Zwift route, which is a daily motivation for me to collect all those badges.
These small goals kept me motivated and gave me a sense of accomplishment.
2. Fuel Your Rides Properly
One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was under-eating because I was too focused on cutting calories.
It didn’t take long to realize this was counterproductive. I felt like shit before, during, and after my rides. My performance started to dip after 3 weeks.
Riding burns calories. Your body needs the right nutrients to keep up.
Once I started focusing on what I was eating instead of just how much, I noticed big improvements in both my energy levels and weight loss progress.
I balanced my meals.
Pre-ride snacks, like a banana or protein shake, became a staple for energy.
3. Leverage the Power of Community
I thought cycling was a solitary activity, but the Zwift community changed that for me. Participating in group rides and races kept me motivated, and, most importantly, made it fun. Having people to ride with gave me the push I needed on days when I felt less motivated and seeing someone passing me in a race always makes my legs go faster. I love competition a little bit too much!
Plus, receiving kudos and seeing others’ progress on Strava pushed me to keep improving!
4. Consistency Over Intensity
At the start, I was overwhelmed thinking I had to be super fast to see results.
I quickly learned that consistency mattered far more than intensity.
Rather than going all out every ride, I focused on showing up every day or as often as possible, even for shorter rides. Some days were easy recovery rides, others were harder efforts, but the most important thing was that I stayed consistent. The hardest part of a habit is often just starting the action, so just sitting on the saddle was a good way for me to make sure to stay consistent.
5. Track Your Progress and Celebrate Small Wins
Strava is my best friend for tracking progress.
I log every ride, and it became a habit to review my stats afterward. It wasn’t just about calories burned or distance covered. It was about noticing improvements in my Watts, RPM, and elevation. Seeing even minor improvements kept me going. Whether it was hitting a new PR on a route or losing a kg, acknowledging those victories made the larger goal seem more achievable.
6. Embrace the Ups and Downs
There were days when I didn’t feel like riding, or when the weight didn’t come off as fast as I had hoped.
But I learned to embrace those moments and not let them derail my overall progress. I realized that the journey is rarely linear. There will be highs and lows, and that’s okay.
What’s important is to keep showing up and not let a bad day or a missed ride turn into a bad week. Progress is built over time, and setbacks are just a part of the process even if this is hard for a mind to assimilate .
7. Having a Reliable Partner In Crime
This might be the part that looks like a forced ad placement from my girlfriend, but it is not, I swear.
I had the chance to start this journey with my girlfriend. Without her, I don’t think it would have been possible. To have someone around you to give you the extra motivation you need to accomplish your goal is mandatory in my case.
When I was in my lows, she was there to remind me to jump on the saddle and make the kms number grows bigger. Shootout to her!
I hope this helps anyone starting their fitness journey. Feel free to ask me anything or share your tips to our amazing community!
Great write up! Any suggestions on how to figure out calorie/nutrition requirements and good ways to stick to them?
Creatine 5 gm per day for muscles and power, 10 if you want cognitive benefits. Electrolytes
I would suggest that you figure out what your balance between your input and output needs to be. Eg If you want to lose weight, you need to create a deficit such that you expend more energy than you ingest. If you are happy with your weight and don’t want to gain/lose weight the cals in and out need to be equivalent.
apps like Zwift, Strava and TP will tell you what you have expended on the bike. You also need to get some estimate of your Basal metabolic rate and basal calorie needs. Weighing scales (eg from Garmin) can give you this. The two numbers give your your daily need in cals.
A food tracking app like my fitness pal can really help you be honest about what you are consuming.
Using this method – knowing my basal and my output cals per day and balancing them against my input cals, I have gone from 80 to 67 kg. I have been doing 3-4 weekly bike rides (some very high intensity intervals and a weekly long – 80-100 zone 2 ride) in addition, I do 1-2 weight training sessions of 45 min in a small group.
Keeping my daily deficit goal (the difference between cals out and cals in) at 200-300 cals I have not been really hungry or hangry, my rides are well fuelled and often very hard, the weights are improving my strength, and the weight loss is really manageable at about 500g per week.
One final point, you need to make sure you get plenty of protein eg 1.6-2g per kg body weight.
Hope this helps?
I applaud you, this is really quite wow and inspirational. Well done!
Merci pour ton partage Jonathan ! Tu as raison sur bien des points 🙂
De mon côté, j’ai aussi découvert Zwift et je ne peux plus m’en passer depuis 2 ans.
Les sorties en groupe et les courses sont vraiment le point clé de Zwift, bien plus que les entraînements programmés qui sont beaucoup moins motivants à mon goût.
Au plaisir de te lire 😉
Thanks for sharing! I did read your post last week when I was just about to buy a Kickr Core and delve into Zwifting myself.
Right now I just set everything up using my mountain bike, but I’ll definitely get that 300€ Triban bike you also use in the future – Pure genius, especially since cheap brakes/tyres on a road bike like this don’t matter one bit on Zwift 😉 Thanks for the idea!
Keep it up!
I’m using a hybrid MTB … before you spend €300 on a cheap bike, get the Zwift Play controllers which are much cheaper. They say you can only fit them on dropped handlebars but you can fit them to bar-ends on straight bars. It is a bit of a bodge, but you’ll get Virtual shifting which will give you 24 gears and keep you chain in-line and straight.
Well done & keep going. I started something similar but on a different cycling app. It was hard work at first so I started an 8 week training course, designed to improve your FTP, and I’ve found it to be excellent.
As a very long term marathoner I was used to about 100 calories/mile as the rule of thumb. When I switched to cycling about 5 years ago I was surprised to find that as cyclists the rule of thumb is about 500 calories per hour. In my case I was burning fewer calories per hour cycling than I had running. Had to watch my intake to maintain weight. Others can weigh in.
Um… No. Depending on your conversion efficiency, it’s about 3.5 (25%) to 4.1 Cal/Whr (21%). At the upper end, pushing for an hour at 300 W will burn over 1200 Cal/hr while a 200 W zone 2 effort will burn at least 700 Cal/hr. Assuming you’re at least a somewhat experienced athlete and have zone 2 in excess of 3 W/kg, I suppose you might be able to burn as little as 500 Cal/hr at zone 2 if you weigh less than about 47 kg. However the fact that you were burning more calories while running suggests that you might be doing cycling wrong; peak powers should be about the same or slightly favor the cyclist.
Cycling burns less calories than running, fact
“If you weight less than 47kg” are we talking about a kid or an adult here ?!? And it is well known that running burn more calories than cycling.
I just started zwifting daily to reduce anxiety and loose the beer tire. What works for me is playing video games while on the long rides.
I play fortnite… 70 minutes is nothing in zone 2
Things I have learned:
– You can’t lose weight while racing (calorie needs are too much). Lose the weight and then think about racing.
– If you stop cycling regularly for any reason, you will still have the appetite of a regular cyclist. Thus begins a different battle to keep the weight off and limit intake.
Keep in mind that to ‘lose’ a pound you need to burn 3300 calories more than you take in. Losing weight without crash dieting is a marathon not a sprint. It takes time, consistency and discipline. For most it’s also a lifestyle change but it’s worth every pedal stroke. P
So happy to see someone taking up the torch. I loved, loved, loved hosting group workouts. Even just a group ride is a very worthy goal. Join a few existing groups to better learn what’s needed. Then consider what role you can create.
Subscription jumped from £9.99 a month to £17.99 a month, gave me the motivation I needed to cancel my subscription and jump back on my real bike.
I’ve never looked back
Check out https://drumuri.bike for an interesting alternative for inside riding. A bit flakey, but I have covered about 1000 virtual kilometers using it.
Take a look at the combination of Strava and VeloViewer, if you’ve found the notion of “riding every Zwift course” to be motivating.
Happy to walk you through what this means over a call, ping me.
Well written article! We are blessed to have Zwift in our lives. I feel the convenientcy (sp) of Zwift is a major plus.
If you’re shouting out your GF like that, here’s a little pro tip: time to put a ring on it! 😀