Having trouble hitting caloric deficits with current training plan. (Page 2)

If you have time, add the biking and see if you can stay around 129lbs for a month or so without trying too hard...then make another push down if it feels like you can do so.  Still seems like you're yo-yo'ing if you can go up to 140...

You might look at the book Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald. I'm doing the high volume triathlon program to lose 15-20 lbs. So far I really like it. Just a thought! Good Luck!

1)  five hours rides are for peak ironman training only.  like the the last two months of training for most people. 

2) during peak IM training is not the time to try to lose weight

3) you'll be hungry enough to eat off your arm in peak IM training.

4) Why the hurry to lose the weight.  Aim for a 500 cal deficit as others have said.  On days with less excersize maybe eat a little more, on days with more, aim for a higher deficit.

5)  An inefficient swimmer swimming at 1 min/25 m is burning as many calories as an efficient swimmer swimming 1 min/50 m.  It has to do with the level of effort.  1 min/50 m is super duper easy aerobic effort for me, but that 1 min/25 m for you is a much harder level of effort.

Why not just train and eat....

Once you build up the fitness to be able to train for longer periods of time, the weight will come off no matter what.

Balanced, healthy diet....get your butt out the door....and trust me, it will work itself out.

Deb - one question in regards to your 115 lb goal.  Is this for weight reduction so that you are faster in a triatholon or is it a vanity goal.  If for vanity (like most of the rest of us if we're honest), let me ask you this hypothetical question:

If you were given the choice of being 115 lbs but you looked like a size 12, OR you could be a size 2 (or 4 or 6 whatever you consider 'perfect') but when you stepped on the scale it said 140 which would you choose?  I'd guess you want to 'look' your best right?  If that is the case, you want to lose fat not arbitrary pounds. 

I would challenge you to get your body fat measured and just focus on that number or focus on measurements (as a I guy I focus on waist size, my wife does the same but focuses on waist and hips).   You can use your overall weight and your body fat % to understand how pounds of fat that you are carrying and focus on reducing that number.   Focusing on losing from the overall/total number is not the best way to focus on your true goal.  This way if you lose 5 pounds in a month but that was actually a 6 pound fat loss and a 1 pound muscle gain, you can tell yourself that you lost 6 pounds that month because you did!

Some of the hottest women on the planet are fit-looking size 4's that probably weigh 140 lbs or more.  That number on the scale is not a good indicator of body appearance. 

Ah, definitely spoken like a man.

It is possible to out eat what you can burn...as a woman, anyway.  I've done it - even riding 300+ miles a week!


Deb - I agree with others who mention getting body fat testing done.  I'm also 5'4" and I could never be 115 lbs unless I was willing to cut off a leg (even though the charts say otherwise).  My lean mass is heavier than that, so to get there, I'd have to lose quite a bit of muscle and I'd look terrible.  You might want to look into your body composition to make sure that your goals are reasonable.

Also, if you haven't already, you might want to re-check your BMR.  It does change as you lose weight, so if you calculated/measured that 1800 when you were heavier, it could be significantly lower now that you are closer to your goals.

That's the best advice in this thread so far. 

To the OP, I think you are making triathlons way too complicated.  If you are overweight/obese, your main goal should be to always finish every scheduled workout.  As long as you don't drastically eat yourself to death after each workout, I think you should be fine.

Just to put in my own personal experience, I am probably eating 1.5 if not 2x as much calories right now (triathlon training) compared to when I was just working out.  I have no idea how many calories that is but I know I am eating almost if not twice as much.  Over the past 11 months, I have lost 7 lbs, look leaner, and have never felt any healthier in my 29 years of existence.  An almost 4-pack magically appeared and I don't do any abdominal exercises. 

I still don't care about what I eat although I unconsciously cut down on fast food since I'm learning how to cook

Everything will fall into place as long as you don't treat every meal like a buffet.

Edited by arkmann 2011-01-06 12:53 AM

Amen. I'm 5'3" and have 105 pounds of lean mass.  If I weighed 115 I would be scary looking.  And incredibly hungry.

I agree that body fat percentage is the way to go - get it checked and use it to figure out your goal weight based on your goal body fat percentage.  As you continue to train and lose weight, get it rechecked every few months.  If your lean mass goes up, that'll change your goal weight, although your goal body fat percentage will remain the same. 

I get where you guys are coming from but it's really not true.  If you do not pay attention to diet you can easily out eat your workouts.  Now, if you follow the bolded part, and truly do have a healthy diet then it's actually pretty darn hard to overeat.  To me though healthy diet means fruits, veggies, and lean protein's.  Start throwing things in like rice, pasta, etc (I won't argue if that is good or bad cause I haven't made up my mind) then it actually starts to get pretty easy to build up those calories really quickly and then poof, there you go, gaining weight.

m2tx - have thought of adding biking sessions, even 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there is 200 pounds.

owl_girl - I'll be doing the water immersion one soon, the gym and at home comes around 30% but people say no way it's that much by looking at me.

darkka - one of the books in my To Read List

daffodil - I jush wish there was a better way to measure calories in the pool

Fastyellow - yeah I know it's just a few months while I build myself up.

TXT - both  I just feel I have extra weight in me.  I want to get to 129 and then go down a little further and see what
happens, I want to go by feel.

GLC - I adjust BMR every 5 lbs
I start ChaLean Extreme next week (a Beachbody weightlifting program that I already own).

I have to agree that 1000 is a big deficit. I would say maybe do 1000 deficit once a week and focus on 300-500 on other days.
Also, BF% is a much better way of setting a goal, or measurements like waist, thigh, bicep, etc. 

Once you get consistent on your training, and have a healthy eating lifestyle, they become habitual. If you are "dieting" too much, rather than establishing a healthy diet, you will have no base to revert to once you lost the weight.

Also, since calorie counting and BMR and calories used during exercise are fairly inaccurate outside of the lab, you have to account for the fact that your numbers may not always be accurate. 

And, don't half your swim calories due to speed. Until you become a better swimmer, chances are you are burning MORE than you think in the pool. Humans are wildly inefficient in the water.

I know that for myself, at 200lbs, I use a simple 600 calories an hour as a basic measurement of calories used for just about any exercise. Not always accurate, but good enough to give me a basic number for figuring my deficit each day.

Good luck with your training. Your motivation is high, and that is a BIG part of success.

 

Why are you adding another program?

Deb, you need to focus if getting better at triathlons is your goal.  You need to bike and run more, and you need to learn to swim, then swim more.  You don't need huge caloric deficits.  You don't need another whole program to interfere with your recovery from S/B/R.  You seem to want to do everything all at once.  

More isn't always better.  Harder isn't always better.  Smarter is always better. 

Some more great advice....that will be ignored.

Your calorie burn numbers is not taking into account day to day activities, like breathing, walking around the house, parking lots, stairs, Kids? I lug around a 31lb 1 1/2 year old most of the day.  Unless you are truly a couch potatoe that does absolutely nothing  then you already burn around 1000 cals a day.  More if you make lifestyle decisions such as taking the stairs, parking further away, etc.  so let's consider a base of 1000, any exercise on top of that is going to be extra.

My personal example: I started tri training to help me finish losing my last 20lbs.  since I was had developed a healthy diet keeping my caloric intake around 1500-1800 with light exercise (30-60 min per day 5-6 days per week) I had been losing weight consistently. so bring in tri training, I was training hard 6 days a week at least 2-2.5 hours per day. Still eating healthy  with the normal 1500-1800 cals per day. totally plateaued, quit losing wt and inches!!! did a ton of research, finally started keeping a calorie log.  Came to the relization, I was putting my body into starvation mode, in this mode the body will cling to fat and burn muscle. My caloric deficit was TOO HIGH. maybe you want to look this up and look into yourself. But your body needs fuel especially when you start taking it to new levels of fitness.  You should start by keeping a journal, log everything I used www.caloriecounter.com then you need to do a BMR (basil metabolic rate) calculation. With the intensity of my average training day (which is 6 days  a week) i need 2000-2500 cals of fuel. This is very hard to do if you are eating healthy,  I have to snack all day on healthy snacks  to get to that high of calories.

And from someone who has ridden the wt loss roller coaster for many years (biggest loss was 70lbs ) that last 10lbs is insignifigant in the long run. eat smart train hard, make lifestyle changes ...that is the only way I have found my way off that roller coaster.

good luck!

ChaLean Extreme is purely a muscle-building program.  They say it's important to have a strength portion to a triathlon program so I was going to do that instead of let's say go to the gym and lift weights.  

Is it normal for your appetite to increase exponentially when you start training for triathlons?  Does it even out?  I'm only doing 1-2 hours of exercise a week and before I was doing 3-4 of something else, so I'm curious as to why I'm exercising less and being more hungry. 

Your hunger may be caused by a couple of things.
1. Exercise suppresses appetite.
2. You have more free time to think about food (this is the one that gets me).
 

^^ This... X about a million.

LOL.  

Building in strength training as you mentioned is important to improve overall performance and to aid injury prevention.  However it can also really help boost your base calorie burn.  Try thinking more about body composition and less about weight loss.  When I added strength training about one year ago I weighed 158 pounds (I am a 41 yo 5' 8" male) and my body fat percentage was 23%, on the higher end of normal on the charts.  I was already doing quite a bit of running and had a good cardio base. 

After nine months of 3x per week strength training I was 5 pounds lighter at 153 but my body fat had fallen to 9.5%.  This means I had lost almost 22 pounds of fat and put on 17 pounds of muscle  (158x23%= 36.3 pounds fat, 153x9.5%=14.5 pounds of fat).  The great news here is that each pound of additional muscle raises your daily base calorie burn by about 40 calories (range is 35-50 based on many variables) so I raised my daily calorie burn by around 560 calories.  So as you start to build muscle you get a multiplying effect that allows you to burn excess weight much easier. 

Don't think I turned into some bulky muscle bound guy... you can see from my picture that isn't the case!   But being able to train harder without injury and carrying 22 pounds less of dead weight did allow me to PR my marathon in October with a 3:08 when my previous fastest had been 3:30 over 5 years ago.  I don't want this to come across as a brag... I have yet to even compete in my first triathlon!  But before last year I had never really understood how this all worked and I am a true believer now and hope that others can see similar results.

Very serious question for you.  Do you want advice on how to do this?  Some of us keep offering you advice based on experience, but if you don't want it, then I'll go ahead and shut up.  Can't promise anything for anybody else.  

x 3 (or x5, x10)

Free advice is worth what you pay for it I guess. :/

Another great post....that will be ignored like yesterdays news...

The number of threads started to multiple page thread ratio for this one is off the charts.