Anyone lost a lot of weight, and kept it off?

A light bike doesn't replace good fitness.

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Shrike
Posts: 2019
Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2016 5:08 pm

by Shrike

bestazy wrote:
Thu Sep 19, 2019 7:25 pm
I was 250 pounds. Currently 140.

It was calorie counting, plain and simple and planner for meal prepping. No special diets. No particularly heavy exercise. I just watched what I ate. Lost 110 lbs in about a year and a half.
Amazing good job.

Did you count calories daily for a year and a half?

Longest I've lasted calorie counting is about 4 months. I've done that a few times, but just burn out in the end. It's too much logging everything daily, and obsessive, I'm thinking the ritual may even be disordered. It does work though!

My problem has been dieting while doing heavy training plans. You end up in a bad place and everything falls apart. Hunger spikes from going from low blood sugar to high are way more extreme when you're doing a lot of long hard rides every week while calorie restricting. Eventually you're doomed to fail.

I'm liking the fasting so far. Did 6 days this week at 16/8, and today I'm hoping to go for 20/4. It's more fun than calorie counting I'm finding and hunger does hit a bit at times, but it's not horrible ever. Insulin spikes after eating so far haven't been so bad that you just want to eat non stop. Stomach feels to fill much faster too, like it's shrunk or something.

Today will be interesting with the 20/4 though :twisted:

Been thinking about long term.. I think 16/8 for me I could do (well based on my measly sample of a week), but @853 has been doing it for years and now regularly does 20/4s so who knows. Not really that many places online where you have cyclists fasting/IF for years on end. Lots of unknowns here.

I was worried about power so did a small test before dinner yesterday and power was excellent, was able to do a big 50 minute effort (picked ADZ on Zwift to test it as it's relentless). Body hasn't broken down yet, so so far so good, but I'm going to test it weekly on Saturdays because I know that when your body is starving itself it's unhealthy, and the first thing to go is higher end sustained power. Don't want to get into that mess again..

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stoney
Posts: 474
Joined: Wed Jun 08, 2011 11:26 am

by stoney

I've been doing 16/8 to 18/6 IF for about 5 weeks and have gone from 180 pounds to 165 pounds at 5'10". I feel much better on the bike now and am definitely climbing faster. I'm 51 years old and work a full time job Monday through Friday so my weekly training is in the afternoons after work. My first meal is usually lunch and I finish with dinner in the evening after training. My 3 to 4 hour weekly long ride is usually done on Saturday mornings with a group. So on Saturday's I do not IF and eat a decent breakfast for energy during a spirited ride. I think the key to IF for cyclists who still have performance goals for races and rides is to not be afraid to arrange your eating around your performance goals. So basically I IF 16/8 or 18/6 six days per week.

Shrike
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by Shrike

@stoney you do the 18/6 on days where workouts are easier?

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853guy
Posts: 225
Joined: Sat Dec 30, 2017 8:48 pm

by 853guy

Shrike wrote:
Sun Sep 22, 2019 10:39 am
(snip)My problem has been dieting while doing heavy training plans. You end up in a bad place and everything falls apart. Hunger spikes from going from low blood sugar to high are way more extreme when you're doing a lot of long hard rides every week while calorie restricting. Eventually you're doomed to fail.

I'm liking the fasting so far. Did 6 days this week at 16/8, and today I'm hoping to go for 20/4. It's more fun than calorie counting I'm finding and hunger does hit a bit at times, but it's not horrible ever. Insulin spikes after eating so far haven't been so bad that you just want to eat non stop. Stomach feels to fill much faster too, like it's shrunk or something.

Today will be interesting with the 20/4 though :twisted:

Been thinking about long term.. I think 16/8 for me I could do (well based on my measly sample of a week), but @853 has been doing it for years and now regularly does 20/4s so who knows. Not really that many places online where you have cyclists fasting/IF for years on end. Lots of unknowns here.

I was worried about power so did a small test before dinner yesterday and power was excellent, was able to do a big 50 minute effort (picked ADZ on Zwift to test it as it's relentless). Body hasn't broken down yet, so so far so good, but I'm going to test it weekly on Saturdays because I know that when your body is starving itself it's unhealthy, and the first thing to go is higher end sustained power. Don't want to get into that mess again..
Hi Shrike,

I've found the research by Peter Attia and Ben Greenfield to be very useful:

Peter Attia & Ben Greenfield: Is It Possible To Be Extremely Active and Eat A Low Carbohydrate Diet?

Barry Murray & Ben Greenfield: The Ultimate Guide To Combining Fasting and Exercise

Peter Attia: The interplay of exercise and ketosis – Part I

Peter Attia: The interplay of exercise and ketosis – Part II

This quote from Barry Murray (MSc Sports Nutrition/Ex-Team BMC nutritionist/endurance athlete) is from the above podcast:

"So I’ve done almost about 20 of these events now over the last three years, and I’ve won a few of them and I’ve placed in kind of usually in the top 10 in most of them. I supposed to give some recent, I mean last year, I ran 127 K race here in Italy, and like I said, I ate nothing before the race. I ate very little during, and it was a hundred and twenty-seven kilometers and I finished it in fourteen-and-a-half hours, and I won the race...

So I think that the best type of athletes that (fat adaptation) is suited to be the long distance athletes, particularly the long distance athletes that are performing at that, more or less, a steady state. The reason why I said that is because I’ve done a lot of work with professional cyclists, and while fat adaptation and fasted state training is something that is very good for them, they still require to be glycolytic. In other words, they still need carbohydrates to function because there are higher variations in the speeds at which they work at. So if you look at two different cyclists, they’re doing long 200 K rides, but there might be breakaways, there might be hill climbs. There are sprints, you know? So there’s a lot of variation in the power which they’ll be using in the speed and intensity which they’ll be at."

Best,

853guy
Last edited by 853guy on Sun Sep 22, 2019 1:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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853guy
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by 853guy

Double post

Shrike
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by Shrike

@853 brilliant links, took a bit to absorb but it was worth it, especially for what ultimately I am hoping to know.. how adapted could I become through IF and greatly reducing carbs and carb loading, while still being able to ride around tempo and sweet spot. What about threshold?

Tempo is likely the most important as it’s the pace I’d want to master for very long distances, and thankfully it should be the easiest of all ranges to achieve in a lower carb state. What I learned just now is that we do actually make and store glucose from fat! Never knew that.. so does that mean even while fasting we wouldn’t be fully depleted, we’d still have some stores after a 16 hour or 24 hour fast? It’s not clear to me but if I’m reading this right it might be the case..

This was heartening:

Lesson 4
While it’s probably the case that my liver has less glycogen (i.e., stored glucose) at any point in time, relative to what would be present if I were eating a high-carb diet, it’s not clear this matters, at least for some types of workouts. Why? Take the following example:

Someone my size can probably store about 100 gm of hepatic (liver) glycogen and about 300 gm of muscle glycogen at “full” capacity. This represents about 1600 calories worth of glucose – the most I can store at any one time.
Before I was ketotic, my RQ at 60% max VO2 (about 2,500 mL of O2 per min consumption) was nearly 1.00, so at that level of power output (a pace I can hold for hours from a cardiovascular fitness standpoint) I required 95% of my energy to come from glycogen. So, how long do my glycogen stores last? 2,500 mL of O2 per minute translates to about 750 calories per hour, so I would be good for about 2 hours and 15 minutes on my glycogen stores.
Contrast this with my ketotic state. Let’s assume my glycogen stores are now only half what they were before. Muscle biopsy data suggests this is probably an overly conservative estimate, but let us assume this to be the case. Now I only store 50 mg of hepatic glycogen and 150 gm of muscle glycogen, about 800 calories worth of glucose.
In ketosis, my RQ at 60% max VO2 is 0.77 (at last check), telling me I am getting only 22% of my energy from glucose and the remaining 78% from fat. So, how long do my depleted glycogen stores last? Nearly 5 hours. Why? Because I barely access glucose at the SAME level of oxygen consumption and the same power output.

stoney
Posts: 474
Joined: Wed Jun 08, 2011 11:26 am

by stoney

Shrike wrote:
Sun Sep 22, 2019 11:23 am
@stoney you do the 18/6 on days where workouts are easier?

Yes, I'll do anywhere from 16/8 to 18/6. I just depends on the day and circumstances.

kafreeman
Posts: 170
Joined: Thu Jul 23, 2015 8:46 pm

by kafreeman

stoney wrote:
Shrike wrote:
Sun Sep 22, 2019 11:23 am
@stoney you do the 18/6 on days where workouts are easier?

Yes, I'll do anywhere from 16/8 to 18/6. I just depends on the day and circumstances.
Same here.

No need to always be rigid. No training this weekend and I ate a ton all day.

Time to start a training plan I think. Starting to stay dark until 7:30 am. We will have the standard time shift in a couple of months, but even then the days are too short.

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kytyree
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by kytyree

Shrike do you ever listen to the Flo Cycling podcast?

Their recent one with Steve Neal (Episode 30) might be interesting to you. They had him on before and that one is also good, but in 30 they touched on some training techniques that remind of what you wrote about tempo...

Shrike
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Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2016 5:08 pm

by Shrike

kytyree wrote:
Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:36 pm
Shrike do you ever listen to the Flo Cycling podcast?

Their recent one with Steve Neal (Episode 30) might be interesting to you. They had him on before and that one is also good, but in 30 they touched on some training techniques that remind of what you wrote about tempo...
Was that the one about people focusing too much on threshold training whereas they should be training more at FatMax or whatever they're calling it? :P

I spotted someone talking about it last week on the TR forums and been meaning to check it out. Thanks for the reminder!

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kytyree
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by kytyree

I guess they'd say the training is focused on improving "FatMax" but I think you could also call it his techniques for sweetspot training.


I'm not sure about all the underlying physiology, nor do I plan to get the proper analysis done of what my metabolic efficiency, but the idea that focusing on sub-threshold improvements might be more beneficial for certain types of events I can believe.

Shrike
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Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2016 5:08 pm

by Shrike

kytyree wrote:
Mon Sep 23, 2019 4:12 pm
I guess they'd say the training is focused on improving "FatMax" but I think you could also call it his techniques for sweetspot training.


I'm not sure about all the underlying physiology, nor do I plan to get the proper analysis done of what my metabolic efficiency, but the idea that focusing on sub-threshold improvements might be more beneficial for certain types of events I can believe.
Most people are definitely not doing full on 1 hour threshold rides to events and most people aren't doing 2 to 3 minute hill climbs or even racing..

Yet pretty much anyone into structured training gets pulled into the same build phase. Maybe there is an argument for focusing more on sub threshold intervals after base training.. not sure if that's what's being discussed in the podcast yet, but it would make sense to me. Instead of doing say 2x20 FTP in build, why aren't we doing 1x40 at tempo or sweetspot if the goal is to do long gran fondos, centuries etc..

Oh and the other things is that base phases, like TrainerRoad's which are mostly sweetspot, especially the high volume plans, are most fuelled by riders on higher carb ratios. Maybe it's a case that we need to learn to do base phases like these but work on fat adaptation too. Maybe we're only doing one half of the equation.

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kytyree
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by kytyree

It's along those lines, an example he referenced was a 3x20 sweetspot workout, with the important caveat of using a HR ceiling that especially at first would push the level of those intervals down. The training stuff is a little more detailed in that second podcast, the first one is interesting but more of an overview in my memory.

Diet wise in both the podcast they talk about the work of Bob Seebohar, whose stuff I haven't read but I gather it's less carb-centric, not keto but more emphasizing a protein carb balance for meals.

AJS914
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by AJS914

That podcast was pretty interesting! Thanks for the link.

Shrike
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by Shrike

What's the low down with fasting and heart rate? Mine dropped after last Monday where I went 23 hours on a fast. Tuesday onwards HR has been around 5 to 7 beats lower on all zones... Into my second week of 16/8 with one 23/1 session. Not sure if good bad :shock:

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