Not losing weight after 3months of running and riding

Hey everyone

I was on a 2 years hiatus from training and just got back to running and riding again since our pools are still closed.

In that 2 years I did absolutely nothing cause of family, covid etc etc. No racing where I live anyway.

The past 3 months I’ve been trying to lose the 40lbs I’ve gained but I am stuck at 200lbs! It has not moved since the day I started but my running pace has improves, my bike FTP going up but my weight wont go down.

Ive been trying to follow myfitnesspals app recomendation. It say I need to eat 1800cals on days that I am not training but need to eat back the calories that I also exercise. That can be 2500 calories or 3500 calories depends on the length of the work out.

This is how my day plays out;

Breakfast #1
150g egg whites
1 full eggs
1 bagel from costco

Work out
Run/Ride 1hour on weekdays and 2-4hours on weekends esp now that its warmer

Post work out shake
protein powder
banana
1/2 cup greek yogurt fat free

Breakfast #2
Oatmeal 1 packet

Snack
Banana

Lunch
10.5 oz of sweet potatoes
chicken breast/fish

mid afternoon snack
fruit like grapes or oranges or strawberries

Dinner at 5
fish or chicken or meat with salad.

I dont eat ice cream or chips or anything “bad”
I try to keep them clean.

Im 36 if that helps

Are there any dietician that I can consult for one time that can give me a meal plan?

Thanks ST!

That can be 2500 calories or 3500 calories depends on the length of the work out.

Run/Ride 1hour on weekdays and 2-4hours on weekends esp now that its warmer

Not a dietician, so can’t directly answer your question.

But the above two lines don’t quite square with me. How are you calculating calories expended during exercise? I did two hours pretty high intensity Sunday (criterium racing), and that totalled ~1900 calories. Many 1-hour workouts I do might only be ~400 calories. 3500 in 4 hours is possible, but that’d be something close to race effort (at least by my calorie burn rate).

In short, your calories/hour exercise seem to skew pretty high to me.

thanks for your reply.

For the bike ride I got by the powermeter kilojoule.

For running the only data I have is my garmin while wearing a heart rate monitor.

thanks for your reply.

For the bike ride I got by the powermeter kilojoule.

For running the only data I have is my garmin while wearing a heart rate monitor.

Do you drink alcohol? How tall are you?

No not at all!
Last drink was 2019 January

No not at all!
Last drink was 2019 January

If your not loosing weight you are simply eating more calories than you are burning. You mention you need to eat the calories you burn… Why? The whole idea of exercise to lose weight is to create a calorie deficit

No not at all!
Last drink was 2019 January

If your not loosing weight you are simply eating more calories than you are burning. You mention you need to eat the calories you burn… Why? The whole idea of exercise to lose weight is to create a calorie deficit

yup this.

You’re eating too much.

Kira,

What’s you typical average wattage for your hour rides? IIRC one burns about 3.6 Calories per watt hour. So that would be 360 Calories per hour at 100 watt average, 720 Calories at 200 watt average, etc…

YMMV,

Hugh

Stop eating the bagel and the yogurt.

If it helps for calorie counting I weigh 225 and burned 2400 calories yesterday running a hard half marathon effort. Running an hour Z2 training run I’m consistently around 900 cal.

To your question though I’ll pile on that you’re still not eating few enough calories to make a daily deficit. If you can get yourself a food scale and weigh out your normal meals for a couple days you may start to see that nutritional info serving sizes vs what you actually eat may be in disagreement.

You mention you need to eat the calories you burn… Why?

Typically a smallish daily deficit is the most consistent with quality training. I could see eating only a fraction of exercise calories. Zeroing out probably isn’t sustainable for long for someone expending several thousand calories per day in exercise. Body shuts down pretty quick in self-protection mode with that kind of deficit.

thanks for your reply.

For the bike ride I got by the powermeter kilojoule.

For running the only data I have is my garmin while wearing a heart rate monitor.

Those are usually pretty decent way to do it. But burning 1000 calories in an hour of cycling takes an average of ~277W for that hour. That’s typically no joke. You’re a bigger guy, so maybe 300+W is tempo…just saying that your 2500 calorie minimum for a workout is a lot of calories.

You might try either validating that it’s really what you’re burning, or just eating some fraction of those calories rather than 100%. Dial down the fraction until weight loss resumes.

I just usually figure that an hour of riding my bike is 400 calories.

Email Michelle Howe. Her email is her first name, “@”, the company we both work for, .com.

Regardless of if you email her, be careful with what folks on ST tell you about nutrition. There’s some very good advice from some very smart people and some very bad advice from also very smart people who aren’t experts in the area of physiology or nutrition. Work with a professional who can help sort all that out for you, at least for a month to ask loads of good questions.

It is hard loosing weight and gaining muscle mass at the same time.
As you are getting more fit (higher FTP etc.), you are loosing fat and building muscles.

My advise is to give it time, now is time for building muscles. This base will help increase your calorie burning rate, and the weight loss will come later on.

You mention you need to eat the calories you burn… Why?

Typically a smallish daily deficit is the most consistent with quality training. I could see eating only a fraction of exercise calories. Zeroing out probably isn’t sustainable for long for someone expending several thousand calories per day in exercise. Body shuts down pretty quick in self-protection mode with that kind of deficit.

Starvation mode is highly highly highly overrated. Just like people blame hormones for being fat.

Not sure if this is allowed, not in any way sponsored or connected to this channel, but there is a channel on Youtube called more plates more dates (I know…). Regardless of the name, it’s actually a knowledgeable dude with plenty of material on this subject, backed by studies etc. (just search for calorie deficit)

I agree with the others who are suggesting your estimates for expended energy on exercise seem way to high.

Regardless, while I typically enjoy analysing the numbers on most topics, I think it can be a mistake for a lot of people, including myself, to approach eating in this way.
On one hand it’s difficult to manage accurately. It’s also difficult to be sure you’re applying the correct numbers to start with. And also I find it’s just a miserable way to live.

Based on your experience, you already know that the numbers, as you’re using them, are not doing the trick.
I’d firstly suggest that you forget the idea that you’ll lose weight by training. It should help, but it’s not the main factor and thinking that it is will psychologically have you thinking you need more food because you’re exercising. For modest amounts of exercise that’s not necessarily true. I’m doing a fairly modest amount of training at the moment, only a few hours a week. A couple of weekday evenings I do 60-80mins mostly at pretty high intensity on the trainer. That typically equates to 800-1000kcals. My FTP is somewhere in the vicinity of 270W at the moment. I don’t need any extra food after this, just my normal dinner. It doesn’t sound like you’re doing any more than that, but you’re having 2 breakfasts and a highly calorific shake by the sounds of things. I’d suggest you dump the numbers for now, they’re not working for you, possibly because they’re not correct and may just be propping up bad habits. But regardless, they’re unnecessary.

It’s fairly common from what I’ve seen for people to start training more, but also eat more, and end up getting heavier instead of lighter. Eat a bit less and see if the weight starts to drop. If it does, just stick with it, if not reduce intake a bit more and repeat until you see progress. Don’t worry about fuelling your training. Yeah, it might be beneficial in some ways, but that mindset will almost certainly be your downfall if you’re struggling to lose weight.

I’ve never found it hard to know how to lose weight. In my case, I just eat less than normal. I don’t worry too much about what I eat, though it is easier to eat less if your food is not cheesecake, ice cream or chocolate based. The tricky bit is getting used to a slight sense of hunger (slight!). I find this easy once it becomes habit and can keep it up very long term. But establishing the habit can be very difficult. No matter what anyone might tell you around here, it’s NOT sustainable to do anything difficult by “will power” alone. That’s why typical “diets” virtually NEVER work. You have to make things like this into a habit. Make it normal so that you’re not depending on yourself to not slip up… The tricky bit is establishing the habit. But eating less is not a technical challenge, it’s just something ,most of us find hard to do at first. Focusing on the numbers obscures that, and focusing on the numbers might be a good short term motivator (it works great for me doing bike intervals) but it’s not a good long term motivator. In fact I think it’s almost useless.

Just another angle, I know that when I worked on my feet for 8-10 hours a day and coupled that with training…I could eat everything and not have an issue.

Now with a desk job (well dining room table job currently) for 8-10 hours and then maybe some TV afterwards, except for my workouts I was not really expending many calories.

So now the dogs get morning walks and afternoon walks. I stand more do push ups several times a day, just to keep moving. I found that I came to rely too much on my, “well that was a good workout out so now I veg” mentality to maintaining or losing weight.

Just a thought.

I am not an expert but I had a similar thing with myfitness pal.

You probably have it set to active or very active, Which gives you more calories. Then you are doing exercise adding that into myfitnesspal and eating them. Almost double dipping every day.

Keep it simple. Never eat above your calorie maintenance level regardless of exercise.

So if you are allowed 1800 calories to lose 2lbs per week, then after exercise myfitness pal gives you an extra 1000. You only eat an extra 700 of that to take you the maintenance level of 2500 (that figure is just a guess at what your maintenance level is)

Each week you need to readjust this based on your weight loss.

This works for me.