Weight Loss - I'm clearly not grasping something...

portland_bill

Ok people, I've been cycling quite a lot over the last year except for a month or so when I had no shorts to cycle in.

On average I'm doing 120-150 miles per week at the moment which I know to some of you isn't a huge amount, but I'm trying to get at least two or three days commuting to work (19 miles each way on hilly roads in Northumberland averaging around the 17-18mph mark) and I do at least one training session with my local club on a Tuesday night and try and fit in a Sunday ride in, either on MTB for a few hours or do anything from 50-70 with the road club.

As for my diet, I don't eat a lot of crap. I don't have sugar in my tea, if I drink fizzy drinks I make sure they're something like Coke Zero or sugar free. I normally have a bowl of cereal and a yoghurt for breakfast or a yoghurt and a slice of toast with peanut butter on, lunch generally consists of a banana, a bag of crisps and a sandwich and dinner is normally egg noodles and salmon fillet/ fresh veg and chicken kiev/ sausage casserole and fresh veg/ spag bol/ chilli con carne/ chicken curry. Fair enough I have the odd McDonalds when I'm out and about but that's maybe once a month at the most. I'm also in the habit of carrying a water bottle around with me all the time so I drink plenty of water.

I hadn't weighed myself for a long time, but for the last couple of months I've been weighing myself once a week on a Wednesday morning and over the last 4 weeks, I've lost 2lb.

Wtf? I feel like I'm slogging my guts out and getting nowhere.

Granted my fitness is improving, there's no doubt about that, but I need to lose these moobs and this spare tyre.

bompington

Have you considered eating less?

Seriously, I'm in a similar position to you, but I know perfectly well that I'm never going to lose any weight until I eat less calories than I burn.

It's the laws of physics and there's no getting round them.

estampida

not really advised but eat after your commute in the morning

burns the fat not your brekkie

bompington

estampida wrote:

not really advised but eat after your commute in the morning

burns the fat not your brekkie

See the first law of thermodynamics

legendary27

I would consider swapping cereal or toast for fruit - try an apple and a banana for breakfast - and swapping crisps and a sandwich for soup and a low-fat yoghurt and another piece of fruit. That would certainly help.

Regards,
Gordon

big_p

there's a good article in cycling weekly this week about dieting, mostly about the sh1te that's hidden in so called healthy food and peoples misconceptions about a good diet.

portland_bill

When I commute I don't have my breakfast until I get into work. I've never been able to do exercise with food in my stomach. I've got a hiatus hernia so if I do I just end up belching acid all the way so I always leave it a couple of hours before I do any exercise after eating.

I don't really see how I can eat less. I can't see how a (multipack size) bag of crisps and a sandwich at lunch and a small plate of veg and something with meat in for dinner is excessive. Especially not compared to what I used to eat. I feel hungry most of the time as it is. Like now for example, I'm not having my lunch break until 13:30 which is only 35mins away but I feel like I could eat a rotten whale.

Wotski

Your weightloss is happening, albeit slower than you would like, but this is a positive as it should help to ensure that it's sustainable weightloss as opposed to crash dieting.
You have probably converted some body "mass" to muscle, which is more dense than "mass", so whilst your composition is improving, the weight won't be dropping off.
Try replacing some of the carbs you might consume with protein (shakes).

brettjmcc

what do you drink when you ride?

If you are drinking energy drink for your commute/anything around 90/100 mins, just have water or somthing like a Nuun or 5 Zero tab

danowat

Crisps and bread are bad (IMO), also diet soft drinks, even though they don't contain sugar, and mess up your insulin response, cut those out and see what happens.

How much water do you drink during the day?

portland_bill

Cheers Gordon, and I know it sounds like a stupid question, but what kind of soup? The sandwiches I have are always homemade and generally consist of a couple of slices of ham or cooked chicken breast and lettuce with a thin smear of LIGHT salad cream or lighter than light mayonnaise on wholegrain bread. Surely a bowl of soup can't be much less calorific than that? Can it?

Could give the apple and banana a go for breakfast though...

But then again on the other hand, I posted about feeling lethargic when out riding a few weeks back and was told I'm not eating enough!

getprg

You have probably converted some body "mass" to muscle, which is more dense than "mass", so whilst your composition is improving, the weight won't be dropping off.

+1

Also this reads like you are tea total - if you drink alcohol (even modest amounts) this is full of "useless" calories - just a thought and I'm not trying to suggest you are a raving alcoholic.

Slack

It's probably more down to the tempo/duration of your rides, as most of your miles seem to be at a brisk pace for shorter durations - so you'll mainly be using the stored energy (glycogen/carbs) in your legs, rather than burning much fat.

I really only start to shed weight when I go through a phase of doing regular longer and slightly slower rides of 4hours plus.

To be honest, a 2lb loss over 4 weeks seems like a healthy way to do it gradually.

portland_bill

I'm not tea total but I rarely drink. Maybe have one night out every couple of months and although I'll have a few pints, I can rarely handle more than 5 or 6 before I've had enough and I don't get mortal drunk, I just get bored and stop drinking.

styxd

Your diet is rubbish. I'd have thought that would be pretty obvious.

Where's the protein?
Wheres the vegetables?

Cereals are craps, bread is crap, any drink other than water is crap, fruit is full of sugar, rice and noodles etc are just starchty carbs.

You can stil eat all this if you want, but its not going to help you lose weight.

Get up, ride to work. At work eat a healthy breakfast consiting of protein, (probably fish, eggs, meat) and healthy carbs like vegetables or legumes.

Have a similar thing for lunch

Have a similar thing for tea

Repeat

If you fancy a snack, eat something protein based like a tin of mackerel etc.

Its really not hard.

dw300

2lbs in a month is fine for starters. Don't be brainwashed by magazines and Soni into thinking that you can keep up the rate of loosing 10lbs in a fortnight.

Think about how dedicated you have been in adding the pounds to your body, then realise how it's going to take a comparable timeframe to burn calories as it did to eat and store them.

It's going to be a combination of how much you eat as well as what you eat. If I had a pound for every person that thought they'd loose weight by adding fruit and veg to their diet I'd have a nice bike by now. You have to eat smarter, and look at food as fuel for your activity. Eat what you need in order to have energy and recover. Overweight people are usually the ones that eat to fend off hunger and/or boredom, rather than eat what their body needs.

With the mileage you are doing, you can easily wreck your progress by eating just a few hundred calories a day more than what you need to. So concentrate on the quantities. Count calories for a week till you start to equate quantities of food to to what energy values they have, then you can start to judge it by eye, and from your results.

Consistency is the goal, and anyone who is in good shape will have been at it for a long time, rather than just having been on a diet for 2-3 months.

Also .. you can't convert mass or fat, to muscle anymore than you can change lead into gold.

t.m.h.n.e.t

Portland Bill wrote:

But then again on the other hand, I posted about feeling lethargic when out riding a few weeks back and was told I'm not eating enough!

You aren't eating enough.

getprg wrote:

You have probably converted some body "mass" to muscle, which is more dense than "mass", so whilst your composition is improving, the weight won't be dropping off.

That isn't physiologically possible.

phreak

Keep a diary of what you eat. Add up the calories, and then subtract what you burnt through exercise and your basic metabolic rate. That'll give you a decent idea of whether you're eating too much or not.

At the moment it sounds like you're just guessing, which will always make things harder. It's reasonably easy to find out what's in the food you eat, and there are calculators to judge how many calories you burn when cycling. If you err on the side of caution with both of these (ie assume too much when recording your food and too little when recording your riding) then you'll soon get an idea of whether you're losing weight or not.

I believe 1lb of weight is akin to 3,000 calories, so you can see from that how much you need to eat.

I know it's heretic to many on here, but if you want to lose your moobs, doing some chest exercises might not be a bad idea. It's not going to help your cycling much but would give you better shape.

legendary27

Portland Bill wrote:

Cheers Gordon, and I know it sounds like a stupid question, but what kind of soup? The sandwiches I have are always homemade and generally consist of a couple of slices of ham or cooked chicken breast and lettuce with a thin smear of LIGHT salad cream or lighter than light mayonnaise on wholegrain bread. Surely a bowl of soup can't be much less calorific than that? Can it?

Could give the apple and banana a go for breakfast though...

But then again on the other hand, I posted about feeling lethargic when out riding a few weeks back and was told I'm not eating enough!

I tend towards lentil, vegetable or something similarly basic. I was assuming that your sandwich was a pre-packaged one, which would (generally) be less healthy than the one you make yourself. I would estimate though, that soup, a low-fat yoghurt and an apple (for instance) would come in at around two to three hundred calories less than a sandwich and a packet of crisps - I may be wrong about that though.

As to your second point, it is a pretty common problem - trying to achieve a balance between reducing calories sufficiently to lose weight, but still being able to train effectively. Ideally, you need to keep an accurate record of calories in versus calories out (perhaps stating the obvious). As as I recall, there are a number of threads about this already on the forum, so it may be worthwhile having a hunt for them.

As a general rule though, replacing bread and crisps with fruit will definitely help.

Regards,
Gordon

portland_bill

Wow Styxd that was pretty damning! :oops: I mentioned that my diet does include vegetables, and I thought chicken and fish were supposed to be good sources of protein?

Get up, ride to work. At work eat a healthy breakfast consiting of protein, (probably fish, eggs, meat) and healthy carbs like vegetables or legumes.

Have a similar thing for lunch

I appreciate what you're saying, but the problem with that is all I have at work is a fridge and a microwave in a little room that's not exactly kitted out for preparing meals. If I could have poached eggs and smoked salmon for my breakfast every morning, believe me I would.

I'll try with the in/out diary. I usually struggle to keep diaries because I just forget about them, but I'll give it a go, but I'll have a look through for some other threads tonight and try and give the idea of having fruit for breakfast instead of bread or cereal a go too. I'm not a fan of cereal anyway, it never agrees with me as it is so I'd be happy without it, I just don't tend to find fruit remotely filling, but I'll give it a go.

styxd

Sorry.

I think you're setting yourself up for failure though.

Fruit for breakfast? I cant see how that is really much better than cereal (its probably worse since at least you get some protein in the milk)

To eat enough fruit to provide you with enough calories (i.e. a decent breakfast, 600 odd) will mean consuming lots. Which means lots of sugar. Which means putting on weight.

Honestly, Ive told you how to do it, it involves you motivating yourself to do it.

Whats wrong with preparing meals at home and taking them in with you

phreak

For what it's worth I wouldn't rule out cereal. If you have cocoa pops or something then sure, but a bowl of porridge or muesli is a good way to start the day. If you want some good food suggestions I can recommend Go Faster Food. It's a recipe book for endurance athletes and includes some good recipes that are healthy.

I've found it useful to cook more than I need for my own meal, so say 4 portions. My gf and I would eat 2 that evening, then I'd freeze the other 2 and can then take them to work and heat up in the microwave for lunch.

With work kitchens another handy food is cous cous. All you need is a kettle for that, and you can add tomatoes, dried fruit/nut, some meat or cheese or whatever to make a decent salad. Very easy to make and pretty healthy.

huuregeil

styxd,

You're right about the refined carbs (i.e. they're bad) but you're wrong about fruit. The reasons sugar (as in, spoonfuls of the white stuff) makes you fat are: it doesn't fill you up, so you end up eating lots of it; it leads to an insulin spike meaning your blood sugar levels drop, and you end up eating again more to compensate.

The reason fruit doesn't do this is alluded to in your comment:

To eat enough fruit to provide you with enough calories (i.e. a decent breakfast, 600 odd) will mean consuming lots.

Yup, fruit fills you up, and the reason it does this is because it contains a lot of fibre. This means two things. First, it's extremely hard to over-indulge on fruit! Try it, you get full first. Second, the fibre (primarily, and also the negligible fat content) helps to regulate the insulin response so you don't get the sugar lows. Most fruits (with the exception of melons) rank low on GI tables. Owt wrong with fruit, and many benefits, and apples/bananas/dates are ideal as a snack, also during/post ride.

Finally, the whole idea that you need to go out of your way to consume "protein", is completely wrong. Look at it this way: you need about 1g protein per kg bodyweight for basic nutrition, and no more than double that if you're training. So, of order 70g protein a day, closer to 140g if training. If all you ate was fruit and veg, you'd average about 10% calories from protein (fruit is around 5%, beans 15%, average it out). 2500 calories a day, makes 250 calories from protein, protein has 3 calories per gram, make 83g of protein. Ample, and that's without doing anything special. If you're training, you might need 4000 calories a day, 400 calories from protein, makes 133g protein. Ample. By the time you add in a small bit of fish/meat, you're way over what you need. So this whole "where's the protein" thing is completely wrong - eat enough whole foods and you get enough protein. The issue comes when people eat many refined foods, and then, yes, you might have an issue.

Back to the original poster: cut the refined carbs out (no bread, no pasta, no breakfast cereal) and stick to whole/unrefined carbs (e.g. porridge is good, wholegrain rice, lentils, bulghur, pumpernickel bread is ok, wholemeal pasta occasionally); cut the dairy down too; *lots* of fuit & veg; cut out added fats.

PS All fruit breakfasts are great - a few bananas, plums at the minute are amazingly good, kiwi, peaches... - I quite often do this.

dw300

DurianRider, is that you?!

There are 4 calories in 1g of protein.

Pigeons in flight

phreak wrote:

For what it's worth I wouldn't rule out cereal. If you have cocoa pops or something then sure, but a bowl of porridge or muesli is a good way to start the day. If you want some good food suggestions I can recommend Go Faster Food. It's a recipe book for endurance athletes and includes some good recipes that are healthy.

I've found it useful to cook more than I need for my own meal, so say 4 portions. My gf and I would eat 2 that evening, then I'd freeze the other 2 and can then take them to work and heat up in the microwave for lunch.

With work kitchens another handy food is cous cous. All you need is a kettle for that, and you can add tomatoes, dried fruit/nut, some meat or cheese or whatever to make a decent salad. Very easy to make and pretty healthy.

Just checked out Go Faster Food on Amazon - looks like a v useful book....and is now on my unfeasibly large wish list.

kiwi43

Hi there, the problem with weight loss is that everyone wants it gone now...
you have to remember that it took a while to put on, so it is only logical it will take a while to remove it! period!
you can lose it quick and there are a lot of programmes out there, but they are very intense eg body for life. insanity etc, but very hard to implement if you have a life.

2 pounds a week is considered MAXIMUM weight loss per week
anymore and you eat into musclemass which makes the problem worse, contrary to popular belief, weight loss and maintenance is very complicated physiologically, as it depends on your body fat, your lean mass index, your rate of metabolism, your exercise, is it just cardio or does it have weightbareing portions in it.

basically food is thermic which means food use so much energy to digest it before the body gets to use it.

protein is the most thermic, carbs second (inc veg) and fat is the least...
you up your protein 1-2g per kg/body weight per day (about the size of your palm only!!!!),
reduce your carbs to a fist size portion per male and a fist size portion veg per meal,
EAT 5-6 small meals per day 300 calories per meal or largest meal breakfast to smallest meal for 6th meal (whichever you like)

In other words EAT WHOLE FOOD NO PROCESSED CRAP!!!!

exercise before breakfast and dont eat for around 30 minutes post morning exercise( burns up to 300% more calories) but no more than an hour after as your eating muscle not fat as this is where the body gets glycogen from when you havnt eaten all night.

drink lots and lots of water!!!

do not snack on rubbish, if you cant eat a meal so what, eat an apple a hand full of nuts and that will see you through for a couple of hours, you dont have to eat staek, chicken breasts every meal.

eating clean and healthy 100% of the time is unrealistic and is almost impossible to sustain long term, so have cheat meals, probably no more than 2 per week MAX as a reward for being good and it will stop cravings for rubbish. initially though i would have only one per week.

train hard for the morning exercise, HIIT training is very effective at weight loss at least 20-30 mins of intense riding/running etc, you need weight bareing exercises in your training not just cardio to prevent musclemass wastage...

biggest tip of all though is... DO NOT WORRY ABOUT WEIGHT muscle is heavier than fat so the more muscle you put on the less you will SEEM to have lost, USE and TRUST a tape measure it never lies. weight is subjective as it depends when you weighed yourself, have you just eaten, are you dehydrated, are you retaining water, do you have your period etc... the tape measure is much better!!! weigh yourself weekly only.

this is a very quick example for weight loss only NOT a training regime so please dont flame me about not enough carbs-calories for a triathlon or 100 miler etc

huuregeil

dw300 wrote:

DurianRider, is that you?!

There are 4 calories in 1g of protein.

Lol, no!!! But the nice thing about science is that certain things can be shown to be wrong - fruit makes you fat is one of those, it's a false statement. Durianrider happens to be correct about this one ;-)

Fair point about cal/g of protein (maths failure!), but the point still remains, it's very hard to underconsume protein, even if you're vegan (which I'm not, hence I don't worry about it, hence I make basic maths errors!).

portland_bill

All good advice and even the conflicts in opinion give stuff to think about.

I might see if I can get a copy of Go Faster Food. Most of the reviews seem to suggest the recipes are reasonably normal and use normal ingredients that you can find in the local Tesco extra or Coop and you don't need to go to some whole food shop in London to buy some special grain or vegetables that only grow where virgin's have slept in rare bushes on islands near Hawaii and costs £80 per gram which is the problem I've found with most "healthy" recipes. The last booklet I got free with Men's Health or something like that used mostly ingredients I couldn't find anywhere so just ended up binned.

If anything I'm going to try and keep a record of everything I eat so I can look at it properly instead of guessing.

Alex_Simmons/RST

Portland Bill wrote:

but for the last couple of months I've been weighing myself once a week on a Wednesday morning and over the last 4 weeks, I've lost 2lb.

Which equates to an approximate average energy deficit of ~300Cal per day.

500Cal/day is about the sustainable limit over the medium/longer term. When obese it's feasible to be faster than that for a short while, but ultimately it's not sustainable.

So you are actually pretty close to an ideal rate of body fat reduction, just need to either increase exercise by another 200Cal/day (e.g. 20-min of moderate intensity cycling/day) with no change to diet,

or eat a little less, or swap one or two energy dense items with something less energy dense.

I'd ride a bit more, it's more fun than eating less. But a little of each can help.

As you get fitter, you can also metabolise more per hour of cycling too, which makes the task easier.

Flashy

phreak wrote:

Keep a diary of what you eat. Add up the calories, and then subtract what you burnt through exercise and your basic metabolic rate. That'll give you a decent idea of whether you're eating too much or not.

At the moment it sounds like you're just guessing, which will always make things harder. It's reasonably easy to find out what's in the food you eat, and there are calculators to judge how many calories you burn when cycling. If you err on the side of caution with both of these (ie assume too much when recording your food and too little when recording your riding) then you'll soon get an idea of whether you're losing weight or not.

I believe 1lb of weight is akin to 3,000 calories, so you can see from that how much you need to eat.

I know it's heretic to many on here, but if you want to lose your moobs, doing some chest exercises might not be a bad idea. It's not going to help your cycling much but would give you better shape.

Regarding keeping a diary, I've been using an app for my iPhone to keep track of what I'm eating and what I'm burning.

The app I'm using is called myfitnesspal and is free on Appstore.

You can literally scan the packaging of your foods and weigh the amounts you're eating to give you an accurate amount of calories. You can also make up recipies for the foods you regularly cook at home.

You'd be really surprised how many calories are in some foods. A couple of examples that shocked me were; home made fajitas (3x wraps) 1200 calories, shop bought sandwich (i.e. 2 slices of bread with some sort of filling, rather than a deli sandwich) 450 calories average.

It also measures the amount of fat, protein etc.

Its not something I live by everyday, but it does make you think before you eat that 3rd custard cream at 65 calories a piece or having a few mid week pints at around 195 calories etc.

I know its not the be all and end all but its a good yard stick.

portland_bill

Just downloaded it. I'll give it a shot! ;-)