I purchased the
“Weight Loss Meal Plan: Winning In the Kitchen - 8-12 hr/ week training / 170-200 lb (77-91kg) / Male”
and started it Monday. I am not concerned with losing weight right now, I just want to stop gaining weight and worry about losing weight later. I followed the recipes exactly and weighed all ingredients and tracked everything in myfitness pal. The only thing I did not do exactly was I would skip lunch or dinner most days, It was just too much food, I still felt full from the last meal. This is definitely more than I was eating.
This was a low volume week for me, but still 12.5 hours of riding. I was slowly gaining weight before starting this plan, but never this much in a week. My question is what am I doing wrong, that is a lot of weight to gain in one week. I have all the details about what I eat and when, but that would be pretty long, here is just the daily summary.
HI @elicriffield - let’s examine this closer and see if we can figure out why. Coach @Jake can help too.
Probably would be best to track your food intake in chronometer (better than MyFitnessPal).
We use kiloJoules from your powermeter as a better indicator of the work done - can you share that + your total volume from the this week + the last week.
Are you weighing yourself at the same time of day each morning? Same scale I presume…
This indicates something is amiss like water weight inflammation - how’s your power output and training - do you have enough energy to train well & improve? Could also be a question for Coach Jake.
If we can’t resolve this we can get you over to Dr. Lauren for a Nutritional Consult
We are still coming off Unbound so I suspect some inflammation, body is in recovery mode still and the volume of training is quite low.
My two suggestions would be lets give it a week or two, but maybe more so lets get a consult with Dr. Lauren and we can work on this together. I know we aren’t looking to lose weight at the moment but we want to stop putting it on and level off. Also we can start those good habits now so that when it is time to lose a bit we can transition to that easy enough.
Hi @elicriffield
Not sure if this will help but on the same plan after 4 weeks I only dropped 2 pounds. This was during a period of 8-10 hours training per week. While FPT did not go up I felt stronger on the bike and like you say food volume was higher than I was used to.
I came off it for a week then started back so this is a rest week before I start Firecracker 50 to get ready for an enduro. I weighed myself this morning ( I don’t do daily weigh ins) and had dropped 4 pounds.
Thanks for the quick reply! When i realized today was a holiday I wasn’t even going to check for a reply until tomorrow. You guys are amazing!
I’ll try that
This week was 5517 Kj, last week was a rest week after unbound so only 2422 Kj , average for the last 4 weeks is 5374 Kj but a lot of that was tapering for unbound. The 4 weeks before that I averaged 7728 Kj per week.
I like charts and graphs and numbers so I’ve been tracking my weight for 7 years, every morning right before I shower on the same scale. So I know the trends and fluctuations pretty well.
I feel great, power numbers are at all time highs, and I’m recovering from big events like unbound and a hot 100 mile race Saturday better than ever. Losing this extra 25 lbs would go a long way to helping me not get dropped from the fast guys (which always happens on the hills).
Sounds like a good plan, I feel like maybe I’m some kind of outlier with a crazy low Base Metabolic Rate or something. That’s probably something Dr. Lauren could help with.
I know I could just cut calories until I wasn’t gaining weight. I’ve lost weight in the past, but always with fasting and very low calories and it really hurts my energy levels. I don’t want to sacrifice how good I’ve been doing and recovering.
Hey Eli,
Monitoring this discussion as I am interested in what you find out here. Throwing in some N=1 observations for you to consider.
A. I find that my weight can vary a LOT (+/ 1 or 2Kg for 82 Kg base) between Sat/Sun, Monday (rest day), and Tues (1st normal training day). Seems to depend upon how much riding, racing, and recovery I do over the weekend. If I do big rides / race / training on the weekend I usually am pretty light on Monday, but my weight increases by Tuesday when I am hydrated, fueled, and have given my glycogen time to recover. So: I measure weight at the same time every Tues when I am hydrated, rested, and w/ glycogen restored. Also, consistency matters. To be blunt, urination / defecation, consistency is important so I picked a state and am consistent w/ my measurements including time of day.
B: At the start of this year I was observing weight increase after two months off the bike and used MyFittnessPal to track calories in/out. Set basic metabolic rate at 1900 calories/day. In general if I was burning 600 calories average per day over a week I would increase total fueling to 2500 calories (1900 + 600). Once I restarted training I didn’t see any measurable movement in my weight even if I under fueled over the week, 2300 calories vs. target of 2500 calories. I did feel better, had more energy, and mentally was sharper when I increased calories to 2500 (counter to every inclination I had to try to lean out).
C: thought that my resting metabolic rate might be out of whack so did a RMR test. It was spot on to the estimated average at 1850 calories. Note that the exercise physiologist I was working with said as much ahead of time. He asked me what Watts I was able to put out, FTP, ect along w/ how I was feeling and predicted that I would be average. The test was good valuation though.
D: I don’t have a lot of confidence in the calorie estimation in MyFittnessPal and think that it introduces a false precision. Portion size really matters.
E: It has taken months of focusing on high-quality food, fueling my workouts, and consistent sweetspot / Z2 work for my weight to plateau and start to decrease. My observation is that it takes a LONG time when training / racing to make substantive and longstanding changes and allow them to stick. Give the variation in day to day and week over week (3 week training / 1 week recover cycle) the graph doesn’t change w/ a step function, it is a slow and gradual change over time with lots of variability in the day to day and week to week measurements. It has taken 6 months for me to see my weight graph roll over and move in the direction I want it to go!
