I originally took up cycling as a means to lose weight. Eventually that arrangement flipped itself – now I view the weight management as a means to being a better/faster cyclist.
I currently am dancing to & fro over the normal/overweight line.
What motivated this post was the fact I am cycling much faster than I was last year on less watts. Last year I started training with 210 watts and peaked at 284 watts but was NOT going any faster than I had been in previous years and I was getting dropped very quickly in the crits I was in. Whether or not I stick this year or not remains to be seen but things will be better. I am coming away with the notion a 20# weight drop is having a much bigger effect on my cycling than a 20 watt difference.
I’ve seen eating disorders mentioned once or twice here in this discussion. IIRC, Nate mentioned this as a reason they stay away from this topic on the podcast. The recollection is vague.
The secret diet is to not eat tasty, ultra-processed, salty, sugary, fatty foods juiced up by the food industry and sold in a box. 90% of the grocery store is off limits.
Eat:
the leanest cuts of meat for protein, tofu is a great change of pace, eggs are great
eat tons of vegetables, fruit, salads, legumes (not out of a can most of the time)
quinoa, brown rice, oatmeal are nice for grains
Cross pizza, soda, burgers, beer, deep fried, take-out, fast food, butter, etc. off the list.
You still have to watch your calories to lose weight. It’s a lot of work cooking all your food from scratch.
I’d bet that you’d lose weight but you’d still be hungry in a calorie deficit.
The thing is that you can never go back to eating the old way. That is always when a “diet” fails. The old stuff slips back in.
You can make a pretty strong case that much of this is the result of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle society / culture……IOW, the “calorie out” side of the equation has grown increasingly less.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding a nuance here, but are you saying that high intensity training and weight work doesn’t increase RMR? I guess you can find a study that proves/disproves anything, but intensity and weight training are near the top of any list on increasing RMR. You can’t swing a stick around this subject without finding a study with clear evidence on this point. Yes, part of the increase in RMR is related to potential increases in muscle mass, but high intensity training also increases the ratio of RMR to lean muscle mass (so increases RMR without adding muscle). Also, I don’t agree that adding lean muscle is always bad. You can absolutely be losing weight (ie running a deficit), gaining lean muscle, and increasing your RMR at the same time. I’m not saying it’s a guarantee for every individual or every situation, just like you can’t say everyone that runs a calorie deficit will decrease their RMR. Like most things, it will depend.
If you are trying to say it’s not possible to increase your RMR while losing weight or that you can’t increase your RMR by doing intensity and weight training, that is just wrong. Not because I “think” that, but because smart people that make their living studying this stuff say that.
Yeah, and the “calorie in” side is downright comical.
The original bottle of coke was 6.5oz. In 1955, they came out with the 10oz “king size”. I’m not sure how big those fountain sodas are now, but they are pretty crazy.
That sounds like the magic holy grail. I’d love to read any information on it that is not bro science.
You might check out the work of Herman Pontzer. He’s found that humans across many cultures, regardless of activity level burn about the same calories per day. He’s compared indigenous farmers with 5x more daily activity to sedentary office workers in the US and found about the same total calorie burn.
What part of it are you questioning and I’ll try to answer. I’m a 50+ guy, so I’m always looking at ways to combat reductions in RMR, vo2max, LMM, etc.
This one is focused on body builders and strength training, but some of the results are interesting. Running calorie deficits while dropping fat and adding muscle. It also links to some other studies that talk about the same phenomenon in overweight untrained individuals.
Eating in a slight calorie surplus will always provide better recovery day to day, week to week, than eating in a calorie deficit. Big deficits lead to a big decrease in recovery ability eventually as your body slows down metabolism. That said, weight is a big piece of the performance equation, and if you have 20-30 (or more) pounds to lose, that should be a major focus, maybe even more so than improving power. I also think losing weight was easier mentally for me in the off season, where I didn’t have to worry about having peak power output. Weight loss / calorie deficit with a lot of higher end cardio also disturbs my sleep, so recovery is hindered by that as well, which is not a good thing in the race season. If you are in the middle of race season, it’s a toss up, but if you are significantly overweight losing weight should remain the focus.
Also, just cut the alcohol completely. What’s the point if you only have “a” beer? No buzz, just decreased recovery and less motivation the next day. I stopped drinking years ago, and to be honest after a couple of years I stopped even thinking about it. Game changer for me physically and mentally.
By far the best way to lose weight (and, be healthy), coming from someone who can put it on easily:
A consistent weight training routine. Aim for more muscle mass.
A couple days a week of HiiT (2x for me). I like hill Sprints. 5-10 intervals over ~20-45 minutes or so (If you’re older or have any issues, this is the one thing I’d check with a doc on first. But big help for weight loss)
Lots of walking and movement. Could sub EASY bike rides here.
Eat Low-ish carb, high protein. Mediterranean Diet FTW (Whole foods, veggies, fruits, lean meat and fish and get rid of everything processed)
Get rid of alcohol, juices, soda. (Yes, even one drink impacts you. Recent studies show the best amount of alcohol is zero. Even one drink 100% affects my HRV and recovery, and yes I still like having a couple drinks a week.)
Get rid of all this silly endurance training.
This is also coincidentally the route to being as all around healthy as possible and living as long as possible.
At some point when I get all the “FTP Gainz” and seeing how far I can push myself on the bike, I’m going back to taking my own recommendation and going back to just riding for fun. But hell, for now all the training and prepping for events is “fun” in it’s own sadistic way…
Zone 2 training can improve your health and longevity more than anything else with one exception - quitting smoking.
Source? It’s in Peter Attila’s book Outlive. Chapter 12 goes into physical activity but the whole book keeps talking about the importance of exercise. If anything it would be defensible to say that you need to do strength and endurance exercise so not only endurance exercise.
I’ll agree with you if you keep Z2 EASY, EASY, EASY all day pace it’s important and beneficial. The problem is most of the endurance exercise you see in studies is NOT aligned with what a typical cyclist thinks of as endurance / Z2. Cyclists push it way more and harder and do way more of it.
There’s a lot of research that I’ve seen recently says one of the BEST ways to increase overall lifespan / health is weight training, not “Endurance”. One example looking at all cause mortality:
I’ll agree with you if you keep Z2 EASY, EASY, EASY all day pace it’s important and beneficial. The problem is most of the endurance exercise you see in studies is NOT aligned with what a typical cyclist thinks of as endurance / Z2. Cyclists push it way more and harder and do way more of it. So, it is absolutely beneficial, just not in the way it gets talked about here if that makes sense.
There’s a lot of research that I’ve seen recently says one of the BEST ways to increase overall lifespan / health is weight training, not “Endurance”. One example looking at all cause mortality:
My cardiologist, on Monday, said a trend they are seeing is a lot of people with health problems who don’t look obese, and aren’t terribly overweight (so think they’re healthy). But when they look at their stats their lean muscle mass percentages are really low (i.e. not getting exercise and have higher fat % than their body composition would otherwise indicate from a visible perspective.
Of course he said that doesn’t apply to me because I get lots of exercise and have visible muscle mass… it’s just blatantly obvious that I’m fat, too. lol
Ok that chart does not tell the full story. It’s just a list of fad diets, which shouldnt even be seriously taken into account when it comes to overall population weight gain.
If we’re talking about population wide obesity rates, IMO, the core issues, in order of importance:
Sedentary work life
Generally poor available/convenient food choices
Car culture/non-walkable cities.
If you’re looking for the simplest recommendations for how to lose serious weight while riding from non expert…
Strict diet. Figure out how many calories you need per day, and track ever single calorie, without exception. then eat 500 less (account for exercise calories though, but maybe account for like 600 of an 800kj ride. I think it’s ok to boost loss a bit here). Also note that if you cheat with just a single piece of cake, you’re throwing 1-2 days of progress away. If you go nuts and eat out 3 meals with drinks in a day, you could easily throw a weeks work of progress away. I think people get into serious trouble by thinking “oh…it’s just 1 burger 1 day at lunch.” Not true. That lunch was probably ALL of your calories for the whole day gone, and you’ve still 2 meals and snacks to find room for in the calorie budget. It’s catastrophic.
If you’re not losing weight over a week or two, cut calories by a few hundred more. Whatever tools you’re using to calculate both calories in and calories out are going to rely on a lot of guesswork, but if you’re eating and doing the same stuff…the measurements should be reasonably consistent even if off. Lot of veggies (more than you want). Lots of protein. Probably also more than you want. 1.5g/kg or more. Limit but do not eliminate carbs or fat. After accounting for small quantities of fats in cooking oil or things like avocados, fill in the remaining calories with more complex carbs.
Bike wise, lots of zone 2 or 1. Eat maybe 50g of carbs per hour IF you’re riding more than say 2 hours and at zone 2. Other than that, just water.
Like noted…I’m no expert. But if I were trying to drop 20+ pounds, that’s what I’d do. IMO none of this stuff is particularly complicated. I think most people know it already. But implementing it IS extremely hard.
From a weight loss/gain perspective yes, from how they make you feel after you eat them, no.
Since your body react differently to different foods I would say that impacts the calories in side of the equation. Getting more energy from some food than from others means your calories in are higher for those foods.
Weight loss if difficult for a variety of reasons, as you say ~70% of Americans are overweight/obese and I don’t think they are all intentionally overweight. If it was easy to lose weight that number would be much lower. Some foods have been specifically designed to get us to crave them and eat more, we spend more time behind a desk or behind the wheel of a car vs years ago, many things are stacked against us losing weight.
I’m sorry if this sounds like I’m attacking you, that isn’t my intention, but I stand by my previous comments:
Just like having a 5W/kg FTP, I know what I’d have to do to get there, but actually doing it is another story.
The abstract is more focused on reduction in RMR as we age, so maybe I’m looking at the wrong one. The article is interesting, but raises a lot of questions. How do they define 5x more active? Hunting and gathering isn’t exactly a big calorie burning activity (and certainly not intense exercise). Is the body weight of the active subjects similar to the body weight of the americans they are comparing to? If they are comparing a lean 130lb person hunting and gathering to the typical overweight american office worker, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had similar caloric burn. I don’t disagree with the general premise of the study that the body wants to preserve body weight and RMR decreases as we age (all else being equal), but there is no way that exercise/activity doesn’t influence calorie burn at some point. If you are burning 2000 calories per day through exercise, your body isn’t capable of lowering your RMR low enough for overall calorie burn to be in line with sedentary people (nor would it try). Again, intense exercise is proven to increase RMR, not decrease it. Looking at results/statistics from a general population doesn’t necessarily translate to individuals that don’t fit cleanly into it (ie people who are athletes and training hard).
I did some additional digging into studies where RMR is reduced through calorie deficits and the 2 I looked at were both done with extreme deficits (like 1000-1200 calorie per day intake). I suspect that would be what is found in most of these studies. Of course your body is going to shut down if you are starving it. I don’t think anyone would debate that crash dieting is a disaster for your metabolism and a terrible and unsustainable way to manage body comp.
