The D & V plan diet

bompington

What with one thing and another (weather, injury, illness, new baby) I've hardly been out much since december. And so, since self-discipline, food and me are an uneasy mixture, the weight has steadily gone up from about 80k to 85k, not good with my only real training target of the year (the Etape C) looming in 7 weeks or so - I've previously managed to get down to about 77 for it. I've pretty much resigned myself to a slow and painful ride.
But the ever helpful Norovirus has come to my rescue! A couple of days of shooting in all directions, combined with strict "clear fluids only", and the weight's disappearing fast - and yes, I am keeping myself hydrated.

So what's the point in this post, apart from it being something to do at 2am when I can't sleep?
I'm wondering if anyone's got any suggestions for how to leverage a weight loss head start into a more sustained plan over 6 weeks or so.

Team Banana Spokesman

SST every day. sort your diet out

if you commute, commute hard.

90-95% of your 1hr pace is good.

hard enough to gain serious power but easy enough to to every day

bigpikle

it all starts with calorie intake, so you have to create a net deficit in the kitchen. For me, thats easily achieved by reducing intake of stuff like pasta, potatoes, rice etc and replacing it with plates of veg and fruit etc. You can keep well fueled for workouts and take in less calories at the same time. After a couple of days the appetite switches off and you dont feel hungry either - well, I dont anyway For me, this has led to >35lbs off in about 6 months, while training 5-6 days a week over last winter, without ever starving myself or feeling like a monk living in a monastery etc. Easy to keep it off as well.

If you want to simply lose weight, rather than develop cycle fitness, then high intensity is the key. Training such as intense circuit training that is both aerobic and resistance based (weights etc) that creates a very intense session. This burns max calories but also creates the 'afterburn' which burns calories long after you stop. Simple aerobic exericse really doesnt do that at all, despite the general myth to the contrary. Intensity is what you need.

Of course, if you want to achieve bike fitness as well then a specific bike based programme is what you'll want, and thats not an area of expertise for me, so I'll let others chime in.

guinea

Stop eating carbs.

Works for me. I just stick to meats and green vegetables/salads with a protien shake and bars for breakfast/snacks.

This is not the diet you want for riding long events, but you'll lose 3lbs a week with no problems.

After 10 months off the bike due to injury I too gained weight, but in a couple of months I've lost almost all of it. When I get close to target weight I'll increase my carb level and increase my cycling load.

Tranlok

Bigpikle and guinea are absoloutely right. I can speak 100% off my own experience since i lost 5 stone in 7 months!!! from 18.1 stone to 13. Im currently hovering around the 14 stone mark, but thats mainly due to putting on muscle mass and eating more, but essentially i havnt put fat back on.

Here is what i did, which pritty much contains what others have already said:

To lose weight you need a calorie defecit, simple as that. I think its 3200 calories per pound of fat. So thats the defecit you need to create to lose each pound of fat :shock: . I started this off in the kitchen, with a high protien low carb diet strictly eating no more than 1200 calories per day. I fully eliminated refined carbohydrates like pasta, bread, rice etc. The only carbohydrates i would take would be from sugrars from fruit and things like that. For this reason you cant call this the atkins diet, since your body doesnt stricly go into Ketosis (i.e. where your bodys metabolism changes to use fat soley as a source of fuel. For this reason to you cant go on eating cheese or butter still :P )

With the diet sorted, its time to introduce exercise to increase the calorie defecit. As stated above, HIGH INTENSITY is the way to go! Interval training really is the best for this. I used to do 30mins of interval training a day, which consisted of a 1 minute full burn every 5 minutes. I used an exercise bike for this since its all programable for it. And after that i would average another 30mins doing some weights.

There is a debate over exercise and weight loss, and wether it should be high intensity short duration, or vice versa. I look at it like this:

HIGH INTENSITY exercise for 30mins burns 600
20% from fat = 120 fat calories + A large after burn a few hours laterr due to a metabloic increase.

LOW INTENSITY exercise for 30mins burns 300
40% from fat = 120 fat calories + a much smaller after burn.

Now at this point the amount of fat calories are the same, however the extra 300 calories overall from the high intensity exercise will be burnt from energy stores such as ATP from glycogen in your muscles. These will have to be replaced later on which is what causes an increase in your metabolism, and if you have already created a calorie defecit from your diet your body will begin to break down fat to replenish your muscle's immediate energy stores. This type of metabolism can also cause HGH (human growth hormone) which is the only way to create new muscles cells, instead of just increasing the mass of existing cells.

If you look at the figures above you can argue that low intensity exercise will go on for longer and eventually be more beneficial than High intensity. this is true, but practically we are all human and have other things to do with our time! Who wants to do something for 2 hours when you can get the exact same result in less than half the time!

(reading my post back it looks like ive ranted off the question a bit! meh, maybe some 1 will find it interesting!)

craker

Good info everyone my diet up to now has been 'lose the dairy foods, lose junk foods' but is currently working less well - I can't go an evening without eating a packet of mini-eggs.

The hard thing is that my exercise has shot up since January when I started the diet and I'm just eating too much pasta / spuds / rice / (min-eggs).

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smithy1.0

Low carb/high protein diet and high intensity?

Well, I don't know about most of you on here, but unless I have adequate carbs fueling me, I can forget about high intensity training! I just can't get the HR up. Perhaps people differ, but when I tried low-carb before, I had zero energy and riding the bike was a struggle. It didn't loose me any weight either for some reason - I think my body felt starved so metabolism slowed - it definately felt like that anyway (i'm 150/5ft9.5 but would like to be 145lbs ideally - those last 5lbs are tough to budge!).

I see some people can run well on low-carb, which may explain why some people put on weight so easily eating carbs. Personally, the lightest i've ever been (140lbs) was on a high carb diet. I lost muscle (and power) to do that though, which wasn't a good thing.

keef66

The Atkins diet doesn't work by switching metabolism to burn fat, it works because it's near impossible to take in too many calories when you completely eliminate carbs. There are just so many things you can't eat that Atkins dieters simply end up eating less. (I think it was a Horizon documentary a few years ago which dispelled the ketosis myth and shed some light on the actual mechanism)

I'm a simple soul. I just follow the calories eaten < calories expended = weight loss logic.

You can with reasonable accuracy estimate how much energy you're burning in a day, and accurately calorie count what you eat and drink in a day. If the latter is bigger than the former, you can either eat less or exercise more, or possibly both