Weight Loss

I like to eat and unless I’m riding a lot I end up gaining weight. Even if I’m riding a lot, I have to be careful. I think part of it is genetic. It’s frustrating to see how much some other people can eat and not gain weight. I’m on medication for hypothyroidism and so are both of my parents and my sister. I think another problem is I get used to eating quite a bit when I’m riding a lot and when I have an easy week or take a couple months to remodel my house, I keep on eating as though I’m riding 10 or more hours a week.

The only way I’ve been able to consistently lose weight has been to count calories. The more accurate the better but studies have shown that just the act of keeping track of what you eat helps you get back on what you eat. I’ve been using DietPower to do it. At first it took a little while to log everything but now I have it so I can log everything for a day in about 5 minutes. Although DietPower has a lot of foods in its database including brand name foods, I still had to enter some of my common things such as all the Hammer Nutrition/E-caps fuels and supplements that I use.

With DietPower you set your weight goal for a certain date and it calculates your calorie budget for each day. It also works if you want to gain weight. It starts out with a metabolic rate calculated from your current weight. It can then calculate a more accurate rate based on how much you eat, calories burned in exercise, and how your weight changes. A pound of weight is equal to 3500 calories. It took a little tweaking to get the number of calories burned per hour on the bike right. When I didn’t have it right, I’d see a big swing in my metabolic rate after doing some extra long rides since DietPower assumes any calories not accounted for from eating, exercising, or weight change is from your metabolic rate. DietPower also allows you to check what popular diet plan you are using such as Weight Watchers, South Beach, Zone, Slim-fast, eDiets and more. It uses that to give suggestions on how to improve your diet but I haven’t used that feature so I’m not sure exactly how it works.

My weight peaked out at 197 in December. Saturday morning I weighed in at 179 and after my hard 143 mile ride on Saturday, I weighed in at 178 on Sunday morning. Saturday was the official weigh in day for B5 Challenge. I did Ok for the month but would have been better if I hadn’t had so much trouble cutting my calories after Hell Week. I got used to eating 6,000 plus calories a day and it was hard to cut back to where I needed to. You can see a nice spike in my weight in March from it. A month ago I was leading the pack in the B5 Challenge. In a few days, last month’s results should be posted and I’ll see where I am. The thing I really care about is it motivating me to keep losing the weight. I really don’t want to go below the low 170s before RAAM since I’ll need some reserves for that.

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