Been doing some race specific blocks of work the past couple months. A TT and a RR.

After my RR I have some time to play with.

I want to drop and hold about 2.5kg less.

I tracked my food during these power build blocks and it’s close as hell to a net zero or a touch over or under depending on the week.

I simply feel sometimes that the math doesn’t add up somehow. Maybe I’ve depressed my insulin sensitivity too much in training or something. Dunno.

Any racers (ahem, furiousferret) have good plan tips for that one?

I float around 72kg fully glycogen topped up. 70 inches tall. I’d like to maintain that at 69kg.

Short of doing a huge base/tempo block while starving.....whatcha got?

Stay hungry all the time. IMO, you are at the stage where it is about how much hunger can you tolerate to achieve your goal. IMO, you are fighting your homeostasis which is why the math does not seem to work. Ask yourself this question before you eat anything - will eating this make me faster or slower.

You can see how easy it is to become anorexic. The thinking and discipline to lose those last few pounds is not healthy physically or mentally but it will make you faster.

Yeah, I'd rather not become an angry depressed basket case that starts losing power on the bike.

I think I still have a few areas I could improve eating. Biggest disappointment is that outside of maybe enabling better workouts and power, my zero alcohol for 180 out of 365 calendar days schedule has yielded zero weight improvement. Despite that probably being easily 500 to 1000 calories less per week.

I do eat better on the bike now for workouts and long rides. I used to be bad about that. That's improved those rides and training effect. Maybe that's just the "cost of entry" and I need to just maintain instead of try to lose.

There's a hill climb TT in summer I may want to try. My team said I'd be a great candidate as I'm still a 4/5 and my advantage (locally at least) is that I can destroy folks in my race class on anything that goes uphill more than 4% grade for longer than 2 minutes. Which does no good in races here since there's only one or two road races, and they're flat or rolling.

A little harder to take a wrong turn on a hill climb TT that's point to point on the same road! Ha ha ha! Laugh at my own fail. So sad.

When I get down to those last few pounds, I feel that it's longer rides that gets them off more reliably. On shorter rides, I feel like I just eat back all my Calories even if the sum of those short rides is more mileage per week.

Longer being 50 or more miles. However I don't race or compete, so YMMV.

furiousferret Your presence is requested to provide BTS with your sage, weigh loss advice.

I'm 5'11", 150 lbs (age 62), pretty close to my optimal weight as an amateur boxer in the 1970s. Back then I'd compete as high as 155 lbs, but had more upper body muscle. My optimal weight then and now would be around 145-147.

I already know what I'd need to do to pare off that remaining 3-5 lbs, virtually all belly fat. I'm just not motivated enough to do it.

I've already eliminated alcohol, mostly because I couldn't metabolize it after my thyroid failed a couple of years ago. I like beer but it doesn't like me anymore. One beer gives me hangover symptoms within an hour or so. Takes all the fun out of it.

And I've cut way back on sugar and junk carbs. My only added sugar is sweetened creamer in my coffee. Most of my energy snacks -- gels, bars, etc -- use maltodextrin. I tried sugar alcohols like maltitol but that stuff gives me ferocious gas. Not painful for me, but would be for anyone following me. I switched to Clif or Larabars, which usually contain sugar rather than sugar alcohols or "artificial" sweeteners. I have stevia in the kitchen but rarely add sweetener to anything so it doesn't get used much.

I try to eat anything with sugars or carbs only around workouts. But I eat a lot of bananas, day and night, which adds sugar and probably some junk calories.

There are theories about insulin reacting differently to different types of sugars, with interstitial belly fat being a side effect. That's pretty well known among bodybuilders, due to misuse of insulin. But there's still some disagreement over whether the body really does react differently to sucrose, fructose, glucose, dextrose, etc.

I average 125 miles a week, sometimes more if I use the indoor trainer for intervals and recovery rides. Outdoors I aim for zone 3 and 4 as much as possible, based on heart rate and felt effort.

To eliminate that last 3-5 lbs of belly fat I'd need to go full keto. I'd need to keep a lot more low or no carb snacks around to replace the bananas I usually munch on. Maybe even eliminate my morning oatmeal.

And to adapt I'd need to eliminate anything but recovery or zone 2 endurance rides, at least for a few weeks.

And stress may be a factor, with cortisol apparently responsible for hanging onto belly fat as emergency rations. It's possible my body is interpreting my workouts as stress and refusing to let go of that belly fat. So perhaps switching to lower effort endurance rides for at least a couple of weeks might help.

But I'm not training for anything so it's hard to get motivated. I'm thinking about time trials (no more crits, thanks, due to the thyroid thing I have osteopenia and don't bounce anymore). So maybe that would motivate me enough to try a couple of modifications to my diet and workout routines.

Learn how to force your body to convert nasty fat to brown fat, stay hungry like the wolf, and ride til your glycogen stores' shelves are bare. Repeat. After two weeks of absolutely killing yourself you'll be at your goal, but you *MUST* be in a caloric deficit to accomplish this at this rate. Your results won't vary, but they probably won't last, either. But you'll shed that 2.5kg...

There's the Lance method: go out for 6 hour rides with nothing but water. I don't know how often he did that, but it worked. Maybe couple times a week? Moderate pace of course, but do the math. The good part is that you don't lose your legs. The bad part is that it's not exactly fun.