"Racing Weight" by Matt Fitzgerald

[MattTuck]

I recently saw the review of this book at Red Kite Prayer (http://redkiteprayer.com/?p=1937).

As I'm always trying to lose weight, I picked the book up and I'm about about 90% of the way through it, and figured I'd report to the forum on.

Everything that review says is accurate. This is a great book. Well researched and cited and provides a ton of tips/advice to dropping pounds.

Talks about everything from what to eat, when to eat it, what kind of exercise to do and more. It is especially useful (from my perspective) because he presents a ton of individual tips that don't necessarily have to be done together. That means you can choose which parts of his advice you want to adopt, and how to phase them in.

If I have any complaints with the book, the author could do a better job summarizing HIS advise rather than citing so many studies as backing. Not that I don't appreciate the research, but I'd get a lot out of a half page summary at the end of each chapter.


Anyway, for those trying to drop weight, this could definitely help.

[false_Aest]

I've been wondering about this book.

Thanks. After RKP and Pez took a look at it I started getting interested.

I'll probably pick it up. I wouldn't mind droppin' another few lbs just to make me look like an emaciated Belgian. (Seriously. loosing 8lbs made me way faster. Another 8 will force other cat 4 rider to poop their pants and DNF. It will also probably make me slightly faster---if I manage to do it right.)

[regularguy412]

I've been wondering about this book.

Thanks. After RKP and Pez took a look at it I started getting interested.

I'll probably pick it up. I wouldn't mind droppin' another few lbs just to make me look like an emaciated Belgian. (Seriously. loosing 8lbs made me way faster. Another 8 will force other cat 4 rider to poop their pants and DNF. It will also probably make me slightly faster---if I manage to do it right.)

Seems that's always good for at least 2 lbs. worth.

:D Couldn't resist that one.

Mike in AR:beer:

[Louis]

I haven't read the book, but have always wondered about the following question. I haven't asked it because I feel somewhat guilty, given that for many others around the world this is not a choice but an everyday part of living:

In order to really get down to say 8% body fat does one basically have to go to bed hungry at night? Even if I'm completely maxed out on riding, (for me, that's 4 times per week, say 10 hours total in the saddle, to the point where my knees and the rest of my body start to tell me to back off) I don't really loose much. The lowest I've been able to manage in the last few years since I bought the Tanita "fat-o-meter" is 14% body fat, well hydrated before bed.

[MattTuck]

I haven't read the book, but have always wondered about the following question. I haven't asked it because I feel somewhat guilty, given that for many others around the world this is not a choice but an everyday part of living:

In order to really get down to say 8% body fat does one basically have to go to bed hungry at night? Even if I'm completely maxed out on riding, (for me, that's 4 times per week, say 10 hours total in the saddle, to the point where my knees and the rest of my body start to tell me to back off) I don't really loose much. The lowest I've been able to manage in the last few years since I bought the Tanita "fat-o-meter" is 14% body fat, well hydrated before bed.


There's a chapter on managing appetite. The short answer to your question is "no", you don't need to go to bed hungry. There are several strategies to accomplish that:

When you eat: For instance, eating a larger breakfast reduces appetite later in the day.

What you eat: Different types of food (fat, protein, carbs) have different characteristics when it comes to making you full/satisified.

How much you eat: Volume is a big piece of making you feel full. So the idea is to eat less dense foods (from a calorie stand point).


If you were eating a "typical" American diet which has few fruits/vegatables and lots of processed sugars and fats (a very dense diet), then you may have a harder time going to bed full.

[Louis]

What you eat: Different types of food (fat, protein, carbs) have different characteristics when it comes to making you full/satisified.

How much you eat: Volume is a big piece of making you feel full. So the idea is to eat less dense foods (from a calorie stand point).


If you were eating a "typical" American diet which has few fruits/vegatables and lots of processed sugars and fats (a very dense diet), then you may have a harder time going to bed full.

I'm a vegetarian, but I do wish folks would not keep candy dishes at work :no:

[learlove]

Racing Weight II by Learlove

Chapter 1

Ride more and eat less.

The End

[azrider]

Anyone read that article in BICYCLING magazine about getting faster? Jonathan Vaughters was quoted as saying "if you really want to get faster, try starving yourself after your Saturday long ride."

This hold any truth or fit in with anything that was mentioned in "racing weight".

Is starving common practice among endurance athletes?

[fiamme red]

Anyone read that article in BICYCLING magazine about getting faster? Jonathan Vaughters was quoted as saying "if you really want to get faster, try starving yourself after your Saturday long ride."Sounds like a good way to lose muscle, if that's your goal.

[Dave B]

Anyone read that article in BICYCLING magazine about getting faster? Jonathan Vaughters was quoted as saying "if you really want to get faster, try starving yourself after your Saturday long ride."

This hold any truth or fit in with anything that was mentioned in "racing weight".

Is starving common practice among endurance athletes?


Yes, I once read and unfortunatly I cannot remember the article, but it discussed athletes and dieting. Cyclists had the highest results for anexoria and bulemia for any professional sport. Where power to weight percentages are in small percent increases. a 10% increase in a cyclist is huge compared say a footballer.

Often times we see cyclists after their career and they look fat tous, but by normal healthy standards they are stuill pretty lean. I suppose it is all in context. 14% body fat isn't bad at all, wish I was there, but 8& or lower is damn hard to get to and maintain when being a pro athlete is not your career.

[jlwdm]

Last June Bradley Wiggins was down to 4% body fat. Lots of professional monitoring of his body though.

Jeff

[bostondrunk]

Racing Weight II by Learlove

Chapter 1

Ride more and eat less.

The End

Is that available in hard cover? What about audio book?

[jeffg]

I haven't read the book, but have always wondered about the following question. I haven't asked it because I feel somewhat guilty, given that for many others around the world this is not a choice but an everyday part of living:

In order to really get down to say 8% body fat does one basically have to go to bed hungry at night? Even if I'm completely maxed out on riding, (for me, that's 4 times per week, say 10 hours total in the saddle, to the point where my knees and the rest of my body start to tell me to back off) I don't really loose much. The lowest I've been able to manage in the last few years since I bought the Tanita "fat-o-meter" is 14% body fat, well hydrated before bed.

10 hours a week can still be at fairly high intensity. High intensity riding = body wants food.

That being said, longer rides where I am not entirely shattered afterwards help me keep a sensible caloric deficit.

My problem is, body wants wine ...

[MattTuck]

Anyone read that article in BICYCLING magazine about getting faster? Jonathan Vaughters was quoted as saying "if you really want to get faster, try starving yourself after your Saturday long ride."

This hold any truth or fit in with anything that was mentioned in "racing weight".

Is starving common practice among endurance athletes?


I don't have the book with me here at the office, but I haven't read anything yet on starving yourself.

There is an argument that he makes for exercising with the goal of depleting your glycogen stores (in liver and muscles) which sends signals to your body to regenerate those stores (and in turn prevents storage of calories in fat).



Racing Weight II by Learlove
Chapter 1
Ride more and eat less.
The End


Ride more what? More total miles? More frequent rides? Longer rides?
Eat less what? Fewer meals? fewer calories? less fat? less carbs?

I joke, and the book COULD be shorter (probably 1/2 its length) if he didn't talk about so many damn studies. But I think it is a little more complex than ride more/eat less.

[BuddyB]

1) Eat more unprocessed foods like raw veggies and fruits along with lean protein at every meal. Avoid the processed crap like energy bars, energy gels, ice cream, soda, crackers, cookies, cereal and so on.

2) Stop believing you can eat whatever you want because you ride

3) Ride less at hard intensities and spend more time riding long rides at very low intensities. So low in fact that you never feel like you are working hard and so that you aren't hungry. Teach your body to burn fat as fuel instead of glygogen.

4) Drink more water...most people mistake thirst for hunger.

Best of Luck
Buddy B

[zott28]

4) Drink more water...most people mistake thirst for hunger.

Best of Luck
Buddy B
A jug (64oz) of water at my desk has helped me out a ton.

[MattTuck]

1) Eat more unprocessed foods like raw veggies and fruits along with lean protein at every meal. Avoid the processed crap like energy bars, energy gels, ice cream, soda, crackers, cookies, cereal and so on.

2) Stop believing you can eat whatever you want because you ride

3) Ride less at hard intensities and spend more time riding long rides at very low intensities. So low in fact that you never feel like you are working hard and so that you aren't hungry. Teach your body to burn fat as fuel instead of glygogen.

4) Drink more water...most people mistake thirst for hunger.

Best of Luck
Buddy B

To give folks an idea of the style/approach that this book takes, here's a passage dealing with this issue. (if this in some way violates forum rules, please let me know and I'll take it down.) This is from pp 168-170, in the chapter "Training for Racing Weight"


Some endurance coaches promote training in the fat-burning zone to increase an athlete's fat burning capacity and ultimately increase fat-reliance in racing. Perhaps the best-known advocate of this approach is Phil maffetone, a triathlon coach who made his name by developing a training philosophy characterized by an extreme emphasis on the importance of fat metabolism. He taught his athletes, including six-time Hawaii Ironman world champion mark Allen, to do virtually all of their training at a very low intensity to maximize fat metabolism and stimulate physiological adaptations that increased the body's capacity for fat oxidation in subsequent workouts. (I have my doubts about whether these athletes actually held themselves back as much as their coach advised.) Over time, Maffetone believed, the athlete would be able to swim, bike or run faster and faster at the same, low, fat-burning intensity.

Research has shown that training int he fat burning zone does improve fat-burning capacity. However, it only improves fat-burning capacity within the fat burning zone itself-that is, at lower exercise intensities. No matter how fit they are or in what manner they've trained, all endurance athletes rely on carbohydrate when racing at intensities that are near or above the lactate threshold. For example, a triathlete who is capable of completing an Olympic-distance triathlon in 2:20 is likely to swim, bike and run at approximately 85% of VO2 max. A this intensity, the muscles get approximately 90% of their energy from carbs and only 10% from fat. Thus, while the well trained triathlete has much greater maximal fat burning capacity than an unfit individual, this particular training adaptation is irrelevant to performance in spring and Olympic distance triathlons.

Skipped paragraph, because I'm typing this and lazy.

This point was illustrated by a study from the University of California Berkeley (Bergman et al, 1999). Nine untrained subjects rode stationary bikes for 1 hour at the power output level that elicited 66% of their individual VO2max. The relative contribution of fat and carbohydrate oxidation to their muscle work was estimated. The subjects then engaged in a regular cycling workout program for 9 weeks and were retested. During those 9 weeks of training, their VO2max increased significantly, so that the power output level that elicitied 66% of VO2max int he first test elicited only 54% in the second. The rate of fat burning was higher at this absolute power output level in the second test. However, when they rode at 66% of their NEW VO@max, the relative contributions of fat and carbohydrate to total energy production were unchanged from pretraining test.

Skipped another paragraph.

Phil Maffetone's approach suggests that athletes seeking these adaptations [increased fat burning] need to go out of their way to get them. They don't. Normal endurance training with tis emphasis on long, moderate-intensity workouts, naturally maximizes fat burning adaptations. There is no evidence nor is there any cause to speculate that training almost exclusively at moderate intensities as Maffetone recommended, enhances fat burning adaptations beyond the level achieved by training predominantly at moderate intensities. And there is every reason to believed that eliminating high-intensity workouts form your training would compromise your fitness in a variety of ways, including reducing your mechanical efficiency, VO2max and muscle power.

For example, in one study, researchers from Brigham Young University (Creer et all. 2004) separated 17 trained cyclists into two groups. One group performed only moderate-intensity training for 4 weeks. The other group included a very small amount of spring training - just 28 minutes per week-in their training mix. Total work output increased significantly in members of the spring group but not int he moderate intensity group. Studies such as this one show that a little high intensity training goes a long way to enhance performance through mechanisms that are complementary to those by which moderate intensity training boosts performance. Increased fat burning capacity is not the be-all and end-all of performance in endurance racing; it's just one piece of the puzzle. The endurance athlete who ignores the other pieces, most of which are associated with training at higher intensities, will pay for it.


Anyway, that gives a flavor. Sorry for the typos, I'm not a perfectionist enough to go back to fix them.

[Louis]

Interesting story in the NYT here (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18exercise-t.html?src=me&ref=general)

Weighing the Evidence on Exercise
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

How exercise affects body weight is one of the more intriguing and vexing issues in physiology. Exercise burns calories, no one doubts that, and so it should, in theory, produce weight loss, a fact that has prompted countless people to undertake exercise programs to shed pounds. Without significantly changing their diets, few succeed. “Anecdotally, all of us have been cornered by people claiming to have spent hours each week walking, running, stair-stepping, etc., and are displeased with the results on the scale or in the mirror,” wrote Barry Braun, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in the American College of Sports Medicine’s February newsletter.

But a growing body of science suggests that exercise does have an important role in weight loss. That role, however, is different from what many people expect and probably wish. The newest science suggests that exercise alone will not make you thin, but it may determine whether you stay thin, if you can achieve that state. Until recently, the bodily mechanisms involved were mysterious. But scientists are slowly teasing out exercise’s impact on metabolism, appetite and body composition, though the consequences of exercise can vary. Women’s bodies, for instance, seem to react differently than men’s bodies to the metabolic effects of exercise. None of which is a reason to abandon exercise as a weight-loss tool. You just have to understand what exercise can and cannot do.

“In general, exercise by itself is pretty useless for weight loss,” says Eric Ravussin, a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and an expert on weight loss. It’s especially useless because people often end up consuming more calories when they exercise. The mathematics of weight loss is, in fact, quite simple, involving only subtraction. “Take in fewer calories than you burn, put yourself in negative energy balance, lose weight,” says Braun, who has been studying exercise and weight loss for years. The deficit in calories can result from cutting back your food intake or from increasing your energy output — the amount of exercise you complete — or both. When researchers affiliated with the Pennington center had volunteers reduce their energy balance for a study last year by either cutting their calorie intakes by 25 percent or increasing their daily exercise by 12.5 percent and cutting their calories by 12.5 percent, everyone involved lost weight. They all lost about the same amount of weight too ?— about a pound a week. But in the exercising group, the dose of exercise required was nearly an hour a day of moderate-intensity activity, what the federal government currently recommends for weight loss but “a lot more than what many people would be able or willing to do,” Ravussin says.

At the same time, as many people have found after starting a new exercise regimen, working out can have a significant effect on appetite. The mechanisms that control appetite and energy balance in the human body are elegantly calibrated. “The body aims for homeostasis,” Braun says. It likes to remain at whatever weight it’s used to. So even small changes in energy balance can produce rapid changes in certain hormones associated with appetite, particularly acylated ghrelin, which is known to increase the desire for food, as well as insulin and leptin, hormones that affect how the body burns fuel.

The effects of exercise on the appetite and energy systems, however, are by no means consistent. In one study presented last year at the annual conference of the American College of Sports Medicine, when healthy young men ran for an hour and a half on a treadmill at a fairly high intensity, their blood concentrations of acylated ghrelin fell, and food held little appeal for the rest of that day. Exercise blunted their appetites. A study that Braun oversaw and that was published last year by The American Journal of Physiology had a slightly different outcome. In it, 18 overweight men and women walked on treadmills in multiple sessions while either eating enough that day to replace the calories burned during exercise or not. Afterward, the men displayed little or no changes in their energy-regulating hormones or their appetites, much as in the other study. But the women uniformly had increased blood concentrations of acylated ghrelin and decreased concentrations of insulin after the sessions in which they had eaten less than they had burned. Their bodies were directing them to replace the lost calories. In physiological terms, the results “are consistent with the paradigm that mechanisms to maintain body fat are more effective in women,” Braun and his colleagues wrote. In practical terms, the results are scientific proof that life is unfair. Female bodies, inspired almost certainly “by a biological need to maintain energy stores for reproduction,” Braun says, fight hard to hold on to every ounce of fat. Exercise for many women (and for some men) increases the desire to eat.

Thankfully there has lately been some more encouraging news about exercise and weight loss, including for women. In a study published late last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from Harvard University looked at the weight-change histories of more than 34,000 participants in a women’s health study. The women began the study middle-aged (at an average of about 54 years) and were followed for 13 years. During that time, the women gained, on average, six pounds. Some packed on considerably more. But a small subset gained far less, coming close to maintaining the body size with which they started the study. Those were the women who reported exercising almost every day for an hour or so. The exercise involved was not strenuous. “It was the equivalent of brisk walking,” says I-Min Lee, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the lead author of the study. But it was consistently engaged in over the years. “It wasn’t something the women started and stopped,” Lee says. “It was something they’d been doing for years.” The women who exercised also tended to have lower body weights to start with. All began the study with a body-mass index below 25, the high end of normal weight. “We didn’t look at this, but it’s probably safe to speculate that it’s easier and more pleasant to exercise if you’re not already heavy,” Lee says.

On the other hand, if you can somehow pry off the pounds, exercise may be the most important element in keeping the weight off. “When you look at the results in the National Weight Control Registry,” Braun says, “you see over and over that exercise is one constant among people who’ve maintained their weight loss.” About 90 percent of the people in the registry who have shed pounds and kept them at bay worked out, a result also seen in recent studies. In one representative experiment from last year, 97 healthy, slightly overweight women were put on an 800-calorie diet until they lost an average of about 27 pounds each. Some of the women were then assigned to a walking program, some were put on a weight-training regimen and others were assigned no exercise; all returned to their old eating habits. Those who stuck with either of the exercise programs regained less weight than those who didn’t exercise and, even more striking, did not regain weight around their middles. The women who didn’t exercise regained their weight and preferentially packed on these new pounds around their abdomens. It’s well known that abdominal fat is particularly unhealthful, contributing significantly to metabolic disruptions and heart disease.

Scientists are “not really sure yet” just how and why exercise is so important in maintaining weight loss in people, Braun says. But in animal experiments, exercise seems to remodel the metabolic pathways that determine how the body stores and utilizes food. For a study published last summer, scientists at the University of Colorado at Denver fattened a group of male rats. The animals already had an inbred propensity to gain weight and, thanks to a high-fat diet laid out for them, they fulfilled that genetic destiny. After 16 weeks of eating as much as they wanted and lolling around in their cages, all were rotund. The scientists then switched them to a calorie-controlled, low-fat diet. The animals shed weight, dropping an average of about 14 percent of their corpulence.

Afterward the animals were put on a weight-maintenance diet. At the same time, half of them were required to run on a treadmill for about 30 minutes most days. The other half remained sedentary. For eight weeks, the rats were kept at their lower weights in order to establish a new base-line weight.

Then the fun began. For the final eight weeks of the experiment, the rats were allowed to relapse, to eat as much food as they wanted. The rats that had not been running on the treadmill fell upon the food eagerly. Most regained the weight they lost and then some.

But the exercising rats metabolized calories differently. They tended to burn fat immediately after their meals, while the sedentary rats’ bodies preferentially burned carbohydrates and sent the fat off to be stored in fat cells. The running rats’ bodies, meanwhile, also produced signals suggesting that they were satiated and didn’t need more kibble. Although the treadmill exercisers regained some weight, their relapses were not as extreme. Exercise “re-established the homeostatic steady state between intake and expenditure to defend a lower body weight,” the study authors concluded. Running had remade the rats’ bodies so that they ate less.

Streaming through much of the science and advice about exercise and weight loss is a certain Puritan streak, a sense that exercise, to be effective in keeping you slim, must be of almost medicinal dosage — an hour a day, every day; plenty of brisk walking; frequent long runs on the treadmill. But the very latest science about exercise and weight loss has a gentler tone and a more achievable goal. “Emerging evidence suggests that ?unlike bouts of moderate-vigorous activity, low-intensity ambulation, standing, etc., may contribute to daily energy expenditure without triggering the caloric compensation effect,” Braun wrote in the American College of Sports Medicine newsletter.

In a completed but unpublished study conducted in his energy-metabolism lab, Braun and his colleagues had a group of volunteers spend an entire day sitting. If they needed to visit the bathroom or any other location, they spun over in a wheelchair. Meanwhile, in a second session, the same volunteers stood all day, “not doing anything in particular,” Braun says, “just standing.” The difference in energy expenditure was remarkable, representing “hundreds of calories,” Braun says, but with no increase among the upright in their blood levels of ghrelin or other appetite hormones. Standing, for both men and women, burned multiple calories but did not ignite hunger. One thing is going to become clear in the coming years, Braun says: if you want to lose weight, you don’t necessarily have to go for a long run. “Just get rid of your chair.”

Gretchen Reynolds writes the Phys Ed column for the magazine. She is writing a book about the frontiers of fitness.

[OtayBW]

I haven't read the book, but have always wondered about the following question. I haven't asked it because I feel somewhat guilty, given that for many others around the world this is not a choice but an everyday part of living:

In order to really get down to say 8% body fat does one basically have to go to bed hungry at night? Even if I'm completely maxed out on riding, (for me, that's 4 times per week, say 10 hours total in the saddle, to the point where my knees and the rest of my body start to tell me to back off) I don't really loose much. The lowest I've been able to manage in the last few years since I bought the Tanita "fat-o-meter" is 14% body fat, well hydrated before bed.
I don't know - I've got one of them 'fat-o-meters' and it doesn't make sense to me. I'm:

6ft tall - check
168 lbs - check
7.7% body fat - wha?..... :confused:

Maybe I should soak my feet in a brine solution for a more accurate measurement....

[Louis]

I don't know - I've got one of them 'fat-o-meters' and it doesn't make sense to me. I'm:

6ft tall - check
168 lbs - check
7.7% body fat - wha?..... :confused:

Maybe I should soak my feet in a brine solution for a more accurate measurement....

What's the confusion? 8%'s great IMO. Pinch your waistline. If all you get is skin and not much else, then the 8% matches what one would expect - a good result.

Do you think 7.7 is too high or too low? Biggest issue I've found is that if you are dehydrated you get a high reading. That's why I don't do it in the AM. PM right before bed for me.

[oldguy00]

What's the confusion? 8%'s great IMO. Pinch your waistline. If all you get is skin and not much else, then the 8% matches what one would expect - a good result.

Do you think 7.7 is too high or too low? Biggest issue I've found is that if you are dehydrated you get a high reading. That's why I don't do it in the AM. PM right before bed for me.

+1
Given your height and weight, 7.7 sounds in the ballpark. Very healthy and fit level of fat.