[dbrainard]

My wife and I are ice coasters, fairly exclusively. We both have full time jobs but stay active. She is a long-distance hiker, cyclist and kayaker and I focus on technical climbing, shorter hikes, trail runs and free-heel skiing. We are approaching middle age, but still have some bigger (for us) goals in mind. Neither of us have the gift of being naturally slender people and we are both people of girth, as they say. We train close to daily, mainly by cycling, trail running and doing some strength training, PT and martial arts. We eat a fairly typical, modern, American diet. Veggies and some meat, yogurt/fruit smoothies for breakfast, and at this point and at our age, I am looking for advice on how we can trim weight, be in better athletic shape and not sacrifice general health. When I have had bigger rock climbing goals, I have been able trim down well, but not without going to “not quite enough intake” while maintaining a consistent and fairly high activity level. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and thank you!

Topic

[Steve House]

Steve House on July 20, 2017 at 10:04 am #5654

Have your read through the nutrition chapter in Training for the New Alpinism? If not, perhaps start there. Then I would recommend that you also read:

Train to Burn Fat

Burn Fat to Go Fast: Fat Adaptation and Endurance Performance

For some motivation. Start there, and let us know how it goes.

[Neil]

Neil on July 20, 2017 at 5:22 pm #5672

In spite of being very active with endurance hiking I carried a bunch of useless blubber up and down the Adirondack mountains. Then I decided enough of this and lost a pound a week for 25 weeks. I found the book, Racing Weight to be very helpful and inspiring. In short what I did was: 1-create a (roughly) 500 calorie per day deficit via eating smarter and better and exercising (requires some easy on-line research to hit your numbers ). 2- Increase my protein intake to prevent lean muscle loss. 3- Cut back on carbs in all their forms. I aimed at matching my carb intake to what I burned while hiking and training. 4-Pump iron (think functional training) to further prevent lean muscle loss. 5- Eat big satisfying meals with plenty of fat and protein then forget about food til the next meal. No empty calories, no alcohol and so on. The weight came off like clockwork and I had no energy problems doing 10-12 hour rugged hikes with 5-6k elly gain. I read a slew of other books on the topic and what I gather is that after exercise the tendency is to over-compensate. Also, there is a tendency to think you only consume x calories per day when in fact you consume x + y calories, where y goes to fat. 🙂 Good luck with the weight loss!

[dbrainard]

dbrainard on July 21, 2017 at 6:59 am #5678

Thanks Steve. I have read the chapter in your book, and will continue to use it as a resource. The links were helpful in thinking about a more concrete plan. The parts about fasted work-outs and planning menus around activity level and plans are also really helpful, they might seem obvious–up to a point–but applying more organization is necessary to take advantage of this sort of thing. I will post again when we try some stuff and see how it goes…

Thanks to you and Scott for sharing all this experience with the rest of us!

Dave