When to reduce calories

Completely agree with that.
Cut down on the empty calories.
Don’t drive yourself insane. The only diet that is worth doing is the one you can stick to.
There’s no point going on an hardcore diet, losing some weight, and then crashing out and regaining everything.
It’s about life style changes. So it has to be sustainable. Give yourself a break once in a while. Have dessert, have a drink. Give yourself enough that you feel life is worth living as it is :slight_smile:

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I think the advice from Amber on this topic (here and in the podcasts) is really solid, not just what to do but in a way how to do it. Lifestyle change, habit forming, call it what you will but it’s hard to make it stick and it’s clear she has put a lot of thought into it. Great addition to a team that is already strong on this particular topic.

For the OP I think they answered their own question, shave a few hundred calories off every day and think of it as long term project.

If anyone is looking for faster results, i.e. up to a kilo a week of fat loss, I have heard the argument (from Michael Hutchinson, British cyclist/author) that calories burned using just fat as fuel don’t need to be replaced as much so if the training load was largely low intensity you could achieve a bigger deficit than 500 a day without causing problems. This worked well for me from October through to Christmas but I wouldn’t be able to maintain it while doing interval work.

Would second using long and easyish rides as a way of safely building up a bigger calorie deficit. You can also do them fasted, or at least the first couple of hours fasted before eating something if you’re going longer.

On the Pro/Elite training thread there are some posts about Sky pros incorporating this type of riding into their schedules when losing weight. E.g. They’ll have a light and low carb evening meal, start the morning ride fasted at low intensity, then start fuelling 2 hours into it.

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As Chad mentioned in an earlier podcast (2018?), the best surefire way to lose weight is not to diet, but to change your diet. Specifically, eat healthy, whole foods.

Cycling creates a fairly significant calorie deficit beyond your BMR and it’s quite difficult to make up for that deficit when you’re strictly eating good food. How many bananas and sweet potatoes can you really eat? Not as much as you might think.

As for maximizing caloric deficit, endurance rides win every time.

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i am reading The endurance Diet by Matt Fitzgerald his idea is to have a good food diet with lots of variety in food. laying of the heavy red meat in favour of fish or chicken in that order. eat lots of fruit and vegetables and whole grain carbs. there is an app DQS that helps you score the food to meet the variety but you should look at volume as this is relative to your body size i.e. a 6 foot person will eat more than a 5 4’ foot person. Nate also gave some good advice keep a food diary and work out the callaries you consume and then adjust downwards till you loose weight slowly emphasis on SLOWLY! You will tank your power if you don’t my personal experience was i was at 309watts august 2019 and lost weight from 93kg to 83kg in about 2 months my power tanked to 258watts Oct of 2019

I’ve lost 33 pounds since July 15, 2019. The loss has been slow and steady. Things that worked for me include:

  1. I did not diet on the bike. I fueled before, during, and after my workouts.
  2. I all but cut out processed foods and replaced them with whole, single ingredient foods. Jack LaLanne (yeah, I’m that old) used to say, “If it’s made by man, don’t eat it.”
  3. I started looking at starchy carbohydrates, including whole foods such as sweet potatoes, as nothing more than fuel. I ate what I felt I needed to fuel my workouts, but no more.
  4. I included full body resistance training into my regimen.
  5. I did not starve myself or go hungry. If I was hungry, I ate something. I ate to satisfaction. My thought was that always dealing with hunger would never be sustainable for me so why go there.
  6. I did not count calories. However, all the above created a very effective and maintainable caloric deficit.

Best wishes.

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Yup, the short answer that basically echoes what others have already said:

Change your diet, don’t go on a diet.

In order to keep progressing in cycling or any endurance sport, at some point your volume needs to go up. Thus, eventually you’ll get to a point where eating based on hunger is insufficient to replace all the calories expended, as long as you eat healthy.

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