I eat lunch at 1:00 and dinner at 7:30. That's it.

I suffered through getting used to Myfitnesspal and was rewarded with losing 20#. It didn't turn out as bad as I thought using it. Helped that my wife had had put in the time to get familiar with portion sizing. At the basic level though, it was really helpful for me to pause and see how many calories were actual in my food. It also made me realize how many snacks I was eating between meals and how those calories added up. There were a lot of things I didn't eat because I didn't feel like entering them.

I'm in the same boat. My FTP is around 240, but I'm 5' 8.5", 185 lbs ... and I get smooooked on hilly courses. I did weigh 168 lbs 9 years ago.

Like you said, it all happens in the kitchen. Start by cutting out all liquid calories. I'd drink 1/2 glass OJ in the morning and everything else is water; except for electrolyte drinks while training and a protein Recovery drink after 1 hour+ workouts.

Eat a square healthy lunch, and early light dinner; focus on lean meats for protein, lots of greens and beets, and greatly limit carbs (breads and pastas). Don't waste calories -- so no junk food, zero! You can eat a few extra carbs Friday or Sat night before Long Run and Long Bike. Pick high quality carbs like sweet potatoes, beans, chick peas....

Drink a shit load of water every day. Drink all the black coffee you want.

Do this for a year and you'll hit your goal of losing 30 lbs!

I use a similar app, LoseIt, to track calories when I need to lose weight. Happens regularly.

Without it, my appetite balloons me to my father's size, which is borderline obese. With the diet, I get all the way down to a good race weight.

I tried doing it without the app, totally failed. Also didn't work well when I tried to just excel log - there's something about how easy and accessible the apps are that make it a lot better to stay on the program.

I highly recommend these apps but know that you will still have to suffer a bit of hunger up front to adjust to every caloric drop. No avoiding that.

I had a similar experience and found the book Racing Weight and it's tracking method easier to use. You can download the Racing Weight app for a couple bucks but I would read the book first. My main complaint with myfitness pal was that it was tedious to enter foods if I didn't eat the same thing every time or didn't eat packaged food. Basically, it's easy to track frozen meals. But if you make stuffed peppers, you have to enter in all the ingredients. Maybe I was using it wrong but that was my experience. The Racing weight method connected with my goal of trying to be competitive and it's written for the endurance athlete. Racing Weight is a point system and gives general guidelines for portion size. You can have x number of portions of veggies, fruit, carbs, and dairy everyday. That was easy for me.

Good luck!

i'd say the value of myfitnesspal etc is not so much in tracking your totals but making you recognise the amount of extra crap you're taking in eg drinks (stick with water), snacks/treats (unnecessary), sauces (mostly full of empty calories, use herbs and spices for flavour instead). do it for a while to get a truer picture of where your empty calories are coming from and what portion sizes you should be having. it shouldn't be necessary to do long term.

that and reading labels (or better yet eating food that doesn't have a package or label) to see what crap ingredients and levels of sugar are really in your diet will not just help you lose weight but enlighten you as to what you should do long term to keep it off.

good luck!

So yeah, all good stuff here. No bullshit about some magic solution.
I just got The Endurance Training Diet & Cookbook. Seems like that helps put the icing on the cake, but I haven’t made the cake yet.... I’m a reader, so I’ll get the other one, on your recommendation. The way you put it is EXACTLY where I’ve failed in the past. I do cook, and as soon as there is no bar code to scan, I get frustrated with MFP and delete it. I think I could even start with an old school notepad since, as mentioned above, just having to write it gives you pause. I also agree with the statements on WATER.
I’m just under #220 now, and performed well at #204, but my best years were at #190. Step 1, stop missing breakfast. I don’t eat much junk (Diet Coke...), but maybe as I start paying closer attention, I bet I’m not as good as I want to believe. Currently, my FTP and my weight are equal (in lbs, not KG....). I get away with it since I live where it’s flat and windy. But dragging my fat ass even up the overpass is pathetic. 15 weeks to IM Coz. #2/week. Sounds pretty doable if I take it seriously.....

If you cook from recipes that are online, ie foodnetwork, epicurious, NYT recipes, etc. MFP is actually decent at automatically importing the recipes and matching ingredients. You usually have to adjust a few things that are mismatched but it's a lot easier than manually entering. If you have to manually enter it can be a pain, but if you're like me I have a relatively small number of 'go to' recipes that I make frequently that I've entered into MFP. If it's a one off thing that I'm pretty sure I'm not going to make again I usually estimate based on a few of the primary ingredients.

I would recommend setting a weight loss target of less than 2 pounds per week. That's a lot while you're training hard and I think you will struggle with harder workouts and recovery while trying to maintain that calorie deficit. More like 1 pound a week should be more manageable and while it won't get you all the way to your target it's a pretty good start.

What do you mean 'That's it.' You eat nothing else during the day?

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Paulo Matos

Lots a good suggestions here. Biggest thing is just start logging your calories daily just for you to see how much you are really eating. I bet you will be surprised how much you really are eating. I'm still amazed how much and how fast it adds up.

If you are looking for some one on one help and someone to help revamp your diet, look at the core diet (qt2 systems based). I did it several years ago and it really helped me understand where my biggest issues were and what I needed to focus on. For me, it wasn't about losing weight, it was more about feeling good all throughout the day, during workouts, and not having that afternoon crash.

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blog

Unless a tri course is very flat, weight also matters.

I can't express enough how much weight is overlooked by even club cyclists, who don't do triathlon. Some of the A group guys I'm sure could do 280+ for 20min. But, they're 30lb heavier than I am.

Until it becomes counter productive to power, nobody that rides a bike in competition that isn't a pro or high level amateur really ever has to worry about being too small for their power. If you're eating enough for the workouts, you're good.

I'll add my 2 cents

I used an app similar to Myfitnesspal (LoseIt!) to lose weight. It worked for me.

But I logged meals for about 3 to 4 weeks. All that it taught me was how to quantify calories in food. It turns out I was underestimating the calorie content of food by a lot. Like 25%. Also overestimating caloric expenditure from exercise by at least 10% or more. And those apps over estimate calories burned via exercise so don't trust them.

It got me on track. Losing weight is a total lifestyle change, and it started me down that path. At some point, the logging isn't worth it. I know when I've had a good day, and I know when I've had a bad day. I don't need the numbers to tell me that. So once you get into a rhythm of it you can skip the app. Good luck!

Yeah, man, I'd say suck it up and do MyFitnessPal. There might be other things that work better for you, but for me it's been good. Even if you only do it for a short time, I think at least initially it will help you get a pattern and better understanding of what's going on.

I tried the Racing Weight book, and although I learned a lot from it, I thought it was actually more complicated trying to figure out how many units of this or that.

I weigh myself every morning (95% of them anyway), and I log the calories burned from exercise (I take 75% of what my devices tell me). And I log the food I eat. But usually by the end of the day I have a lot of room to play with the calories, so I eat a reasonable dinner and don't bother logging it.

I don't bother looking at the macronutrients, because I think have a good head for that and I want to keep things relatively simple. The same with a kitchen balance. Often I thought I should buy a scale, but then I figure the increase in precision I'd get would probably not be worth the extra hassle. So I eyeball 6 oz of chicken or a medium vs large apple, and that's all fine for me.

It does kind of suck if you're doing a recipe, but you can save it and use it again when you do left-overs or repeat the same recipe later. Also, it seems kind of smart about putting foods together that you often eat together. So if I put in cheerios, it'll usually also show skim milk and a banana and I just have to click on them.

I don't use MFP to determine my daily caloric needs, tho. I think it overestimates it for me.

Tracking calories may help but ultimately your weight loss will tell what works and what not. If you have a good understanding of what good nutrition should be like, you will know when you had too much, or too little. Self awareness can become a “skill“ in the process. Less calories in = weight loss

One note on all the low carb high protein stuff that is flying around: its not all good. There are numerous studies out there that show that high protein consumption is bad for the cardiovascular system.
Uli

you could do like me last weekend and eat some bad food and lose 7 lbs (from 150) in a few days.

I was thinking that if you could somehow package whatever it is that turns off the appetite, without the other side effects, you'd be rich.

So, the unexpected question at the end of all this is: Do I really have to get out MyFitnessPal and track everything?????



If you track everything the only thing I can guarantee is that you won't lose weight.

I also tried everything and only had results when I simply changed the way I eat. I completely eliminated sugar, bread, pasta, rice. I eat about 7 cups of a variety of vegetables each day, a small amount of grass fed protein or wild fish and natural fats like almond butter, olive oil, and avocados.

The big change though was I only eat 2 meals per day, breakfast and lunch. I haven't had dinner in a few months and since then, my weight has come way down, I have more energy and have lost all cravings. I don't track calories, I just eliminated bad food.

Pretty much this for me also. I hate to track what I eat and don't find it to be sustainable. I do think it is a great way to yoyo diet.

We need an update from Monty right about now.

I used MFP religiously for a while. Really opened my eyes to what is really in food, and how little of the "bad" stuff you can eat and really ramp up the calories, and how MUCH of the "good" stuff you can eat. Like lean proteins have so little calories vs the amount of food you get, and veggies that give you good carbs, but not too many of them. After about 5 months of logging almost every day, it has lost it's appeal and I find it tedious since it is just telling me what I know.

One thing I did do, was average out what it was telling me I "needed" based on the exercises I was doing and upped my target to that number, still focusing on the macro ratios (25/25/50 during heavy training, 33/33/33 during normal life). I find the MFP calories burned seems reasonable, as it is about 15-20% lower than the Garmin gives me, it apparently accounts for RMR, so I don't get credit for burning calories I would have burned sitting around anyway.

Recipes are tough, but you'll quickly learn what "matters" in there and just put that in. No point in digging through and estimating a quantity for something that adds 10 cal to the meal (like canned tomatoes added to a casserole).

For me, during training, if I want to lose weight, I just don't drink beer (or any booze) and weight falls at about 1 lb / week. When I am at an acceptable weight, I'll go back to having a few beers on Friday or Saturday after the workout is done and I'm lying by the pool (and maybe after a particularly hard day at work).

So...yeah, I've been trying to cut weight too. I've done it in the past, it can be easy or hard. Right now...well it's tough because I'm not allowed to run and I just started doing spin classes as I need a new bike and gained an extra 14 after breaking the clavicle.

I've previously gone from 215 to 185 in the span of 50 days...I worked out 48 of those 50 days. That was part of that. The other part is I cleaned up my diet and at the time I was eating Elk or Chicken and a vegetable every meal. I was eating a ton of carrots or broccoli...either 200g of carrots or broccoli cooked at every meal. In fact I was eating 200g of broccoli at breakfast.

First track everything you're currently eating...if you're eating a ton of processed junk...get rid of it. Move to like 90% whole foods, so meat and vegetables. For the weirdos out there that think vegetables aren't a carbohydrate source stfu...seen way too many people say that to include a vegan triathlete youtuber.

Depending on your weight I'd say you gotta diet pretty hard, especially if you're trying to cut 30lbs in say a two month window.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

Usually.

Every once in a while I will eat outside of those times. Driving long distances can cause me to eat something to wake up a bit.

I eat lunch at 1:00 and dinner at 7:30. That's it.



What do you mean 'That's it.' You eat nothing else during the day?


Not speaking for Jim but that is exactly what I do. I eat breakfast about 6:30 am and lunch at 12:30 pm and then nothing the rest of the day, no snacks, no calories from lunch one day until breakfast the next. I increased the natural fat content of my food and the cravings, and don't even consume calories with drinks. I typically only have black coffee and water anyway. I've lost the cravings because of the higher fat content and have no trouble going between meals without food. It was difficult at first but eliminating 1 meal and snacks was the reason I weigh the same now as I did in high school, 30 years ago.

Yeah weight makes a HUGE difference on the bike. Lots of guys in my road group can motor on the flat but once the road tilts up a bit they are gone within a hundred yards.

Maybe that works for some people but is completel unnecessary and likely has a negative impact on recovery and performance - if you care about that. I eat all day and generally maintain a weight I'm satisfied with - 152-155lbs @ 5'8". If I tightened up some of the details I could be 148-150lbs but I enjoy an ocassional burger, tacos, beer, etc. I'll be 44 next month so this isn't a case of a young guy metabolism. I simply eat mostly clean and exercise regularly. I'd say the OP just needs to start by evaluating his current daily intake and identify where things can be cleaned up. While keeping a food log and tracking macros can be a PITA, it's a good way get an handle on the situation initially. Once you become more aware of everything you won't need it anymore.

+1 for My Fitness Pal. I've used it for 1784 consecutive days (it says so right in my app). Went from 230 lbs to 165 in the first year, mostly because I began to learn more about what exactly I was eating. I continue to use MFP to help maintain my current weight. I treat my caloric intake and macro-nutrient needs kind of like a monetary budget. If I want to indulge and spend/eat more, I need to earn more capitol/calories. Plus, obsessive part of me says I should keep the 1784 day streak going.

On a side note, the fact that I have a record of every single food item I've consumed for the past 4 1/2 years has come in handy on one occasion. I had some kind of apparent allergic reaction while out on a run about two years ago. Then, no problems at all until I had a similar (but more severe) episode about a month ago that landed me in the ER. I meet with an allergy specialist next week, and I'm thinking the food log from the two dates may help narrow things down.