Originally Posted by
srode1
Weight loss isn't necessarily a good thing for performance - % body fat is probably more important. You might have just dropped muscle mass in your time of reduced training load.
True, especially if people want to lose a lot of weight quickly the loss is often for a very large part muscle mass, which is counterproductive in maintaining the right or a better weight. Maybe it would help if people call it fatloss instead of weightloss, but I'm afraid people tend to lose their ability to reason about their fat issue first and become obsessed with the scale, which is only an indication about whether they are achieving their real goal.
As others have said, you can't out exercise a bad diet, eat quality foods and not in excess. Personally, I think diets are for Dummies, make life changes don't do diets.
One of the reasons diets don't work is because people start them before they've learned to maintain weight. So they get from a habit of gaining weight to a situation of temporary losing weight, so when they've finished the diet they start gaining weight again. If you change your habits to maintaining weight first then you've tackled the cause of the problem, then you can do a diet to remove the symptoms of the problem that once was and lose the fat.