In my opinion you’d do better focussing on increasing protein and quality of food across the board.
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In the short term beginning, HFLC will probably make you lose more weight, and faster, than other diets. However, this weight loss will be mostly water (you need more water to process carbs do if you aren’t eating carbs…). Things even out fairly quickly after that.
Another suggestion which hasn’t been mentioned is for the OP to start doing fasted rides. It’s been shown that a low glycogen state can initiate mitochondria growth; perhaps doing 8 weeks of fasted Z2 rides (the other mito booster) would substantially increase the results he’s looking for.
Yep, that’s right, glycogen holds on to a fair bit of water.
I’ve personally never had any luck with fasted rides. That’s not to say they don’t work. All the endurance rides that I’ve begun in a fasted state always leave me pretty flat for at least 2 days after I do them. I get my RER tested in the lab twice a year, and despite having a diet consisting of 50 - 60% CHO, I manage to utilize fat at relatively high percentages of my FTP. As a result, I eat before and during all my endurance rides.
Just wanted to say thanks for all the feedback. Reading all the above has left me with the opinion that I wasn’t considering that given my limited likely training volume, I’d be unlikely to get enough training done in terms of volume to support a lower intensity LCHF approach. The low volume plans throw in a lot of sweetspot and increasingly above threshold work and so fueling appropriately for that should be my priority and will be how I tackle it. Though as suggested, the longer endurance based weekend rides can well be tackled fasted to induce some adaption.
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