I’ll have a listen
She’s certainly an unusual character. It sounds like her coach is trying to get her to cross train, hence the broken foot from hiking. I think her health depends on managing her obsession…
I wonder how she “knows” without a study?
I have a tendency not to carry fat on my stomach - more on my hips. I had 5 zoladex injections - 5 months of female hormones being blocked and menopause being triggered. Without doubt there was a sudden increase in fat on my stomach, without weight gain. This began to reduce when I came off the medication.
So not weight gain due to medically induced hormone changes but a definite and very clear change of fat distribution patterns.
Hope that helps
Ok, so a bit of an update from my side. I had a bit of a tough few months last summer, where all I can guess is my hormones were out of whack. I gained a few pounds and felt slightly depressed (definitely felt OFF), had a couple of UTIs where I hadn’t had any in years, plus had some irregular periods (highly unusual for me because I have a Mirena IUD). I saw my doctor and had some bloodwork, but everything came back normal and didn’t show perimenopause or anything. (I was 44 then; now 45.) Anyway, fortunately things improved and I felt a lot more normal, but I wanted to try to lose weight. I had lost some weight a few years ago and went back to that process since it had worked for me. I lost about 4 lbs by March, but then I regained a couple of those pounds back, and I was plateaued. Nothing I was doing was budging my weight. I was stuck for months. My prior method had come from working with a nutritionist, but he wasn’t available, so I reached out to another friend (who is a nutritionist) to see if she could recommend anyone. Instead, she offered to help. I jumped at her offer. We started in mid-July.
Nothing we tried for the first six to seven weeks worked. I was still stuck and plateaued. We kept changing things around, and finally we found a combination of things that have worked! I’m down about 8 lb, and this is the lowest I’ve been in probably 5-6 years.
I won’t get into my rant about how much of what I am now doing goes against a lot of the TR recommendations, but then a lot of what they recommend is for guys and also they are still very geared for performance. I had to reduce the number of calories I was eating from a target of around 1800 down to between 1600-1700, with approximately a breakdown of around 32% fat, 30% protein, and 38% carbs. I also had to change my mindset to be solely weight-loss focused, NOT performance focused (so this is clearly NOT a TR approach), so I do all of my workouts as fasted (yes, I know this is against what Stacy Sims recommends), and not eat much on longer rides, to try to get my body to burn fat. And I do a lot of z2 rides now, plus I’ve added HIIT circuits and Tabata workouts. All of this has finally convinced my body to FINALLY give up some of its fat.
Of course, this was a really good time to make this big commitment and all of these changes to my workout routine because of COVID and no racing. I still have a couple of pounds to go for my original goal weight, and then I will decide if I want to keep going or just hold for awhile. I am going to have to figure out how to maintain and not regain, but I will work on that when I get there.
Anyway, I just wanted to share, in case it was helpful to anyone else.
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Glad you’ve found something that works for you after all the previous frustration!
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Thanks, ME TOO. It’s kind of amazing how frustrating it is to be trying and trying and thinking you’re doing things right, only to not see any results. It was honestly rather gratifying that it took a few weeks to sort through things with the nutritionist, because it kind of crystallized for me that I wasn’t doing things WRONG per say, just that I needed to try new things to get my body to do what I wanted.
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So pleased you found something that works for you. As I said in a previous post, I have found increased fat gain due to hormones to be a real and often miss understood phenomenon.
I think it’s worth bearing in mind what doesn’t work for us may work at a different point in time. So fasting is not healthy for me now, but might be in the future. Thanks for bringing that possibility to my attention.
I had a full hysterectomy 4 weeks ago - so no ovaries now. They’ve put me on the lowest estrogen patch and I have to wait 3 months to see if that works for me. I see a possible fight on my hands to get an increased dose of it doesn’t. Medical professionals seem to have their own opinion on what’s safe which does not seem to reflect current studies.
For me, the hot flushes lead to heat stroke in the summer months. I need to be able to ride/ race in the summer.
For women N=1
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I’m so glad you were finally able to get your hysterectomy, since I know it had been delayed and delayed. I hope it solves your issues, although I’m sorry you now foresee more arguments. I agree that too many medical professionals seem to want to put us in the “normal” box, but don’t keep up with recent research. We all need to be our own strongest advocates, which gets old, but if we don’t stand up for ourselves then we unfortunately often end up with sub-par results. Just keep repeating yourself and stay strong, and hopefully you can get someone to listen to you.
And yes, it’s kind of interesting the results I’m seeing with the fasted rides. I had mentioned the “increased cortisol” argument to the nutritionist and ended up with an earful about “how do you know that your cortisol is increased if you do a fasted ride?” I recalled a similar conversation with another nutritionist a few years ago. I have a cycling coach who follows Stacy Sims a lot, and she wasn’t thrilled when I told her that I was trying the fasted rides. But she agreed with my statement of “I’ve tried a lot of other things and they weren’t working. This isn’t forever, and I need to try it.”
I agree that for women, N=1, and it’s an important number. We need to try things with ourselves to see what the results are. And yes, what works now may not work later. So important to keep an open mind!!
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I thought the same thing when I listened to that episode of The Adventure Stache.
How are you getting on with the fasted rides?
I’m 8 weeks post surgery and have a wodge of belly fat. I’m up to 6km walking everyday and I’m slowly increasing weights doing safe Pelvic floor exercises. The thing that’s stopping me getting on the indoor trainer, is that I sometimes have to “wake it up” for it to connect and although I’m ready to pedal easy, I’m still getting enough symptoms that I don’t want to power through that. Also, easy pedalling isn’t going to shift the belly fat anyhow, so I might as well wait till 12 weeks and go straight into training.
I’m going to focus on all my calories being nutritional for now, as I think it might help to work towards something, rather than a restriction…
The fasted rides (and now that I’m in winter training mode, fasted runs and weights) are still going well. I do all of my weekday workouts fasted, and on weekends I go fasted if I’m just doing a z2-type ride. For the weekend z2 rides, I find I can do about 2.5-3 hrs if I add some skratch after about an hour. I aim for high z2/low z3 HR for optimal fat burn on most of my rides, not doing major intensity right now. Of course, this is winter training anyway, so this actually fits in pretty well. I also do find I have to go out on the earlier side because if it gets too late I become starving. On days I’m doing something longer or harder or later, I eat a regular breakfast but don’t eat anything during the ride; I have skratch, but carry food if I absolutely need it. I’ve found that my ability to go for longer without food has increased.
The person I’m working with is now strongly recommending that I do 16:8 intermittent fasting, but eating only two meals. I’m not really sure this is something I can do, and I’m still trying to understand if I can work this into my life, but I suppose this is something you could consider trying before you reintroduce cycling. I’m with you–I’d definitely wait until you feel fully ready to get on the bike, because you don’t really want to have other symptoms or do something that puts you further behind.
On the intermittent fasting, it seems difficult and hard to incorporate into my daily life due to schedules, and I’m honestly having a hard time considering it.
It will be interesting to know how you progress into high intensity later on and whether you feel that is effected by fasted rides now.
The thing with MTB riding in the UK in the winter, is that we inevitably hit mud at some point and need extra energy to power through that!!
This is about my 5th day of cutting out sugar. I wouldn’t have said I am a big sugar eater anyway, but I definitely had cravings for the first 3 days. I’ve lost 1kg, but who knows what that consists of i.e is it belly fat?
I would get triggered for eating disordered behaviour if I did intermittent fasting. It sounds like it seems difficult to fit into a working day, alongside training.
Keep us posted and good luck
I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to continue fasted rides when I start adding intensity into the mix, but I’m going to try to keep the easy recovery rides as fasted. I’m riding on the road, so it’s easier to pick a route that isn’t going to require going through mud. 
This is a strange journey… normally I’m a major control freak, and it’s really hard to let go this much to trust someone else with something as big as my food.
And yes, one of the key contraindicators for intermittent fasting is disordered eating, so probably not a good idea for you. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for me either. 
Are you avoiding anything with any sugar at all, like fruits? Or just things with added sugar? Someone I know said that when she was cutting out sugar and had major cravings, she would eat something like a small piece of fruit and it seemed to help. Nice work on the 1kg loss! It’s hard to target where we lose the fat, so hopefully (a) it’s fat and not just water loss, and (b) it’s where you wanted it!
Can we get a reducing sugar support group? I did an honest audit of what I eat and every day there appears to be an excuse for some kind of sweet treat. It doesn’t help that the shops are now full of Christmas treats too. Pannetone, anyone?
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Yes, the kg might have found its way back tomorrow 
I’m not being mega strict with sugar in terms of reading the labels of Everything. I’ve always thought fruit to be healthy, although I tend to incorporate berries into my fruit eating, as they create less of an insulin spike. Apparently…
@Scheherazade I’m up for that. People will probably have different ideas of where the line is. I’m not going to cut out bread because it has some sugar in, but next time i shop i may see if there is any without…
If I was training with intensity I would eat sugar to fuel it, but I would like to see if not eating sugar aside from that will melt the fat away!!!
Have you tried cutting out sugar @dhellman?
@Bullseye @Scheherazade
I don’t eat a lot of pastries or cookies these days. The only sugar I seem to be eating these days is 1 tsp of honey added to my plain greek yogurt, and I drink skratch on my weekend rides. I guess I’ve done a pretty good job cutting out sugar already… I still eat about 1.5oz of sourdough bread in the mornings, and I don’t bother to see if it has added sugar or not. I eat a banana at lunch, and I do eat blueberries or some other fruit in the evenings.
It’s been a process to stop eating sugary things. I started a long time ago by cutting out anything with high-fructose corn syrup, and generally try to keep that rule because I somehow find those sweets very hard to stop eating. It kind of makes it easy to turn down eating something, if it has HFCS in it. I do find it really hard nowadays with the yummy stuff showing up in the stores, but fortunately I’m trying not to go out that much these days.
Definitely if I were training with intensity, I’d be eating things with sugar, but that’s not happening right now.
I have been doing this for awhile and I can tell I’m having some cravings these days. Next week is the US Thanksgiving holiday, and I am not planning to restrict on that day, and I’m planning to enjoy some cookies. But I’ll go back to the usual nutrition after that.
It’s my understanding that intermittent fasting/fasted exercise is not beneficial for females. Curious as to why your person (dietician?) recommends this and what the end goal is? thx
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Stacy Sims has definitely been a strong anti-fasting-for-women voice. Both nutritionists that I’ve spoken to about this have pretty much pooh-poohed this idea that fasting raises cortisol. They both commented the exact same thing, that you have no idea what your cortisol levels actually are, unless you’re testing the levels regularly. All I can say is that I don’t think it’s possible to make generalizations about women, no matter who you are.
The goal of fasting is to enable insulin levels to drop low enough to make your body burn fat, not glycogen, for fuel.
Maybe your body already is burning fat, but my body had not been doing so; I was really struggling to drop weight. We needed to do something to get my body to do so. So I’ve been doing fasted z2 rides for the last couple of months to get my body to start this process. Now she’s suggesting that I go another step and do 16:8 intermittent fasting, but also only eat two meals during that 8-hr period, presumably to further the impact.
Thanks so much for answering. That’s good info. I was curious because I’ve been doing the opposite lately: increased fueling around workouts (so eating more before, during and after). It’s working well for me in terms of performance and recovery but I agree, we are all a case study of one and you have to find out what works for your body. I switched things up last year because I’m older (46) and was still eating, fueling and training like I was 10 years ago.
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I’m now 45, so I’m hitting that mid-40s issue too.
But I’m not aiming for performance, I’m aiming for weight loss. The goal is different, and that’s really a key.
If I were aiming for performance, I wouldn’t be doing this.
I’m essentially doing Traditional Base, since I’m doing a ton of z2 rides. When I need to start increasing intensity for performance, I will need to add fuel to my rides.
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