procrit

For me, the slow and steady, calculated approach is the best for balancing performance and weight management. What I notice is that if my daily calorie deficit is too low, regardless of weight, my power output and endurance suffers. More than 200-400 calories a day deficit and the drop in performance is pretty noticeable after a while. At 700+ cal deficit for even just a few days, on bike performance suffers tremendously. The problem is that to get that accurate with calories, you have to weigh / measure everything that goes in your body and keep a good log of your training. Kind of tedious, but I don't think you'll find your optimal w/kg without doing that. In general, I think this is one of the harder problems to solve, and one that I've struggled with (both knowing and unknowingly) for a while.

I also think weight loss is doable during the race season, but the window of concurrently having high performance with steady weight loss is so slim it is best left to the off season where having bad days on the bike aren't as detrimental.