Athenas - How Much Weight Can I Really Look Forward to Losing...
 

If I'm riding an hour a day, five-six days each week, ten miles per trip?

I weigh 245-250, give or take, and I'm 5'4", 44 years old next week. I've been riding consistently for over a week and I'm seeing some muscle definition in my calves, but that's about it. I don't want to get discouraged here. I'd love to hear what other women have experienced. I've read the Clyde stories and while they're inspirational, I've always heard that men lose weight faster than women, show faster results with an exercise program, and all that - true? No? It's true enough in this house. D*H dropped twenty pounds in the last three months. I now weigh more than him. A good bit more than him. This is not good.

If there's already thread about Athena before, during, and after stories, I'm missing it.

DD and I are training for the 18-mile Tour of Poway (the bunny slope version and my first ever bike event).

I've eliminated fast food except for El Pollo Loco and Rubios, which are both made fresh and use good ingredients, I think, and I only eat those a couple times a week. I only eat whole grains any more, lots of organic fruits and vegetables. When I have chocolate, it's dark. No sodas, ever. Lots of water and green tea instead, and fruit smoothies with a scoop of whey protein powder every other day or so. I'm not calorie counting, though. I think I need to go to that next step, although it seems pretty tedious.

I picked up Bill Phillips' Eating for Life, which seems a sensible way to go food-wise (and no calorie counting involved), but he's a big proponent of protein shakes from Met-RX and those other companies. I don't know if they're good for women or not. I've only ever seen body building men use them. Any suggestions for something more girl-friendly?

Obviously I have a lot of questions here as I'm just starting out. I'll keep reading and learning as I go.

It's all about the journey, right?

AR

You've been at it a week and expected big changes? Dreamer! It takes a long time. You should probably try to lose about a pound a week, long term. That'll take you a couple of years to lose 100 pounds, but you'll remain healthy while you lose. To lose weight at that rate, you need to eat about 500 calories a day less that you need to sustain your weight. It really doesn't matter that much what sort of food you eat (as long as you have a reasonably balanced mix), but rather how much you eat. A pound a week, 500 hundred calories a day reduction is not by any means a starvation diet, and shouldn't be too hard to maintain over time. But you gotta be patient and you gotta keep at it. You might start by keeping track of all that you eat for a week or so, being as accurate as you can and not cheating, and find out what your baseline calorie consumption is. Then, figure out what you can reduce or change to get that 500 calories a day reduction. Do not bother with any of the fad diets...they might work temporarily and produce more rapid loss, but they're not sustainable over the long term and set you up for a rebound when you quit them.

Im not an Athena but i was a Clyde, i weighed 247 lbs, on 7-7-08 i started my diet, 9-4-08 i weighed in at 199.2. I tried all sorts of crap for the last couple years and would lose between 5 or 10 lbs at best, then i paid a nutritionalist $100 right before the 4th of July and she set me up, ABSOLUTE BEST $100 i've ever spent!!!!!!!!!. Im not a nutritionalist but from what i've learned in the last couple months you have to count calories, i was eating low fat so called good for you foods but not worrying about the calories and that doesnt work. I actually take in more fat now but less calories then before. PM me if your intrested in an idea of what i eat daily i'd be happy to discuss.

Don't get discouraged. It takes about 2 weeks before you'll start to notice some weight drop. And then it won't be much loss. If you're like me, you'll immediately plateau and it may take ANOTHER week (or 2) before you drop 1 pound.

The trick is to keep at it. You know that the weight has to come off if you keep exercising. You also know that the weight will come right back on (and more) if you stop exercising.

It doesn't always work out that men lose weight faster than women. My first month cycling I lost a total of 3 lbs and that was it. What really happened was that I added some muscle and lost fat but the weight mostly stayed the same. Once I got fit enough to increase my distance I started to lose the fat faster. A good rate is 1 lb per week. At that rate your body can adjust/adapt AND your skin has a chance of rebounding instead of sagging.

I would stop the fast food except as a treat (maybe once a week or so). Most fast food is grease city which is why it tastes so good. (your body craves fats because they are normally hard to get in quantity.) High fats (especially hydrogenated fats) are not good eats when trying to lose weight. I would also second the "write down what you eat for a week" suggestion. You'll find out how many calories you really are ingesting and you'll be somewhat surprised at the total.

You don't need protein shakes unless you are trying to supplement an otherwise deficient diet for what your exercise program requires. For cycling you mostly need carbs to keep the motor fueled during long aerobic periods.

And, like I said above, the trick is to just keep at it. Even if you slow down exercising a bit, if you continue to exercise and watch what you eat (calorie deficient) you will eventually lost the excess weight.

And you don't have to pay $45/week to an ubber corp like Jenny or WWer's in order to get better results.

Hey there - Welcome. Well I have lost 100 pounds in the past in a 12-step porgram and I chose a very very restrivtive program (3 meals a day,no flour or sugar, no alchohol and nothing in between). I lost about 2.5 lbs a week - but I was obsessed with food. :twitchy: I worked extremely hard to keep it off. But I really was a nut about the food. I did keep it off 10 years - but then started eating.

So now - I am here again fat and losing weight - started at 226.6 4/21 and am around 193 .5 (as of last Monday down 1.65 pounds on avg per week). Now I chose a much differnet food plan - the kind where you just eat less and nothing is off limits. I do not say I can't eat XY or Z so I don't crave those foods and let it backfire. I aim for a slower weight loss so if I decide to eat a dessert i won't have blown the week. Most of the eating out I do is at Subway with a 6 inch wheat sub, chicken...and mustard and veggies...with baked chips so I get satisfied - but not a huge meal. I eat that alot and then if at home lots of chicken, veggies, etc. Breakfast - 1 oz (I weight it dry) oatmeal cooked with water and blueberries, maybe 2 eggs or plain non fat yogurt.

When I ride - if I go over 1.5 hours I will eat each hour about 100 to 150 calories.


Net net - It's not about the exercise. (OK please no hate mail for the Bee). If I am large - I coud easily out eat my exercise. Most impt thing I do on a daily basis is not overeat. I do exercizes - I go to the gym and use the eliptical or I do a Slim N 6 video at home - and also I bike a few times a week - and at least 2times on the weekend. So the exercise will help! But I have to be ok if I don't exercise- I will still lose weight.


So hang in thier girlfriend! We can do this - and it is imperative. For me - I am a different human when I lose weight. So I have only lost 33 pounds - ooh maybe more I weigh myself Monday- and I have shrunk a few sizes and I just love dressing up now. I am happy and confident. I still think I am a fat biker - as I get passed on the hills- but man I am proud of me and having fun! Biking is awesome - and I am all about it these days.

So have fun - keep away from some of those real fattening foods most of the time. Also on the shakes.... I did have a Food Plan where I had whey protein shakes - if I did that now I would need to cut back on other food -as the shakes have a bunch of calories. So I am not having many of them - I stick with food.

Also - I would stay away from the fast food placces of any kind except Subway. And I would look at why you go. For me I do Subway because I rarely have bread at home - and I feel real satisfied having it. I also am on the road for work and need to find food. But if you have access to a kitchen - I would look to having most meals at home - and then hit a real restaurant when you really need/want to go. For me the restaurants are like a bar for a drunk - so I stay home or go when I have a date or sufficient reason.

OK - Party on! Lose weight....and you will be amazed! Ride on!

The way to avoid being discouraged is to set reasonable expectations. When most people set out to get in shape, their expectations are anything but. They want to lose their weight quickly (certainly less than a year!), and when they're done losing it, they want to be done with whatever they had to do to lose the weight. Here's some reality:

• You didn't put the weight on in a year, and you won't take it off in a year -- unless you do something very, very healthy and unsustainable.
• If you want to get in shape and stay that way, the changes you make have to be permanent.
• Human beings evolved over millenia where most people had to do hard physical labor daily in order to get food that was just adequate -- sometimes not even that. You live in a world where, most likely, you don't have to do hard physical labor ever if you don't really want to, and where you are surrounded by a surfeit of high-calorie food. I don't really hold with the "eat like a caveman" diets -- I think they leave too many pieces out of the puzzle -- but you do have to take evolution into account if you want to come up with a successful way to get in shape.
• It's hard to say how many calories you burn by cycling at 10 mph -- if you're climbing hills, that's one thing; if you're on the flats, that's another. I've seen estimates of anywhere from 260 (which seems a little low) to 590 (which seems a lot high) calories burned for an hour cycling at that speed. I'm guessing that's on the flats.
• About fast food -- "fresh" and "healthy" are marketing terms where fast food is concerned, so you need to take the claims of fast food chains who claim to serve healthy food with a grain of salt. For example, the famous Jared from the Subway ads ate the following for his famous "subway diet": coffee for breakfast (nothing else); a 6-inch turkey with vegetables and spicy mustard (no cheese or oil or other condiments), a bag of Baked Lays and a diet drink for lunch; and a 12-inch veggie sub with no cheese or condiments for dinner. He ate that every day. The moral of the story is that you may be able to eat food at a "healthy" fast food restaurant if you follow some very strict restrictions on menu choices and portion sizes. I would suggest checking the nutrition on what you're eating at El Pollo Loco and Rubios -- Calorie King has nutritional information on a lot of fast food restaurants, including both of these. Not surprisingly (at least to me), when I just randomly picked a chicken burrito from each of these restaurants, and then one from Taco Bell, Rubio's topped the scales at 650 calories, El Pollo Loco was second with 500 calories, and Taco Hell was lowest at 350 calories. So you see, there are a lot of pitfalls in "healthy" fast food. It's not to say that you can't eat it if you enjoy it -- you just need to understand what it represents nutritionally.
• For that matter, there's no food that's "healthy" if eaten without regard to portion sizes and nutritional needs. Smoothies are usually a pretty concentrated source of calories, protein powder more so. These are healthy foods when they are used to replace the unhealthy foods in your diet and are eaten in moderation -- no one ever lost weight by simply adding a fruit smoothie with protein powder into their diet. I am not a big fan of adding protein powders and other concentrated foodstuffs unless there's a real need for it -- unless your exercise is quite vigorous, they're going to represent surplus calories.

One other thought: cycling isn't the only way to go. If you find some activity that you really love, really are passionate for, you will have all the motivation you need. You'll want to do it more; you'll find that that's a struggle because of your conditioning; you'll get motivated to adjust your diet to focus on fuel instead of food-as-recreation; you'll want to do the activity at a higher level. This is the best approach I know to exercise not being a chore.

Thank you all for your input. Okay, so I'll back off on the over-ambitious weight loss goal a bit.

I read somewhere about using a check register to track calorie intake every day. You start with your calorie limit, say 1600, and subtract as you eat. When you reach 1,600, you're done for the day. Calorie counting is always such a hassle, though. You have to measure everything and write it down. Who has the time?

I'll try, but I don't see sticking with it long term, which is why the Eating for Life thing appealed to me. There are meal plans, and a serving size per meal is about the size of your fist, and it's always a combination of lean proteins and healthy carbs, with a heavy emphasis on veggies and whole grains.
That appeals to me.

I'm digging the riding, though. I went for ten miles this morning and it felt great. Absolutely great. I actually maintained a 16 mph sprint for half a mile around curves and with a slight incline. I felt downright powerful.

Thanks for all the encouragement. I look forward to participating in this group.

AR, the dreamer.

lil brown bat, thanks for the input on smoothies. I usually have one for breakfast every other day. I like them and I don't eat anything else until about 10am when I usually have a small apple or a granola bar or something.

Thanks for the tip on calorieking,com, too. I'll check that out as I'm putting together my training program, diet and exercise this time.

I followed the Fat Flush for a couple of months and did pretty well on it, but wasn't able to maintain it - just too few calories for what I needed, and it was hard to stick to. At the time, I was working some really long days and didn't have the opportunity to eat at home, or even fix something that would keep in a cooler all day, but it's different now. I'm working a regular morning schedule and I've got every single afternoon open for exercise. I've never had this before. That's why I think this is going to be different.

There are some major changes going on this year. Personal and professional. I'll share that later, though.

In the meantime, I won't pay so much attention to the scale as I will to how I'm feeling, and today I feel great.

Thank you again for the support and encouragement.

AR

Hey Athena - I did fat Flush too - And it has some good principles- and the first 60 pages of the book are so interesting! But - I have decided that it was too much to follow the plan - so i am on the Sue plan and whatever works. So hang on - sounds like you have found a good food plan....They all work if you stay on it. Just be gentle - and if you slip up - just get right back on.

Drink a ton of water. Also -soon check out local bike group rides for Beginners. You will be amazed at how much fun the bike world is!

errr...obviously that was supposed to be UNhealthy, sorry.

athenarox I site to help you monitor calories is www.fitday.com. There are some gripes about how accurate the values are but it should help you with calorie counting. I found in the beginning I had to to enter a lot of the foods I eat, but you only have to do that once. Over estimate the calories consumed, I find I don't like eating out as much because I often don't know what the calorie count is. And underestimate the calories burned on exercise.

I find the benefit in riding is so much the calories I burn as the motivation I get from eating better not wanting to ruin the effort I put in on the bike.

If you are biking an hour a day you will see benefits. As time goes along your speed will increase so be prepared to find a new route. Plan to ride for the hour regardless of how far you go.

You should note that while the "healthy" meal from El Pollo Loco provided 500 calories (and Rubio's 650), the "unhealthy" Big Mac from McDonald's has 540 calories.

Besides the link lil brown bat provided, the restaurant chains often provide the information on their own sites. You can scan their menus at a glance.

For example: http://www.elpolloloco.com/nutrition...itionguide.pdf

And: http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/bagam...ion_facts.html

You shouldn't think of calories as something bad, though...they're an indication of the nutritional value of the food. Calories are just a measure of the energy content of the food. As is the case with many things in life, though, while some is good and enough is wonderful, too much can be bad for you.

There's no need to follow any sort of rigid diet. It's the averages that matter. If you splurge one day, it won't hurt you...you can pig out at Thanksgiving, for example, as long as you return to your "normal" amounts of food afterward. Don't expect a straight line of losses, either...your weight will probably bounce up and down day by day, and possibly even week by week, but it's the long term that matters.

It's also okay to indulge your whims and cravings. Just be reasonable about it.

And staying away from the scale is a good idea: when I first started my journey a bit over a year ago, the trainer told me that there won't be much weight loss the first three months, as I'd be building muscle. I weigh once a month and always use the same scale at the gym.

deraltekluge is correct about rigid diets, the problem with diets, is that the first part of diet is die. You go on the diet, you lose the pounds you want to lose, then what? You go back to eating the way you did before and find all those pounds you lost, and a few extras come along for the ride. The key is that most overweight people, need to retrain themselves about food.

The first key rule of this is, food is not comfort, food is not emotion, food is fuel for the bio-mechanical suit that you wear. If you want that suit to work properly, you need to know about it's fuel, and what is good fuel, and what is bad fuel, and to realise that activity can alter the kind of fuel you need.

Long distance touring riders, and hikers can burn incredible amounts of fuel, it's not uncommon for the long distance hiker to burn 5000 calories a day, A 100kg cyclist on a 12kg bike, with a 23kg touring load, going 75km per day at 20km/h on flat ground with a 20 km/h wind will burn over 2500 calories, just riding. Add on their RMR and some walking around setting up camp, and they are probably close to the hiker in total daily burn. Obviously this requires a more fuel then when your sitting at home on the couch. Given the difficulty to consume enough when hiking or touring, some folks will actually put some fuel in reserve, to limit the weight loss. I'll admit that I already have a good supply of reserve, I just need a couple of months off, to go on a nice long tour to get rid of it.....:D

There are differences of opinion about that. A problem with the once-a-month weighing is that you can hit peaks and valleys of the daily and weekly ups and downs. That can confuse the issue...it can make you think you've lost when you haven't, or not lost when you have. I weigh every day (at about the same time of day), and plot the results as a graph using a spread sheet. That way, I can see the long term trends and discount the short term oscillations.

Restaurant food makes me want to pig out. It's engineered to do that, to make you crave it and want to eat more of it. Our bodies evolved to love fat and sugar and salt, and we still chow down on it when we can get it, even though the food we have access to has far more than we actually need. We can eat too much before we feel satisfied physically.

I think my office's weekly company lunches have been a bad thing for my waistline. :rolleyes: Most of the time we get Indian or Thai takeout, and I found that I would eat the whole thing before I realised I wasn't hungry anymore.

My current tactic is just to not eat out of the styrofoam box. I take a bowl, I put half the food in it, and I eat. When I get to the bottom of the bowl, I ask myself if I'm still hungry. Usually I'm not, and I have lunch for the next day too.

One thing this made me realise was that when I was eating my entire lunch, I was actually feeling bloated and drowsy in the afternoons. By not eating more than I need, I actually have energy in the afternoons.

It would be hard to do with a sandwich like a Big Mac, because it's relatively small and concentrated (not to mention would probably taste nasty and look worse the next day!). But if you get things like curries and stir-fries (which aren't always healthy foods -- aah, coconut cream curry, my tasty and saturated arch-nemesis), you may find that "one serving" is actually two or three.

I like your scientific approach. :)

If a woman is weighing herself monthly she should probably coordinate it with her menstrual cycle (if she has one) rather than with the calendar, because that will have a big effect on how much water she retains. That would give the most accurate average for that frequency of measurement, but then of course you get a better average if you have more data.

I think the reason women are encouraged to weigh infrequently is because of body image issues. If you're emotionally wrapped up in your looks and your weight, seeing the fluctuations on the scale might be an artificial and misleading downer. But if you can remember that there are lots of small-scale fluctuations over time, and you can make a chart and look at long-term trends, you should probably weigh more often than once a month. (Who knows, thinking about it scientifically and understanding what your body is doing might actually help you detach if you're too emotionally involved.)

Hey, I've had similar stuff... Lots of new muscle, but I haven't lost as much weight as it seems like I should have. Come over to the women's forum, and check out this thread: http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=461411 :)

Here is another tactic, this works with Thai, Chinese and Indian food equally well, order a small steamed rice for each person, and several a-la-carte items, off the menu, and share, this way each person gets a nice variety of items, and you can order less food this often works out cheaper as well.

Another alternative is to eat your curries on a bed of spinach or lettuce instead of rice. White rice is like sugar in that it causes your body to release insulin. Insulin makes you really good at storing fat. (Brown rice can be better, and is definitely richer in nutrients, but is not available in many place.)

Check out myfitnesspal.com

Great site--easy to use, FREE, and great support forums. I've used fitday and My Fitness Pal is much easier to use. You plug in your stats, and it suggests a calorie daily intake for you. Then you enter in your food, and it keeps track of how much you're eaten, what's left, etc. It also helps you track exercise and account for the calories burned in exercise.

I use it and have lost 63 pounds since April.

I'm an Athena--45 (almost 46). Started at 279 and a now 216. I ride about 5 days a week and average 100-135 miles a week.

You can expect to lose as much weight, as the amount of work you put into losing it. Its just hard work and discipline.

+1 And we have a winner!

Put in the effort and discipline required, and you'll lose as much as you're willing to work for. It's up to you. Just cycling, you can't expect to lose anything. It takes a change in diet as well. This is something that you have to work for.

*does small dance of menopausal glee*

All you need is good old veggies and fruit. Look up these three:Dr. Furhman/green smoothie girl/incredible smoothies on the net. I'm telling you it works, it's easy, never hungry (eat all you want), the lbs. are coming off without much effort at all. I'm sure when the weather warms and I can really ride I will drop a ton of weight in the first few months. Right now I'm losing 3 - 5 lbs./wk without much exercise at all. No brainer!