Tell me a little about your experience

Hi Laura, and welcome to BT!

The difficulty with training for triathlon and losing weight is that they are two separate issues (highly compatible, but still separate). The training programs will prepare you very well to complete a triathlon, but they're not designed to make you lose weight.

I know you said you're not doing triathlons to lose weight, but your post seems to indicate otherwise.

You're also right that three weeks isn't very long. Looking at your weight trend over several months will give you some useful (and probably encouraging) data.

My personal experience is that it was really the long steady distance (a.k.a. LSD) training that helped me lose the most weight ... unfortunately, because of the nature of training for sprints, you don't do a lot of LSD (huh, that sounded wrong). I lost a huge amount of weight this tri season, my first (40 lbs. in 6 mos.), but I was doing a very high volume of training at steady paces.

As for diet--I could be wrong, you could be a registered dietitian or nutritionist--everyone has a different idea of "pretty healthy," and almost nobody actually eats ideally. I suggest reading the nutrition articles here on BT.

Good luck--there's a lot of good information in the articles, and also in the Nutrition and Clyde/Athena forums on triathlon and weight loss.

Thanks for your response. 

I'm really not trying to do a triathlon for weight loss...I'm just hoping that it's a natural side effect.   I'm trying to get into triathlons b/c I'm super-competitive and I miss competing in athletic events.  I guess I just figured that if I kept my diet the same and added a bunch of exercise that I would lose weight.  Hopefully that will happen, but if not I'm okay with it.  I'm certainly not overweight, but those nice jeans I have in my closet sure would be nice to wear.

I would not evaluate the situation for at least 5-6 weeks and more like a few months of consistent training.  I did not start seeing any major change in the weight coming off or the perforance in training for about 3-4 months.  I was loosing weight but really it took a while to really get it going.  I feel like it is really working now.  Now, I am loosing almost 2lbs a week and I am into my 5th month of training.

It takes a while for your metabolism to really get going on higher pace.  Also, you may have been eating too much before training and the training is mostly just keeping you from gaining.  As you are able to do longer and more intense training sessions, you will start to burn more calories and that will help but as I said this takes time.

I started to really see some more drastic effects after adjusting my diet a little bit.  1st, I cut out sweet deserts and anything like that.  Then I started to monitor the amount at each meal, just a little bit of a reduction and then I cut out soda and that is when I started to loose it more quickly.  I was getting way to many calories in soda.  I like soda...

Hang in there.  It will happen.