Lose Weight Bike Commuting

After starting a new job at a car dealership, Chris Legarreta went from being an active store manager to a deskbound consultant.

“I was commuting 70 miles a day and spending 9 hours behind a desk, eating snacks from the vending machine, ” he says—and packed on about 100 pounds in a year and a half.

He didn’t realize just how large he had gotten until the fall of 2017, when a friend tagged him in an Instagram photo.

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“I was absolutely ashamed, ” he says. He’d hit 305 pounds. And it wasn’t just his weight that was suffering—he had also recently ended a relationship and his finances were a mess. “I looked around and realized that had completely given up on myself, ” he says.

In January of 2018. with the miles from his commute adding up, Legarreta began searching for a new car that he could drive to the train station. That’s when a work buddy suggested he buy a bike instead. Legarreta wavered at first, but eventually gave in and decided to ride the train partway and bike the rest. Along the way, he developed a love of mountain biking.

Soon after he started cycling, Legarreta signed up for a weight loss competition at work—and came in second place. In the past, he’d tried a number of different diets. “I tried to go from zero to keto in a week. Every time I tried something, it didn’t work out, ” he says. This time, I began taking a more active role in taking care of myself. “I started to look at food kind of like money. It became like budgeting. If football was at night, I knew I had to eat lighter that day since I was going to eat like crap that night. If I knew I had a riding trip coming up, that week was more light, and I tried to drink more water, since riding all weekend would definitely dehydrate me.” Once he saw that the weight was coming off, he had even more motivation to keep at it. Today, he weighs 205 pounds.

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On weekends, Legarreta goes out with a local riding group. “The guys at work were noticing that I was riding to work every day. They kept telling me I should come out with them but I was embarrassed and didn’t think I could keep up, ” he says. It wasn’t until a friend convinced him to go on a ride (“no judgement, just ride!”) that he took the plunge. “I just about died and had to walk up most of the hills, ” he says, but thanks him now “After that, I was hooked.” He looked up cycling Facebook pages and reddit groups. “When I start a hobby, I like to talk to like-minded people, so I always look for forums or groups to join. That also keeps him training hard. “I want to be able to keep up with my friends on gnarly climbs and bomb down mountains with speed and agility.”

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Hulk Hogan Feels Healthier Than Ever at 69 This Guy Changed His Mindset and Dropped 43 Pounds Pickleball Helped This Guy Drop 70 Pounds How This Guy Lost 16 Percent of His Body FatEvan Hoffmeier, 29, of Sioux City, Iowa is really clear about one thing. He was not interested in riding a bike. “To be as frank as possible I did not want to buy a bike, but my wife Kelsey was adamant that she thought it could be fun.”

At 375 pounds, Evan could think of little that sounded less fun. He was a former offensive line guard at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. It was his job to eat, get big, and block.

“The coaches wanted us around 300 to 315 pounds on the line, ” Hoffmeier says. “I would use whey protein after football practice and workouts and then go eat a large order of food, whatever the college buffet was that day, usually hamburgers or some type of pasta. Keeping weight up was no problem whatsoever for me.”

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Immediately after college, he dialed back his diet and got to 285, but then life happened. “Once out in the real world, I went back to my old eating habits. I was also making more money, so I was eating out all the time. Between 2011, when I graduated to last year, I went from 285 to 375 pounds. I knew I needed to get healthier Christmas of 2016 when my wife bought me a 4XL Under Armour sweatshirt and it didn’t fit.”

But riding a bike? Nah. The last time he rode a bike he was 13. And even then, it wasn’t for fun; it was to get to his buddies’ houses and back. “It wasn’t something I ever wanted to do.”

But Kelsey Hoffmeier, 26, was persistent. They already had the bikes. She’d pressed him to get a bike with her in 2016, a Specialized Expedition he picked up at Albrecht Cycle Shop in Sioux City, which he’d turned in just three weeks later for a Specialized Crossroads, realizing he needed more than seven gears to make riding the hills in Iowa possible, let alone fun. She got a Giant hybrid. But the bikes sat, mostly unused, for the better part of a year. He just wasn’t interested.

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Finally in the spring of 2017, after they had both been going to the gym for a couple of months, Hoffmeier’s wife persuaded him to give riding a shot. “I just knew he would enjoy it because we both enjoy being outside, and it would help change the way we viewed ‘working out, ’” she says.

He agreed to try. “The gym gets old, and I realized it was a good way to not be in the gym and still get exercise, ” he says.

They started out slowly, alternating riding days with gym days. They just went a few miles at a time, gradually increasing their mileage as their muscle and butt soreness decreased and their fun factor increased.

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“As the weight started coming off, it became even more fun, ” Hoffmeier says. “You can feel yourself changing. Riding wasn’t a chore. It became a hobby, or actually an obsession. The miles started going up and the rides became fun, and then the rides became more frequent. What seriously helped us out the most was when we would get out and do 12 to 15 miles we always had the ‘bikers high, ’ where we were tired, but it felt great.”

It was time to take it to the next level. Hoffmeier had only lost 10 or 15 pounds at that point, but again with some persuasion from his wife, he realized that if they wanted to fully engage this new sport, they needed the right tools for the job. That meant heading back to the bike shop and trading in the hybrid fitness bikes for road machines.

“We wanted to go faster, so we wanted lighter weight bikes that would be easier to ride. We decided to do road bikes, and take it seriously because we enjoyed it so much. That is not something I thought I would ever say. I did not think I would enjoy biking.”

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He picked up a Specialized Allez Elite. At 365 pounds, Hoffmeier was technically over the 300 pound weight limit for the bike—“I learned that later on Reddit, ” he says—but he never had trouble beyond a broken spoke. Contrary to popular advice that he’d need a bigger, more supportive bike seat, Hoffmeier went with the saddle that came on the bike after the shop measured his sit bones to be sure it was the right fit.

“My butt hurt after a few rides, but it got better, and it was nothing like the original Expedition that has a huge padded seat. I

Now they ride three or four days a week, 10 to 25 miles a pop, and hit the gym on days they don’t ride. What Evan is clear that they

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“I do not train on the bike at all. I had to change my mindset on that. When I first started, I had this notion that I had to ‘power through’ and just try to finish. But that makes it a workout—a chore, ” he says. “When I see biking as spending more time with my wife, that makes it fun and enjoyable. We’re not doing intervals or just hills or just trying to go as fast as we can. We literally go out and enjoy the ride. We enjoy the nature and the scenery and time with each other. That makes it a better workout for me, because I want to do more miles and the more miles you do, the