Being fit does not always equal healthy body weight. Diet is your best friend if you want to lose weight. Riding burns calories, but if you eat more than you burn in a day then you'll be storing fat. You can lose fat and maintain body weight during training but the gut is the last place us guys are going to lose it. Also, riding on a road bike puts you in a position that pushes out your gut when breathing, so if you've got a bit of a beer belly then it's exaggerated on a road bike and skin tight lycra.
Pro road bikers spend bugger all time in the gym. And excess upper body mass just slows them down. Us mountain bikers are a different story. Look at Nino Schuter in the gym, super buff and he's as XC as it gets. Enduro and DH guys really need that upper body mass. But even these buff DH guys at 6ft tall are still only pushing 70-80kg. Roadies at that height are low 60s and thin as a rake.
Riding around that endurance zone is not building your fitness. The more you train in higher zones, then the more watts or higher power your endurance zone becomes. At the start of the year 200w was my lactate threshold. After 6 months of pretty hard training that's now 267w and guess what, I can now push 200w with my mouth closed.
I think the take away from this is, e-bikes suck and you'd be better off on a normal bike and working to get fit rather than making excuses. Have some self respect e-bikers!
