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Aggressive Fat Loss: Getting Down to Race Weight — PROGRESS REPORT
See my previous post and my ongoing Training Weight Loss: 2012 Case Study.
Dropping weight (fat) is never easy. For the past month, it seemed like no matter what, I would eat back what I had burned!
Today, well hydrated, it looks like the trend has been broken with a new morning-weight low, which I’m going to push on hard, as I’d really like to drop to 170 before the severe climbing challenge of Alta Alpina, where I calculate that 1 pound counts for around 2-3 minutes of time (e.g. lose one pound and total climbing time drops 2-3 minutes).
Specifically, I am switching to morning + evening workouts at 1000+ calories each for the next week. That allows about 6-7 hours of recovery between workouts, with a high calorie burn each day (2000+). Burning that much makes it much easier to generate a caloric deficit; recovery is the issue, hence two shorter workouts.
Body physiology
Body physiology has a mind of its own!
Meaning a caloric deficit or parity can seem to translate into nothing in terms of scale-weight change. But there are things going on:
- Changes in physiology to become more efficient at extracting every last calorie from food (very adaptive, but very frustrating too!).
- “Changes in hunger as the body tries to maintain its preferred weight.
- “Set point”— this effect can be frustrating; one has to persist and persist and persist until the dam breaks— that is until the body accepts that fat stores are goin' down. Then the body tends to choose a new and lower set point. Nutritious food helps here.
- Swapping of fat for muscle tissue (good), which does not show up as any weight difference. It does show up as a thinner layer of fat, which can be noticed.
At least that’s what my personal experience tells me.
