The scales can be inaccurate, especially for athletes if the scale doesn’t have an athlete mode. I’d go more off of the visual or if you really want to know, go get a DEXA scan.
I think you would need to consistently track and quantify a real resistance to what works for most people before reaching this conclusion. Regarding your GP, everything I learned in medical school about nutrition and weight loss was nonsense but…
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someone else put it in here, but the idea of trying things and finding out what works makes sense…its the exploit explore algorithm
taking the reinforcement learning algorithm further, extend the approach to emulation learning…short circuit the process of learning what works for you, and just copy what has worked for others in a similar boat to you…what might be interesting is if TrainerRoad organised a survey, in order to gather some meaningful data for this particular cohort of people…riding a bike is intensely calorific, and means you can shed weight very quickly…so what applies to the Michael Moseley crowd may not apply to the cohort of TrainerRoad subscribers, who can burn off 600 kcals per hour by sitting on a bike and doing something they love
twice, maybe three times, I have lost something like 10kg in a straight line, and its come from the combination of riding more, and eating sensibly, last time was in the lead up to Covid, where I took my power to roughly 250w, and weight down to 63kg, and that was aged 43…its easy to do just taking my metaphorical foot off my metaphorical brake…the first time I experienced this, I was living in the black forest and riding 10hours a week on average…beautiful scenery, really not an effort at all… a simple trick back then was to work in 4 week blocks, with 1 week off every 4
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This is the transformation challenge that I’m currently doing, and have done. At $50 for entry it’s an inexpensive way to get some accountability and support. They also have a coaching option for an additional expense that I think is a pretty good value if you are really motivated.
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Haven’t read all the responses… but do you track protein? If losing weight (fat loss, since I assume you’d like to keep your muscle) is your goal, I’d turn to the people who look like you’d like to look. Going out on a limb but if performance is no longer your ultimate goal then an emaciated upper body to achieve fat loss likely isn’t your goal. Which leaves you to not look to cyclists but body builders/physique athletes. If you spend some time looking at the “usual” advice in that world it is that adding in copious cardio for fat loss won’t work. You have to lift and eat protein to build (or just maintain if you are an old fart like me at 47) muscle. The fat loss happens in the kitchen. Based on this I’d go with option 4. Most of the research in the physique world seems to show that once protein is ideal the rest of your calories can come from carbs or fat - chose the one that lets you stick with a slight deficit with more enjoyment. Obviously for some people this is keto, for others it is low fat. Are you already eating 1g/ lb of bodyweight in protein? If not, start there. You might find that helps regulate your appetite a bit anyway. As someone else said, cutting the highly processed foods will also help with satiety. And just tossing this out there, my usually 15-20lb over ideal body weight husband got to his leanest ever totally not training due to injury and going on the carnivore diet 
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What’s the name? Some of them have been interviewed on the podcast. One guy that won, was a former marathoner and he never was very lean until he did the contest and stopped endurance training.
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My scale set on athlete mode measures my bodyfat about 3.5% higher than the DEXA scan does (the scale has me at 17% and the DEXA was 13.6%). That’s pretty far off. It is well accepted in the lifting community that the bodyfat scales are not terribly accurate. And the leaner I’ve gotten, the further off the scale has gotten from the DEXA. If I put my scale in regular mode, it would be even further off. I’m surprised at the results from the podcast test – do you happen to know what scale they were using?
She wasn’t even the winner or most impressive finisher IMO. The common thread is strength training 4-6 days per week, and slowly building up very low intensity aerobic work in the form of walking combined with adjusting macros as rate of weight loss stalls. They often get as low as body weight in lbs x 10 as calorie floor. For me that would be 1520 per day, but I never dipped below 2250. Although, I was riding on average 12.5 hours per week plus lifting 3 days. I’d go as high 3,500 cals a day on my long ride day.
Video link to an over 50 year old, former endurance athlete guy who dropped 30 lbs. 10 minute video interview.
This is totally common in the physique world. Google before and after for people competing to get stage lean. Most of it is pretty much high protein starvation with lots of lifting. You can even do it keto… check out @ketosavage on IG. His results are quite frankly amazing.
Just throwing this out there…especially if you are older do you have annual blood tests done? I only say this as I’ve been doing some investigating on our company supplied water vendor Pure Life (previously Nestle). Evidently the PFAS and microplastics levels are worrisome enough that I just buy my own water (pilot-we are supplied bottled water every day as much as we want). Anywho…that led to incidental research on liver function studies and increased fat % due to liver tissue damage due to environmental and ingested substances (PFAS, alcohol etc…).
Naturally, my results are really good so I can’t use this as an excuse but, it’s something to consider doing if not already.
Specifically to @JoeX I’ve only been successful doing #4. With that said I think you can be successful with 1 through 3 as well. If you have the ability to get a true BMR done I recommend that. A few years ago mine was about 1850. One of our younger elite climber guys has a BMR of around 2600! I only point his out because understanding CICO is pretty much a pillar of weight loss which starts with BMR. Not saying you have to do it forever but, a month or so can be an eye opener how quickly calories add up.
I’m going to go with forget performance if you really want to lose weight. I took 8 months off the bike and got 90% of my fitness back in 4 weeks. As long as you are working out and maintaining, you won’t lose much and it will come back fast.
Tim Cusick had a podcast on this subject. He basically said to diet during the base period. Personally, I don’t think dieting is very compatible with glycogen stripping workouts.
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I‘ve ways beeen baffled by that conclusion of them. If you look at Nates values, you can see that it doesn‘t track to any statistically significant degree. It mainly reacts to weight.
That‘s also my experience. BF measurement by scales is everything but precise. A mirror or caliper is much better imho. Measuring weight makes sense though for sure.
sounds like she took a mirror selfie on one, and not the other…
Anyways back to the topic at hand. My opinion is - lifting 
easy endurance work getting a handle on calories in and calories out reduce alcohol and cleanup diet eat enough carbs and protein step on scale everyday and use that to adjust portions
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Depth of my belly button isn’t a measure but it is an indicator! 
I have an in body with the handle and if I pose correctly and measure same time in AM it tracks dead on. PITA to do perfectly tho.
DEXA has been found to be rather inconsistent when compared to MRI scans. If a scale reads 3% high consistently, that’s more helpful than inconsistent readings as you can at least assess a trend.
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Just a another datapoint - I’ve got a withings scale and I’ve had 3 dexas scans and the scale was within a couple of % each time. I think once the scale was higher and the other 2 times lower (but might have been the other way around). I find the dexa to be a good data point on where I’m losing fat and adding lean mass (especially when dropping weight), but the scale seems pretty good for tracking high level body comp trends. I don’t worry about hitting a specific BF number as much as the trend. But I do like to keep that first number a “1” as a bit of an emotional line I don’t want to cross.
I wasn’t aware of the comparison with MRIs. My DEXA results over the years have been pretty consistent with what I have expected. It is widely accepted as the gold standard (or at least the most accessible gold standard) for measuring body composition. The problem with the scales, mine included, is that they don’t seem to be very consistent. I’d say mine is perhaps directionally accurate, but only because it seems to be heavily influenced by bodyweight and when my bodyweight is down, I’m typically leaner.
The Dexa is not the “gold standard” for body fat. It’s a tool to measure bone density. Everything else after that is an estimation. If the operation punches in a different algorithm, you get a different result. If a tall patient doesn’t fit within entire space of the scanner, it’s a lot more estimation.
And, I know that the three TR amigos used to sell it as the ‘gold standard’.
I’ve read articles indicating that caliper measurements done by an experienced person is also an accurate estimation and way cheaper.
Well, if there’s a more accurate readily available method that doesn’t depend on the skill of the person administering it (like calipers), I’m all ears.
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