Your personal best way to lose some fat - anecdotes / experiences / examples of what kicked your ***

After I bought my first bike, I went from 80kilos to 58 within the first eighteen month. Back when I I didn’t do anything special in terms of of diet, but did ride consistently around 6-8 hours per week.

I am certain that my diet is a LOT better than what it used to be, but that doesn’t seem to have much effect on my performance.
The biggest change is that I don’t crave junk food and sugar after a hard workout like I used to.

Which aspect specifically? The energy level of our liver glycogen stores, regulates much of our daily metabolism. When dieting your liver glycogen will either be replaced from ingested carbohydrate or protein converted to carbohydrate. This can get tricky when in an overall energy defecit.

I travel for big natural disasters. I weighed 180lb last September, went to Austin to work Hurricane Harvey and eat all of that Austin BBQ, and when I returned home in January I weighed 199lb, lol. Today (November, 2018) I weigh 176lb. I’m leaner than I’ve ever been, waist line is narrow, need new pants.

I got back here by nixing the pastry binge eating and replacing that with sweet potatoes, golden beets, tomatoes, and stuff like that. I’ll bake a full sheet-pan of sweet potatoes and beets twice per week, will snack on those. I made my post-workout and dinner meals a little larger and then took half to work for lunch the next day. I’m on what I believe to be a 300-calorie deficit when not racing, going to bed a little hungry, and stuffing myself with vegetables when I need to binge eat. I’ve always had a tough time eating well when I travel so I started traveling with a knife and small cutting board, hitting a grocery store, and stuffing my face with raw vegetables when I need to eat and don’t want to eat 1000 calories of meat and bread. If I can get a hotel with an oven, I’ll buy a rotisserie bird which will last me three meals and do a sheet-pan of assorted vegetables in the oven.

I really try to cut back beer but I drink the good stuff and love it, going to make a thread about that later to see how I can fit it in if I’m not strong enough to leave it behind. It’s been four days since I had a delicious beer and I’m craving one.

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Beer is often a false friend. Many people did make great steps by cutting the beer. Great work man!

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Hi, @brenth Just curious, How tall are you at 140lbs?

Great link, and really helped me understand a few things. I’ve been creeping up in body weight for a while and that’s really helped me evaluate why and restablished my motivation. Thanks for sharing.

Fantastic! Glad to hear you’re chasing your goals, nd I’m happy that my little blurb may have had a small impact.

We’re all in this journey together!

Just came across this tool, and it’s pretty neat. It lets you figure out weight loss required to achieve a desired BF% and even lets you play around with lean mass loss/gain scenarios. Much easier than doing it all manually. But then again I’m terrible at math. https://exrx.net/Calculators/WeightBodyComp

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Thats a pretty cool tool. Simple. But because of that it’s so nice. Thanks.

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An interesting read thank you!

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Glad to share! It’s helped me really hone in on what I need to do to drop weight in a healthy way!

Ok, so here’s a question about being bad :joy:

You know those days when you just have a blowout and enjoy yourselves? Hopefully we all do that from time to time…

Well, with excess carbs and fat, is it just like when you are trying to take onboard nutrition during exercise and there is only so much your body can absorb or is your body going to try and hang on to all of that and store it?

Basically once you’ve hit an upper limit during your bad day does it really matter how high you go?

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I’m not sure that this is going to work, but I didn’t make much progress last year anyway. I am strictly a CX racer. I like riding on the road with my friends, but am too much of a wuss to race road at 54 years old. I have seen too many things to make it worth it to me. Anyway…

This year starting more or less now, I’m giving the MAF method a go. So the plan is to use traditional base in TrainerRoad as my base. I will likely just keep repeating it until I get to the build phase in May-ish. This forces me to keep my HR under 130. MAF formula is 180-age +/- adjustments. I got a +5 bump for having trained for 2+ years with no injuries. Since this is very low intensity, I shouldn’t be needing much in the way of carbs.

The nutrition side of this is to follow Dr. Phil Maffetone’s nutrition, which is basically a slightly healthier keto or close to keto diet. I think keto isn’t great once you add intensity to your mix, but is probably fine for the base building I plan on doing this up coming year (till May).

My history is this: I used to ride a fair amount when younger, in my 30s. My girlfriend (now wife) HATED my 4 hour rides and all day excursions so I stopped riding altogether. I gained literally 100lbs or 45ish kgs. I got into motorcycles, drank a lot (Jack Daniels and other hard stuff), ate like a pig and had a 44" waist. I was at the point where my Dr was giving me grief over the weight and I could only find clothes at big and tall shops and Tractor Supply Co. I had enough. I remember when younger how well cycling worked, so I pulled out a bike and rode 7 miles. I was hating life. My 13yo son saw me doing this and decided he wanted to ride with me. Then he decided he wanted to race CX. So, we rode together. I am down to 190lbs and want the last 20-30lbs off. This is my 3rd year cycling, next will begin my 4th and I’m looking for a break through year in racing.

I tried a lot of stuff over the years. What worked for a long time was calorie and macro counting. It worked until last year. I think with all the training and the stress it creates my body just said no more and stopped losing.

When I first got going with cycling again, I started doing indoor cycling with a friend and he trained with power on stages indoor bikes. The classes were anything from sweet spot to VO2 max and beyond. I never really did any easy riding figuring no pain, no gain, etc. I think a lot of my racing peers (they are really far superior so peers is used loosely) on my team have been riding and racing for many years. I feel like I am so far behind in fitness and skills. One thing I know they all have is the mega miles in their legs from years of riding. That is a huge base and one that I’m looking to build with this program. I feel like since I went right to sweet spot from nothing that I missed this huge base building many have inadvertently or purposefully built.

I don’t know if this will work, but that’s my plan for now.

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Thanks for sharing. Keep going and you will see soon some good results. TR will help you on this journey. Soon. I am sure!

You want to change some habits? Mabe this is your solution. I like it very much.

Highly recommend: https://www.richroll.com/podcast/james-clear-401/

Its Rich Roll with James Clear, the Author of Atomic Habits.

Listen. And repeat.

He’s also been on the “Food for Fitness” and Sigma Nutrition podcasts in recent weeks…

http://www.foodforfitness.co.uk/podcast/126/

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Overall calorie deficit does matter, but my experience has been that after a couple of days of the body settling back down, the damage doesn’t seem to be so extreme.

Again, in my experience, is to just park the bad days - the issue is the temptation to turn one day, into two/ weekend, into a week and then “start again Monday”. Write off a day and move on is the key.

If a bad (good?) day messes up a week in terms of goals, it’s only a week. Get back on track - the trend is your friend not day to day or week to week.

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Could you provide some examples (or tips) of meal prepping?

I’ve tried it a few times, but by the time I’ve come to day 3 and 4, it seems like the food isn’t all that tasty anymore… I wonder how people manage to prepare it for the entire week…

Sorry to butt in, but what I do is bump up the family meals to provide extra portions.

I generally freeze them in the foil trays that takeaways in the UK and Ireland use (from €2/ £1 shops) - you can write on the top what’s in them, date and calorie estimate (I use the recipe option in myfitnesspal).

I do a lot of the cooking in the slow cooker/ crockpot, and normally get 7 or 8 portions out of batch - that’s 3 for that days meal, the rest for the freezer or coming days. It doesn’t take too many days cooking to fill the freezer and then I generally have to run it down a bit to make room.

I’ve no connection to the site, I just agree with his philosophy and science based approach, but foodforfitness.co.uk has some free recipes (both slow cooker and otherwise), but I’ve paid for the ebooks and haven’t had a dud yet! Here’s an example, which I’m having today which I cooked a few weeks ago, it worked out at 8 portions of 411 calories…
https://www.foodforfitness.co.uk/recipes/chicken-pilau/

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Interesting. My wife is keen to use the slow cooker more but I find that everything that comes out of there is the same - tasteless and boring.

I’ll check out the book you recommend as we are struggling!