grizzly59

I’m a bit of a heretic. I think as you get older, diet becomes more and more important relative to exercise for losing or maintaining weight. My resting metabolism is lower at 62 than it was at 22. How many calories I can burn per hour exercising goes down as well. I had to make replacements in my diet, apples, yogurt, whole wheat bread etc vs ice cream, pie, salad dressing, butter, danish rolls, stuff like that. Swim or bike + weights every day isn’t enough. I also think the energy density of readily available food in the US has gone up. Growing older is a triple whammy.

MinnMan

3 times/week probably isn't enough, either for weight loss or for improving fitness. Consider 5.

Carbonfiberboy 

No. One of the changes we should make as our metabolism slows down is to add higher bulk items to our diet. More fiber, please! Doing that satisfies both the stomach and the bowel.

rumrunn6

I'm sure that's good advice but I was referring to my over-eating behaviors. for example, having breakfast at home, then stopping at McDonalds for a 2nd breakfast. or grocery shopping after work & grabbing a sandwich for the ride home & then having dinner w/ the family. basically double-meals. since August I've stopped doing that

Branko D

For me, I need to watch what I eat to lose weight, if I'm just training and eating :whatever: then it'll stay basically constant - slightly tick up after I take a break from training before my eating readjusts. Ramping up training doesn't really help much - if I could ride as much as I like every day, then it might, but weekdays I'm mostly restricted to a hour to a hour and something of free time to ride, and I tend to balance it with more eating.

Personally, logging it (via Myfitnesspal so it syncs to Garmin) helps keep track. Sometimes I'll deliberately have a lighter dinner or so to keep it in the deficit territory, or avoid a snack, and it works. The numbers I get via Garmin on daily consumption minus intake closely reflects what's happening on the scale, except when I have some sort of brutal day (where it'll drop off sharply for a day until glycogen reserves replenish).

I try not to overthink it, keeping a few hundred in deficit every day isn't a chore and the numbers are slowly but steadily going down. Hoping to be at around 69kg (about 150 lbs) by spring, should improve my climbing by a bit - hopefully just enough to hang with people better in races when the gradient goes up, without robbing me of any muscle and power.

MinnMan

We're in similar places. I'm at just under 70 kg and hoping to get to 67 kg by spring. In general, compared to my riding peers, I have the advantage when the road turns up. They have more power on the flats, but I distance them on the climbs. Losing a few kg will help with that.

I don't know where that threshold is where I would become so thin as to lose muscle and power, but I don't think I'm close. I haven't done a % body fat calculation, but I still have some soft tissue in my abdomen (no six pack here), so I'm confident that losing a few kilos would be good.

genejockey 

That, combined with increased riding, is how I managed to lose 30# last year. Once I got down to 200#, I stopped logging food and exercise and stayed around there, but the arrival of early sunsets, cold weather, and the Food Holidays makes it tough. I'll probably have to start logging again. Sadly, it seems like MyFitnessPal buggered my account, so I'll have to start over and repopulate the 'Frequent Foods'. Ah, well. First World problems and all that.

juankaruna

I´m going to ask my nutritionist.

phobucket

I have treated my weight loss plan as a separate thing from my cycling plan. I'm using Noom and am about 16lbs down so far. The weight loss halted for a bit around Thanksgiving, but that was kind of planned as I was on a week-long vacation, and I was able to get it going (dropping) again in the last 2 weeks. As my miles and rides start to build up, I do wonder at what point I'll need to consider the extra calorie expenditure of cycling as part of my nutritional plan. I don't think I'm there yet, but I'm a bit concerned that I will overcompensate and allow my fork too much freedom because, "hey, I rode 30 miles today..."

Carbonfiberboy 

I weigh148 lbs. and figure I burn 20-25 calories per mile. I plan on eating half that much on the bike and no additional calories off the bike. It's important to eat those on-bike calories, mostly carbs. I might need a snack at some point during the day, but I try to keep it light. A lot of the time, I find a tall glass of water is an excellent snack.

Branko D

I budget training (actually Garmin does a good job), myself. However it is easy to overestimate if doing it by yourself.
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With a powermeter I have a pretty accurate gauge of actual expenditure on the bike. A typical training ride during the weekdays is only 700-800 kcal, depending how long it is - hill repeats and endurance rides often amount to similar expenditure because of coasting downhill and warmup and cool down. A run is typically in the same ballpark.
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The big expeditures are the weekend long rides (especially if I feel like doing it at tempo). Four hours at 200W amount to 2880 kcal. Then I get invited to some social thing (it's the weekend, after all) with wine and food and end up eating and drinking all of it 😁

It’s in French but it is easy enough to understand.


Well, it's still going down slowly.
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phobucket

^^^ ^^^

I'm 174 lbs (down from 191). Targeting 160 by March, so I better keep outrunning le fromage a little while longer.

ckelly_22

i am in the same boat as you, as long as i am on a heavy exercise regimen-swim, bike, run- i can lose or maintain weight, when this stops i gain it rapidly. on my rest days i will gain over a pound easily. my diet sucks so i pretty much train hard to make up for it, i don't mind the training though and i would probably be doing it anyway.

rumrunn6

fwiw - the dry sauna, at my gym, is better than a hair dryer, after my shower. just sayin'