I’m in. I’ve posted about this previously but my basic story: overweight to varying degrees all of my life. About 10 years ago, my physician insisted I lose weight. I started exercising and tracking calories in the LoseIt! app. I lost around 45-50 pounds over around 3-4 years, then mostly hovered fairly effortlessly at the 45 pound weight loss which for me is 132 pounds.
Eventually my main form of exercise became cycling and at first I was a long distance cyclist, riding events in the 100-200 mile range. It’s easy to burn big calories riding like that so all you need to do is eat reasonably and you maintain a good weight.
Over time, I started doing shorter more intense races which necessitated a lower overall total volume of riding, because I needed to go into some of these hard short workouts with a degree of rest. Last year I trained for some really short races (around 7 min and 15 min duration) and gained around 10 pounds. Then about a month after my races (when I’d planned to be back riding a high volume & losing weight), I crashed,broke some ribs, got a concussion and it took me awhile to get back on the bike. I gained another 10 pounds.
Right when I was getting some fitness back, my dachshund had her rabbit hunting fires kindled and I cut back on the bike to accommodate field work with the dog. I’m just now getting back into things on the bike.
Around Oct of last year, after I was pretty well recovered from the concussion, I started back with calorie counting. I’ve lost 8 pounds and the goal is 12 more, or as much as 22 more if I could manage it (but I won’t sweat the last 10 pounds if I can’t manage it).
I had been intending to get back into racing but I’d rather focus on volume riding and calorie burning for now. So the immediate goal is to ride up Haleakala when we go to Maui in May. That’s only a 35 mile ride but it has 10,000 ft of vertical elevation gain and ends at 10,000 ft of altitude. For those of you who don’t ride, that is a very challenging ride on a number of levels- total elevation gain, lack of respite from going up, and the altitude in the second half of the ride.
Anyway. My basic approach is straightforward. I eat 100ish grams protein per day and at least 25 grams of fiber. The fiber ensures I eat vegetables and whole grains. The protein is to enable muscle gain/prevent muscle loss and for satiety purposes. My caloric allotment is around 1600 cal/day but I eat much more on big ride days (as much as 2500 cal, which isn’t really dieting at all) and somewhat more on workout days (around 2000-2100 cal/day). I have power meters on all my bikes, meaning my power output is directly measured which means I have very accurate calorie expenditure numbers for my rides/workouts. I typically ride 4-5 days per week, around 10ish hours per week (but this varies a lot), do a lot of fasted training so can rack up pretty big calorie deficits. I also routinely do core workouts and stretching. Lots of walking in the field with the dogs. Planning on starting up yoga again.
So most of my posts will be about workouts.
Today I did a 20 min core workout- planks and crunches. Followed by a 70 min workout on the bike. 20 min warm up and three 10 min intervals at 110% of my lactate threshold power, with 5 min rest between intervals and a 10 min cool down. Total calories burned (excluding the core workout)- 502 cal.
