there have been a few nutella requests. I think initially we'll include it with one of the other important food groups, maybe the pancakes. If I do get to race weight in good time, I might do a "nutella only" phase, which I think would work well for me. I do love Nutella but I can only eat so much before I feel a little sick, so it could possibly be my key to success if that's all I eat.

I put the provisional food type schedule up on a blog post - pancakes are in for the final push to race weight and we should make a home for nutella there

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

+2 on fried chicken. This with a beer is my achilles heel.

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Fantastic

I believe that you are ripping off the plan from Jan Ullrich. Are you paying him licensing fees? He invented this before he won the TdF in 1997 (well when you beat Virenque, Bjarne Riis, Abraham Olano, Fernando Escartin and Marco Pantani, there must be MORE to the plan but I digress....oh the days when blood was way thicker than water and you could still overcome the Jan Ullrich eating plan)

Panda Express Orange and Beijing Chicken. Something about that syrup and deep fried-ness.

burger updates: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4
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I am getting close to the 77kg mark now, but there are still some burgers I want to try, so I will have to eat a bit more today!
So far I've had BK extra long cheeseburger, Five Guys Bacon Cheeseburger , Smashburger Bacon Avocado Club, and Good Times Big Daddy bacon cheese burger. There are still at least 3 more local burgers I need to try. I was expecting each phase to last about 2 weeks (one pound per week) so I will increase calories slightly to at least hopefully make the burger phase last until the end of this week. Next phase is probably the milkshakes / ice cream phase. In my burger journey I did find something called a spoonbender at Good Times which looks like a 2000 calorie milkshake/sundae thing.

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

Very impressive!

And here I am eating chicken, veggies and brown rice in the lead up to IMNZ, now I'm considering switching to a burgers diet!

while the burger diet is a LOT of fun, I think with a month to go to IMNZ, your current diet is probably better for your training!

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

 
You mentioned 1,500-2,000 calories per day. How did you arrive at that number for weight loss? Is that just based on your experience of what you need personally? Or is there some method you use.

I was in the 195-205lbs range since early 2010 right after I got married. Decided I was tired of getting beat up all the hills so I decided to lose weight last winter. Got down to 175lbs by tracking calories on MFP. Have been in the 170-175 range for the last year. Currently I am 175 and want to be in the 165 range. I agree with your method that calorie deficit is what is important as it worked for me last winter. Just not always sure how much of a deficit I should be using. Would be interested to hear your ideas on that.

Enjoy the burgers, burgers, tots and beer are my issue!

While ignoring the simplest of facts: just eat less!!!

There is a lot of research in diabetes that shows that trying to lose weight from calorie restriction can't work. A calorie is not a calorie because the body reacts differently (ie. a calorie of sugar vs. a calorie of fat).

Look at some of the research from Dr. Fung, a diabetes specialist in Toronto.

Yes that's a very good question. In this whole calorie deficit equation there are some elements that are pretty accurate and others that are not so accurate. So I start with the accurate things and then fine tune based on the not-so-accurate things.

I begin with my RMR (resting metabolic rate). I tested mine using indirect calorimetry (a metabolic cart) but the answer it gave is actually pretty close to some of the estimates you get from online calculators.

RMR: 2200 calories per day. That's how much I will burn if I do nothing.
Then, you would normally add some calories on top of that based on how active your lifestyle is. At this point, I add ZERO, because when I'm not working out, I'm not doing much physical activity. If I was a construction worker or someone who really did move a lot I would add some calories here. But in MFP I choose whatever that most lazy option is.

Then, I deduct calories based on what I want to lose. For me, I think I went for about a 500 calorie deficit per day, so my target is about 1700 calories.
There is actually quite a good mathematically based formula online, that is more sophisticated than the "lose 1 lb of fat for every 3500 in deficit" principle, and it will account for your RMR decreasing as you lose weight, but I just wanted to keep it simple, since with the inaccuracies in both food eaten and exercise calories burned, I didn't really feel it was worth complicating.

After that, I track the calories consumed, using MFP, and I track calories burned using Training Peaks. The training peaks numbers are actually very accurate for me (validated by testing with an actual metabolic cart), so I trust those a lot more than those default calorie estimates you get in MFP (those are over estimated quite a bit).

So with all of that together, I'm aiming for net calories per day of 1700. On most days that means eating 2500-3000 calories. I track it all super diligently for 2 weeks and then see what the weight loss is. Then I adjust the number based on what actually happens.

I also track calories during my key build phase of training, but with the goal of making sure I'm slightly over my caloric intake (i.e. slight surplus) which makes sure I have enough energy to recover well etc. So in those cases I'm shooting for closer to 3000 net calories per day, and if I start gaining weight I reduce it a bit.

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

Yes I'm aware of Dr Fung's work. His "bedside manner" takes a bit to get used to i.e. his "everyone is an idiot" attitude but he's a smart guy... I agree with a good portion of what he says but he's said a few things that he just spouts out with no data to back it up. I think for anyone with a disease (diabetes, other auto immune diseases, cancer etc.) then what you eat has a huge impact on your physical state. But I'm purely talking weight loss in normal people, where a calorie really is just a calorie.

What I end up doing most days (not by design, it just works out that way) is actually very similar to what Dr Fung talks about in terms of intermittent fasting. Since I'm getting almost all my calories for the day in a single meal of burgers and fries, I usually eat that in the late afternoon. I'm not hungry the rest of the day so I don't eat. It just so happens that I get a lot of calories in one hit, then there is a long period of 20+ hours of nothing. There will be some benefits to that in terms of hormonal balance (stable insulin etc.)

When I've heard Jason Fung talk about calories not being important, I think he is misunderstood around that. What I took from that, is that he's saying that the benefits of fasting is not about the calories, it's about the hormonal regulation. The way he says it implies that calorie balance is not important but I don't think that's what he was trying to say. The studies he refers to, are 6 month studies showing caloric restriction and intermittent fasting both had the same weight loss result, but the fasting group had better biomarkers after the study. They are both actually caloric restriction (and by the same amount) but with the non-fasting group they adopted the "popular" diet practice of meals plus snacking, vs the fasting group which maybe only ate once per day (or even less frequently).

So when you are eating burgers all the time, the practicalities of it mean that you don't eat very often, so probably closer to his IF group than the other.

Dr Fung had this analogy of caloric restriction vs fasting: "people saying it's about calories is like saying jumping off a one foot high ledge 100 times is the same as jumping off a 100ft bridge. With one you die and the other you don't"... which I thought is one of the most ridiculous analogies ever, but everyone is free to create analogies that don't make sense I guess....

Anyway here he is talking about the calorie thing if any of you are interested

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

Salted caramel pretzel ice cream, Safeway brand :)

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Colorado Triathlon Company, CO2UT 2021, Crooked Gravel 2022, Steamboat Gravel 2022

Yes! I'm very close to the next phase: ice cream and milk shakes. Will be getting that one for sure. I love salted caramel, pretzels and ice cream, so this sounds like the perfect vice food...

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

ok the burger phase is now done, and I'm now in the 76kg-77kg phase of milkshakes, ice cream, sundaes and other dairy related evils. I did some short posts each day on the blog, and I added a playlist of the videos on youtube which almost accumulate a very short trainer ride duration now.

On my burger quests, I found a place that has a 2000 calorie milkshake which I simply cannot turn a blind eye to

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

ok you're in! cookies are going to be a part of the current ice cream phase, as toppings

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

Ok, that is on the menu for tonight, although I had to go with Talenti as my local Safeway didn't have their own brand. Talenti is legit so I am excited!

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

I don't know if this has been suggested before, but you should try training on food only available at convenient stores. Forget burgers, etc.—arguably "bad" but still whole food... Try training in a food desert.

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@floathammerholdon | @partners_in_tri

you're right, the burgers were fine for training. I'm now on ice cream and milkshakes which is proving a bit more challenging (both in terms of how I feel for training, and being hungry a lot more)

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

What???! Talenti good, yes, but the Safeway brand of the above flavor is the bomb! I can convince myself to have a bowl after any long climbing ride!

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Colorado Triathlon Company, CO2UT 2021, Crooked Gravel 2022, Steamboat Gravel 2022

I was just in LA this weekend for a vacation and got the #1--two waffles and two pieces of fried chicken, two scoops of butter and lots of syrup!

It's safe to say I could definitely have that everyday and die happy.

Maybe choose ice creams that have nuts or fruits in them to add a little diversity to your caloric intake? Or is that cheating? :)

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Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
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No that's fine - totally allowed. I have a few berry ice creams which are pretty good (Marionberry pie crust I am having tomorrow. looking forward to that). But even with all the cookie dough, caramel cores etc. this phase seems to require a lot more careful timing to survive. The mistake I made today was that I started eating ice cream at 11am, and it all added up so fast that I was done with 2100 calories (of only ice cream) before 4pm. So tomorrow I'm going to try and stack all the calories toward the end of the day - it feels a lot easier to suck it up earlier in the day than grappling for survival at dinner time! Also my wife ate roast lamb which truly sucked for me... it got so bad I even started craving pickles...

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Are you ready to do an Ultraman? | How I calculate Ironman race fueling | Strength Training for Athletes |

seriously can you make the blog less useless my mimicking other peoples work of simply eating less, and throw some performance numbers up there in addition?
perhaps average run pace per week or bike watts

From the newest issue of Triathlete.

Prove them wrong in Boulder, Rob!