Is exercising to lose weight a losing proposition?

Sorry about the pun. According to Wikipedia: A human being traveling on a bicycle at 16–24 km/h (10–15 mph), using only the power required to walk, is the most energy-efficient means of human transport generally available.  Just how energy efficient is the bicycle?

The LiveStrong web site has an article, Calories Burned Biking One Miledetailing how many calories one burns riding a bike. Looking at the numbers from that source and others sources as well, you can get a rough estimate of number of calories burned riding a bike. Depending how much you weigh and how fast you ride you are going to expend anywhere from @ 30 to 60 calories per mile riding a bike. For ease of computation let’s use an average of 45 calories per mile of bike riding.

Add two other factoids:  There are 31,500 food calories in a gallon of gas, and there are 3500 calories in a pound of fat.

A human would have burn off nine pounds of fat to equal to the calories in a gallon of gas, and burning calories at 45 calories per mile, could travel 700 miles. Biking is very efficient miles-per-calorie-wise biking, and exercise in general, do not burn that many calories.  You’d better of concentrating on eating less to lose that fat.

This NYT article, To Lose Weight, Eating Less Is Far More Important Than Exercising More discusses the subject in more detail.

High Intensity Strength training on the other hand effectively burns calories four ways  High intensity strength training is the type of personal training we do at Austin Fitness Training and at New Orleans Personal Training.