I still have noodly cyclist arms though. I look like a horse being ridden by a gamer nerd.
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What a lot of normal weight people do not get is how many of us have completely wrecked metabolisms from trying to lose weight for years. We have followed the American Food guide since the 1970’s that is responsible for making Americans the fattest they have ever been. We have followed move more and eat more often and get fatter. We have followed low fat high carb and got fatter still. The science and food industry of the last 50 years has destroyed millions of peoples metabolism and the world is the fattest it has ever been.
Don’t diet on the bike? Where do we diet on the shitter? This is great advice for the majority of tr athletes. But for many of us it just doesn’t work.
My theory is that this is not a calorie issue at all. It is a hormone issue. When I was younger playing hockey I could play 2 games a day for 3-4 days and be down a pound or 2. Others could be down 6-8. My food intake was usually the same or lower.
We are all different. Nothing works for everyone.
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No, they don’t. If you get on the bike, not having eaten anything since dinner the night before, you have protein available in your muscles (that you do not want to use as fuel unless you’re starving), you glycogen stored in your liver and muscles and a very small amount of carbs in your bloodstream (using “glycogen” generally for the carb based macro), and you have fat stored as fat and lipids in your cells. That’s what you’ve got to work with. I’m keeping it simple, but those are the significant sources of energy you have.
You can burn fat. It doesn’t have to be replaced. How do you think people lose weight?
You can eat carbs. If you eat too many they will be converted to fat. “Too many” is variable based on what you are doing. You can eat too much protein. Too much protein will be converted to sugars (gulcagon via gluconeogenesis, I think?), and if you don’t need those sugars they get converted to fat and stored.
Low zone 2 is burning mostly fat. You can ride fasted and burn from your fat stores, but you will be burning some glycogen, too. That glycogen burned is coming out of what is stored in your muscles and liver and being replaced by what is in your bloodstream and the carbs you eat (or if you don’t eat any carbs and use up all the glycogen stored in your liver and muscles, your body will start burning your muscle protein which is BAD). So fuel your ride with carbs, but don’t eat too many because if you do they will be converted to fat and replace the fat you just burned.
Maybe read more and post less, or something.
(edit: I’m not a scientist, and may have used the wrong terms in the above, particularly for what sugars are called in different stages of the process or in different cells. There are plenty of processes that I didn’t get into because I don’t understand them. But the above will generally get you headed in the right direction)
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Not to belittle your experience, but calories in/calories out works for everyone. Our bodies can’t create mass from nothing.
I know that the implementation is difficult for many people - calories out changes day to day and over time with a changing metabolism and is virtually impossible to measure accurately at home. Even calories in is difficult to control because tracking is not easy and even food labels can be wildly off. This is not to mention the psychology behind it all as well as the physical discomfort of not eating enough. But if you can figure all that out, it does come down to calories in/out.
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This goes back to talking about different things.
You burn ~3500 more calories than you take in, you’re losing a pound. It doesnt matter if you burned sugar, protein, or fat. That’s all I was saying before.
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If you say so.
Yes, calories in / out is the current best hypothesis IMO and it certainly works to stay at your current size.
Except it’s just not that simple to say it will work for everybody to be thin. Once one has gained significant weight and created more fat cells, they never go away. They will just be storing more or less fat.
What happens is you cut your calories from your current RMR (resting metabolic rate) by 350 calories per day. You should lose a pound every 10 days (3500 calories per pound).
This works for a little while until you plateau. You plateau because your body figures out how to carry out necessary functions with less energy at a lower RMR. The dieter wants it to use up fat stores. But maybe the body makes less muscle, regrows skin or hair at a slower rate, or whatever functions it can slow down.
The goal posts keep getting moved on the dieter. The body will use less and less energy based on what is coming in. This is why women, for example, lose their periods. Reproduction is not an essential function in a large energy deficit.
So a dieter faced with a constantly decreasing RMR will probably fail. Their fat cells are constantly releasing leptin which says to eat more. It’s miserable to go around constantly hungry.
So when skinny bros on a podcast or on other social media pipe up and say it’s as simple as calories in / calories out, it implies that the dieter is weak willed and just can’t suck it up, lose weight, live constantly hungry, and be normal sized.
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I completely agree with you. Your RMR changes as you lose weight and it becomes more and more difficult to lose additional weight. However, I would counter that just means your calories out is changing.
I don’t think losing weight easy in practice, obviously if it were easy, we wouldn’t have many overweight people anywhere. However, the concept of calories in/calories out is sound.
To put it another way, the theory is simple-putting it into practice is hard.
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Yeah, I didn’t go back and listen to specifics, just saying that going to bed a little hungry is better than late night snack habits for most folks (in my opinion). A single hard boiled egg for dinner is just silly…
I also think Dexa scans are a great tool and a good illustration of the the general theme of this entire thread. Yeah, I guess a dexa scan could be negative if it makes someone pursue an unhealthy body comp (such a small percentage of amateur cyclists are anywhere near that point), but is that a reason we shouldn’t use dexa scans as an informative tool to make intelligent decisions?
People look at everything in black and white and any kind of weight loss or body comp discussion immediately gets squashed because it’s somehow tied to eating disorders and/or shaming others. Personally, I’d rather talk about those negative things in the context of weight loss and body comp rather than use them as the reason nobody seems willing to have a valid discussion around it. This forum and the podcasts are about cycling performance. Body comp is a huge factor in performance and tightly related to power, nutrition, sleep, etc… It’s a huge disservice to avoid the body comp discussion for the sake of not wanting to hurt people’s feelings or for worries about how it could drive eating disorders. Talk about those things where relevant, but don’t water down the core topic to the point where there is zero value in the discussion.
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Pretty sire you’re supposed to be listening to Gwyneth Paltrow or somebody for nutritional guidance then if we’re not trusting science 
At some point this breaks. Last weekend I did a 3600kj ride. My TDEE is about 2600. Eating 6200cal (1:1 kj to kcal) is hard. I ended up eating about 4300kcal.
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I think you just proved my point about gross exaggerations…I’ll also note that that much of they have talked about re: your body “sorting itself out” has been about body composition, of which weight loss is only one aspect.
Yeah, even a 3000 calorie ride can be difficult to catch up calorie wise, but this comes back to looking at it week on week rather than daily
I probably would have gone over the day before to prepare for a big ride and will likely treat myself to a big breakfast the day after.
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I never said CICO didn’t work. It works but your RMR keeps lowering as you stay in a calorie deficit and then you have to lower the calories in even more to match the lower calories out.
I think the best thing one can do is to lose as much weight as they reasonably can and then fight tooth and nail to not gain it back. Eat super healthy and exercise. Probably the idea of a “diet” is forever to stay thin. And by diet I mean eating whole foods and not a constant stream of pizza, burgers, takeout, and beer.
I 100% agree with these points ^.
Ah yes, this is the first thing you read in any literature about low carb diets. Just because those guidelines were introduced didn’t mean Americans actually ate a low fat diet. The processed food industry did take advantage of the low-fat health halo and tempted us with “Snack Wells” and all kinds of low fat high sugar snacks, which certainly didn’t help.
In the most recent 20-30 years though most dieters have been on some form of low carb diet while obesity rates have continued to increase. So one could just as easily assert that the fattest we’ve ever been has been when Americans went low carb. Low carb with increased saturated fat isn’t any healthier than low fat with increased refined grains and sugar.
Most scientific studies comparing diet quality point to DASH or so-called Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes whole plant foods, switching to unsaturated fats like nuts and olive oil and small amounts of the leaner animal proteins. We have to moderate all of the above - sugar, refined grains AND saturated fat.
So, I want to be clear in that I do not mean to blame individuals for increasing obesity rates. The food industry, diet industry and government subsidies have quite an oversized role in what the day-to-day diet looks like especially those on a tight budget, have no free time or are reliant on institutional food.
I assume that most people are not riding their bikes all day long every day, as awesome as that sounds. 
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From what I understand, running a calorie deficit “can” contribute to lower RMR, but it’s far from an absolute and normally talked about in the context of crash dieting and running big deficits (ie people trying to lose 10lbs in a month). If you are training a lot and mixing in some intensity while running a small calorie deficit and eating smart, I’d be very surprised if you’d be sending your RMR in the wrong direction. I think you have a higher chance of increasing your RMR if you are doing some intensity and/or weight training (again, even if running a small deficit).
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The TR podcast team gives wishy-washy weight management advice because eating disorders are so prevalent in endurance sports.
The problem is that the advice they give is mostly only useful for people who are already fairly lean.
The advice that someone who is actually overweight needs is more akin to the advance body builders give.
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This was in the first reply and still is the best response, IMO. I’m a bit surprised that folks on the thread are looking for TR to be able to tell them how to lose weight. It’s not something TR claims to do.
I’m squarely in the need-to-lose-weight camp but I don’t expect TR to tell me how I can do it. I’ve learned a lot and have picked up some relevant info, but the burden is on me to sort it out, for me.
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That’s great that you think all that but is there any research or evidence to support increasing your RMR with intensity or weight training? The research of Herman Pontzer would disagree with that.
Or course, if you put on 10 pounds of muscle you might increase your RMR but we are cyclists not body builders or cross fitters plus we are talking about losing weight.
I’ve read a lot of the studies in this area. The body when presented with an energy deficit simply finds ways to use less energy. The 300 calorie deficit you program into your calorie counter app shrinks and shrinks until you are not losing any weight and there is no deficit. Now you have to decrease calories even more. You’ll plateau again and again.