Originally Posted by DannoXYZ

That's right, more carbs isn't the answer, neither is low-carb. Your diet must be tailored to match your level of fitness and types of workouts. There is no "perfect" formulae that will work for everyone under all circumstances. A TDF pro's fitness-level and workouts require a completely different diet than who rides less than 200-miles/wk.

No, it's not so clear-cut in all-or-nothing, yes/no, black-and-white blanket ideas. I've lost 65-lbs in the past year +3 months and I can tell you that it requires a vast and comprehensive plan that encompasses periodization in training aimed for maximum fitness-improvement rather than weight-loss. You can do some quick short-term weight-loss, but at the cost of sub-par fitness increases and even experience some muscle-loss. This will hinder the long-term goal of high-fitness and permanent weight-loss.

You have nothing to worry about insulin-resistance, which is primarily experienced by sedentary couch-potatoes who tend to overeat and overload their system with food even when their muscle-cells are completely PACKED TO THE GILLS with glycogen already! That's the real problem, overeating and lack of exercise, nothing else contributes as much to their problem, not types of food; it's an imbalance of exercise vs. ingested calories.

So... for your goals, slow and steady should be the plan. Eat less than you burn off and you'll have steady and continuous weight-loss (for the most part). I've found that trying to aim for too high a calorie-deficit per day/week ends up destroying too much muscle in the process of losing weight and my fitness-improvement isn't as fast as it could be. At -2lbs/week, I actually hit some pretty hard plateaus where I was sore for days and couldn't workout on my optimum schedule; I sacrified days that I could be exercising due to fatigue and apathy. In many ways biking requires the training of a bodybuilder combined with an ultra-marathoner in one. So I reduced the calorie-deficit to lose 1lb/week maximum and I was able to make much quicker improvements in fitness. That allowed me to sustain the weight-loss continuously without hitting too many plateaus.

The other thing you want to watch out for is getting caught in no-man's-land in training where you do too much of the medium-intensity/distance workouts over and over again. Your body will get stronger and adapt, but only to the point of being able to deal with the stress and that's it. Once it gets strong enough to do those workouts, it will stop improving and the weight-loss will cease. You'll have to always and continually up the ante in training, add more intensity regulary each macrocycle. In the beginning, you might have 2-3 sprints one day a week, and your body will get stronger. But, you'll also have to increase this load to 4-5 sprints, then 5-7 sprints on a monthly basis to keep your body stressed beyond its limit as it gets stronger. Same for distance, start with 2-3 hour rides on weekends, then increase to 2.5-3.5 hours, then 4-6 hours. It's these longer rides that really take the pounds of fat off. That's because you can only burn about 300-400 calories/hr of fat and the only way to burn more is to do more hours. Fat-burning peaks around 55-65% of MHR and is fairly even until LT, after which it goes down, so you want to ride at tempo-pace on these rides. On the high side would be better due to faster glycogen-depletion and you can also train your endurance and energy systems at the same time.

So...there's no simple holy-grail solution, it requires an intricate and varying programme that continually changes and adapts.