Paul, if I am doing 50 miles at 300 watts that isn’t any different than running for two hours. You can set whatever level of intensity you want for the duration. 50 miles a day all out will wear out even olympic athletes. Source: I work with olympic athletes and time trial champions

Sure, 50 miles a day @ 300W is not much different than running for 2 hours at a sub-7min/mile pace.

But most people cycling 50 miles are not generating 300W continuously, and most people running for 2 hours are not doing a sub-7min pace for the duration.

ps. I have run for 2 hours at a sub-7 min pace, and cycled 50 miles at about 280W.

I successfully lost weight at only twenty miles a day. Now... For a time, that also included Queen Anne Hill, in Seattle. So a decent amount of climbing. Still, I could lose weight easily while biking.

I lost weight on 15-20 miles per day as well.

Also have lost a bunch of weight (or at least replaced fat with muscle) from just doing 10-15 minutes of PT exercises (strength training, stretching, and yoga) plus walking an extra mile or two per day.

I ride 20-25 miles a day on a stationary bike, at about 20-25mph steady rate. It burns a bit over 1000 calories during the hour. It's more than enough to make a significant change, especially when paired with a half hour of weights.

Depends. I can do 15 miles at a leisurely pace on a social ride and not burn very many calories. I can do those same 15 miles at a fast pace and burn 2-3x as many calories. And then you can throw in some hills too.

I lost 80 pounds over the last couple years with riding average of 12 miles a day.

Are you sure about those numbers? Running is about 1kcal/km/kg of body weight. For cycling to be 5x as efficient you would only need 14kcal/km for 70kg man. I don't think it's realistic. The numbers I've seen are closer to 25kcal/km.

It has very little to do with distance. I lose weight much faster with hiit than riding long distance.

"much faster" is ambiguous here. Ride 150 miles a day every day for a week, don't over-eat, and you will lose much more weight than you ever could from HIIT. On the other hand, that's a lot of hours, and HIIT will easily win in terms of weight-loss per unit time.

How is it ambiguous. You clearly understood I meant calories burned per unit time.

The ambiguity is what unit of time you care about. With HIIT you lose more weight per minute of exercise you do. With a lot of LISS you can lose more weight per week than you could with HIIT.

Understood, but the parent I responded to was talking about efficiency so I thought that was the context.

In my experience I'm not so sure about that either. I can't repeat centuries day after day when I am out of shape and need to lose weight. If one can, it's very unlikely he/she needs to lose weight.

Paul, you can lose all of your weight without working out at all!

You don't know anything about my weight! :))

For sure. But the discussion going on here (and in TFA) is the balance between weight loss via exercise and weight loss via lower calorie consumption.

Or live somewhere where you can climb hills on the way to the grocery store... : )