carpediemracing 

Lose weight first. Go through the New Year's stuff before you start training hard.

I went on a pretty militant diet 2009-2010, goal was in the 1600-1900 cal range daily. Went from 183 in mid Oct (I was well over 190 lbs in March) to as low as 148 or something in late Dec, most of my weigh ins were in the low 150s. Gained about 5 lbs before the season started, stopped counting seriously when I went to my then-annual SoCal training camp in January, 2-3 weeks of "ride as much as possible". I don't have my training data handy but I think I did a 30+ hour week in SoCal that year. Stupid big hours.

For food I'm okay with repetition. Therefore I'd cook something controllable (jar of sauce, known quantity of chicken), portion into 4 or 5 meals with known quantity of carbs (rice/pasta). I filled with a lot of veggies. For me it was canned green beans, easy to add, easy to count. Seltzer. Coffee with very little sugar and peppermint to add flavor. Salads with chicken and virtually no dressing. Snacks were generally very controlled, I don't remember what now, but a little bit of jam on bread or something. I was pretty heavy on carbs.

I had days where at 9 PM I was looking at only 900 cal consumed so I'd eat something relatively big to make up for it. I had a number of 1200 cal days. I'd hit my target (1800 or whatever) and feel guilty. It seemed like my weight came off in stages, I'd plateau, lose, plateau, lose.

I tried not to count training calories. There were net zero days, where I'd eat say 1800 cal (and I counted it as such) but I rode easy for a few hours and ended up with close to zero net calories.

It took about 4 days of being a bit wobbly to get into the low-sugar mode. Then I operated in sort of a low-power setting. Always cold. Tired. A bit edgy.

I slowly ramped up the food in December when we went to FL for family. I was so paranoid of gaining weight at first. I totally see how people get eating disorders.

In 2015 I did something similar but this time I cut sugar out as much as possible, ditto carbs to some level. Again, about 4-5 days where I was a bit shaky, but after that I felt pretty good. Much smoother overall with the sugar cut, no shakiness, no weird bonking, no weird taste in my mouth from I don't know what, like starving or whatever. At a lot of chicken. I only got down to about 160 lbs, but I did it only for about 2 months. Participated in a VO2Max/core experiment that was all of 3+3 weeks long, blasted out of the gates with a great for me 218w FTP, won my first non-sick race about 2/3 of the way through the VO2Max experiment (in other words very little training), and then life changed and things went downhill from June.

In late 2015 I had a diabetic scare. A1C was pretty high for a non-diabetic (6.5%). I started in on an Atkins kind of diet just to reduce carbs/sugar. Incredibly I went from about 175/178 to about 163 lbs in about 2 months. I think I spiked my cholesterol a bit as I was sometimes eating 3 steaks a week just for breakfast (and black coffee). It was much more fun eating like that, but the reality is that it wasn't really good for me. 5.9%? or something like that now, so it's better, but my cholesterol went up.

The core helped. No crunches. It was stuff on a foam cylinder (6" diameter, 3 feet long, you lay on it lengthwise, do stuff), some side plank kind of stuff, I have a link if you're interested. Did it 2x a day plus after every ride. I have a bad back so it helps.