$20 gas gets me much, much, much further than $20 in eating high carb prepared food when riding my bike between point A and B. Not fuel efficient, in fact, energy expensive, but it is over all cheaper than a car if you can handle the potential physical abuse of riding a quarter mile up hill to your house.
I did this last year while my car was in the shop, I learned I lived at the top of a hill, in the middle of a valley. Lost around 14lbs in a week just running errands, and I was carb loading like crazy. Carbs, meat, sugars, and tons of water. Riding a bike is all laughs and giggles until you’re doing it to get meat and milk to fuel your required errands and despite eating everything in sight you’re still losing weight at a shocking pace… They had my car a month, I was able to hold out on most errands until around just before the final week, went from 179, to 165. Kept eating as I felt I needed and was back up to 175 in about a week after getting my car back, and with recent exercise and pushing myself I dropped to 169 while increasing my max weight, it’s really only surprising when you find I was 280ish lbs just 6 yrs ago… I digress, bikes are tough on the body.
$20 gas gets me much, much, much further than $20 in eating high carb prepared food when riding my bike between point A and B.
Let’s see. Assuming:
Gasoline costs $3/gallon
A car gets 30 miles per gallon
That works out to where $20 buys 6.7 gallons or 200 miles.
Assuming cycling burns 50 calories per mile, you’re looking at 10,000 calories of excess energy usage to travel 200 miles.
At 1700 calories per pound for dry pasta or dry rice, that’s about 5.8 lbs of pasta or rice, probably less than $10 in most places.
Or course, people eat other things, and will likely increase their consumption of everything in a ratio proportional to their increased caloric needs, not just adding carbs to some kind of baseline amount of food for their BMR, so I wouldn’t expect it to be that cheap in real life. But there’s a little bit of wiggle room to work with for anyone cooking their meals at home.
$20 gas gets me much, much, much further than $20 in eating high carb prepared food when riding my bike between point A and B. Not fuel efficient, in fact, energy expensive, but it is over all cheaper than a car if you can handle the potential physical abuse of riding a quarter mile up hill to your house. I did this last year while my car was in the shop, I learned I lived at the top of a hill, in the middle of a valley. Lost around 14lbs in a week just running errands, and I was carb loading like crazy. Carbs, meat, sugars, and tons of water. Riding a bike is all laughs and giggles until you’re doing it to get meat and milk to fuel your required errands and despite eating everything in sight you’re still losing weight at a shocking pace… They had my car a month, I was able to hold out on most errands until around just before the final week, went from 179, to 165. Kept eating as I felt I needed and was back up to 175 in about a week after getting my car back, and with recent exercise and pushing myself I dropped to 169 while increasing my max weight, it’s really only surprising when you find I was 280ish lbs just 6 yrs ago… I digress, bikes are tough on the body.
Let’s see. Assuming:
That works out to where $20 buys 6.7 gallons or 200 miles.
Assuming cycling burns 50 calories per mile, you’re looking at 10,000 calories of excess energy usage to travel 200 miles.
At 1700 calories per pound for dry pasta or dry rice, that’s about 5.8 lbs of pasta or rice, probably less than $10 in most places.
Or course, people eat other things, and will likely increase their consumption of everything in a ratio proportional to their increased caloric needs, not just adding carbs to some kind of baseline amount of food for their BMR, so I wouldn’t expect it to be that cheap in real life. But there’s a little bit of wiggle room to work with for anyone cooking their meals at home.