cantdrv55

I mean are you still eating bread, meat and cheese and losing weight? I tried eating more veggies but that stuff makes me gag. Only salads with thousand island dressing (all that sugar) is appetizing to me. I give up. Guess I'm going to have to ride waaay more to really lose weight. Good thing I enjoy it.

If you are still eating real food, how much riding do you do to keep your weight down?

crtreedude 

Yes, I eat regular food - and I have dropped weight - over the last 8 years or so I have dropped pretty close to 90 lbs. I do watch quantity of food and I commute on a bike - the last is the most significant factor.

I don't pile on the fat and sugar, just a reasonable amount.

vic32amg

well lately I have tried something new. since the winter I have been riding like a mad man and have lost very little weight. Although Im not watching my eating as well as I could. I do notice changes in physical apperance but overall weight loss has been minimal. don't know why. I certainly look skinnier. But no significant loss of weight. I am riding about 5-6 days a week a minimum of 30 high intensity miles each ride. I try to throw in a recovery ride every now and then. but my body wants to go full throttle. BTW i am 6'1' 175 lbs.

deanp

In the last year I have lost about 50 lbs without changing much to my diet. I have been riding about 250 miles a month.

bigskymacadam

the only way for me to gain weight is to lift weights. i can eat a lot; but don't gain weight.

aham23

what real food? what kind of fake foods are you eating?

i dropped 60 lbs in one year eating healthy lean meats, veggies, bread, pasta, and so on. it can be done if you control your portions and eat the good stuff. later.

HardyWeinberg

What do you mean by real food? bread, meat, cheese for every meal? I don't do that, but I do have 2 sandwiches for lunch pretty much every day (canned tuna or salmon w/ mayo on whole wheat). Meat (mammal) and cheese show up at least weekly but probably not daily. I am about 2 wks into looking at fitday.com it claims, to the extent that I am telling it the truth, that I am eating about 60/20/20 carbs/protein/fat.

My commute is 13 miles/day, not enough to get me to lose weight. I started diligently adding in extra rides while focusing on eating less last September (extend trip in or home, go riding at lunch time) and definitely started losing weight. Weight loss slowed, and I started really ramping up the riding (which also required ramping up some eating), to the point that I am trying to do 35 miles a weekday, schedule permitting, and am still (barely) losing weight. I am down 40# since last Aug, 5# more to go, I tell myself.

Actually at 3500 Cal/pound that works out to about 600 Cal more burned than eaten per day since 1 Sep, so while it seems like weight loss has slowed, in the big picture it does work out to a pretty even and believable rate overall.

aikigreg

Ok, reread that sentence you just wrote and realize you're not likely going to be healthy. Ever. Change your habits.

If you want to train your body to like veggies, try going on the Velocity Diet by Chris Shugart for a month. barring that, you can try Mario Dipasquale's Anabolic Diet.

You sound just like most of the people I turn away as clients. I'd rather not make money. "I want to lose 50 pounds, coach, but I'm not willing to give up that 2 liter of soda or the cheesecake I eat every day. Oh, and I refuse to eat anything that isn't fried, too."

crtreedude 

Real food is not junk food - it is good food. This doesn't say there is no cheese or anything, just that you need good food. You can be thin and malnourished and even fat and malnourished. Learn to enjoy eating good stuff - but it doesn't mean you have to give up taste.

But you do have to learn to educate your taste buds a bit. You can almost always eat more than you use - somewhere you have to learn control.

cantdrv55

OK, seriously now, my problem isn't the meat and cheese part, it's the bun. I am addicted to bread. I've given up white, enriched flour but I need bread. Switching to 100% whole grain wheat has not helped me lose any weight. It's been at least six months since I consumed a donut, PB& J on white bread or any kind of sugar loaded carb. So I have changed my habits quite a bit. Still not losing weight. Also, I do spin classes 3-4X/wk plus ride 30 or so miles on Sat or Sun.

The last time I lost a significant amount of weight was when I gave up all bread all together. That was hard and the second I started eating bread again, the pounds rushed back.

crtreedude 

Bread has a huge amount of calories for volume - for example, for me for a meal, 2 slices of bread is all I would need for carbs usually - perhaps a touch more, but not a lot. The problem is that you could easily sit down and polish off a loaf of french bread. You are talking really concentrated stuff.

noisebeam

yeah i eat real food, pizza, BBQ ribs, fish &chips, french fries, burger, etc.

actually i do moderate those, but for bad fat reasons, not calories. and of course I eat lots of fruit and veggies too.

my weight went down on this diet, but leveled off at health level, if I stop cycling i gain, cycle again and it goes down.

Al

CastIron

Same plan, same results. No need for special 'diet' or 'health' foods.

SSP

Sounds like your definition of "real food" is limited to "high calorie density / low nutrient density" foods. That makes your odds of success pretty low.

SSP

If you're not losing weight with your current food and exercise routine, you have three options:

1) Eat a Little Less

2) Exercise a Little More

3) Do some of both.

Given your current exercise routine, I suspect that you need to take a hard look at how many calories go into your pie hole each day. Finding a few hundred calories that you can forgo each day should jump-start your weight loss.

silk

You need to do some research on weight loss to understand what is going on inside your body.

Here is what is going on in your case.

1. High Intense training will burn less fat over a slower pace
2. You are burning fat and replacing that with muscle which does weight more lb for lb
3. 6.1 @ 175 is amazing, your in great shape already!

You need more recovery days and turn down the intensity to burn some more fat.

SSP

That's a myth. Higher intensity exercise burns more calories per minute than lower intensity exercise. Since most of us are limited in terms of time, higher intensity exercise works better for weight loss for most folks.

FWIW, weight loss is not about "burning fat"...it's about burning more calories than you take in.

"Lb for lb", they're the same. On a "volume" basis muscle does weight more than fat, but most folks don't build up enough muscle mass through training for this to be an issue.

Agreed.

Strongly disagree.

PhattTyre

I've been riding a lot so far this year in preparation for a 100 mile mtb race in July. So far I've logged about 1500 road miles and 500 off-road. I've lost 5 pounds and I'm down to 140 at 5'9.5" tall. I have to eat "real food" like a pig to keep above 140. My personal favorites have been chicken and pasta, burritos, and lots of nachos with lots of cheese, about 3-4 big plates a week. I think I'm eating at least 1000 more calories a day than I was before the training, and it should probably be more because I'm still slowly losing weight.

When I'm not training for anything and just riding for fun I find that an average of an hour a day lets me eat normal foods. I tend to keep sugar to a minimum and I drink very few calories every day. When I was 21-22 my diet was crap, matabolism slowed, and I started feeling like crap, so I started to pay attention to what I was eating and drinking every day. The big killer seemed to be sugar and it came mostly from drinks. I quit drinking soda, started drinking better fruit juices, and stopped putting sugar or cream in my coffee. It cut about 400-600 calories out of my diet every day and normal foods started tasting sweeter (if you don't drink soda, fruit tastes super sweet). These days I only drink water, black coffee, and beer on a regular basis, which still puts my daily liquid calories a few hundred less than they used to be.

Basically I found that if I didn't drink my calories and ride at least 5 hours a week it didn't really matter if I had 1000 island dressing on my salad.

Psydotek

I ate normally (good/bad/fast/junk food) over the last year and lost 3-4% of my bodyweight since i added cycling and triathlon training to my lifestyle. (i dropped 5 lbs from 135-130) I was 125 lbs during college which was about 5 years ago.

Carbonfiberboy 

My wife is an incredible cook, I'm a little long in the tooth, and we eat (she keeps track) about 14 servings of fruit or vegetables per day. So I really put it away. Plus bread, pancakes, pasta, all the yummy things. We don't eat dessert unless we have company. I never drink soft drinks, just some beer occasionally. I ride 100-200 miles per week pretty much year-round, plus we hike one day a week in the summer, and sometimes snowshoe in the winter. I gain a few pounds in the winter and lose it in the spring. I'm down about 5 pounds now, and will lose another 5 by August. That's just the effect of increased mileage. No diet changes.

If you don't like real food, buy a couple of vegetarian cookbooks. For some reason, I find vegetarian food tastier. Meat can really blow the other flavors away, and it can be so greasy. Give me olive oil any day.

Anyway, I'd say if you ride 150 miles/week or so, you'll lose weight, get bigger legs, and enjoy your food, all three together. Just don't eat fast food, don't drink soft drinks, and don't drink alcohol every night.

skinny

I eat regular food. Baked pasta, stir fried vegies, real butter, yogurt, cheese, fruit, nuts, fish, etc.... I lose weight by controlling portions. I'm 5'11" and weigh 165lbs. I can lose 2-3 pounds in two weeks simply by making very minor changes in portion sizes. First establish a base diet of good food you like. then maintain that diet for a significant period and see how your weight is. Set the portions as you like them and maintain that weight for a while. Then work from there by reducing portions or eliminating items. Consistency is very important and you must like what you eat.

If you impulse shop or eat, this will definitely not work. Cheers.

babydee

To lose weight:

1) as has been said, slowly train your body to like decent food (you will be able to eat lots of it if you train right)

2) cardio - bicycling uses tons'o'calories, and you need extra protein to repare your muscles, so lo-fat sources are "freebie" foods

3) weights - building muscle mass takes a great deal of energy, and then the muscle burns energy while you read a book...again, the extra protein requirement means lean sources are freebies

You don't have to spend lots of time lifting or bulk up to benefit from weights, either (even if you happen to have genes that predispose you to it). Just a modest workout where you take one set per major body part to failure (i.e. you push that weight up until you literally reach the point where you fail) once a week will benefit you quite a bit. Throw in cycling and reasonable food with adequate protein and vitamins, and losing weight is a certainty.

The other great thing is that cycling burns more calories the more you need them off, as your weight increases the effort.

Machka 

I eat whatever I want to eat in whatever quantities I want to eat it ... and I always lose weight in the summer.

Carbonfiberboy 

Is "always" still the operative word? Hope your doc had something useful to say.

AnthonyG

I've lost a bit of weight recently eating a real food diet that contains lots of animal fats and very little carbs. I've leveled out a bit recently but I only need to loose say 3-4 kg more anyway.

Something I discovered recently is that there are 2 nutrients that play very important roles in my weight loss and without them I could try as hard as I like and I wasn't going to loose weight. One of them was omega 3 fish oil and the other is Magnesium. Omega 3 fish oil realy helps my body to work in a fat burning mode. The reccomended dose is 6 x 1000 mg capsules a day but that's just a minimum. I take 15-20 a day. Magnesium is an essential mineral for fat burning. If you lost a bit of weight a while ago you would have likely depleted your bodies stores of it and without sufficient magnesium you will not lose weight. You will know you are taking too much magnesium when you have loose bowel movements so gradualy increase your dose untill you reach that point and then reduce the dose again. Magnesium is also required for the proper digestion of carbohydrates and it has a benificial effect on your mood. Its an important muscle relaxer. See, https://www.healthy.net/asp/templates...Article&ID=541

EDIT: Ohh and the other thing is that you have to be not totaly obsesed about what the scales read. At some point you start putting on more muscle weight than you are losing in fat so I watch my waist line as well. As long as my belt is getting smaller and not larger its OK.

Regards, Anthony