 How do you lose weight to improve your cycling performance? As always, today we're gonna be tackling this question by taking a look at the science. I'll be discussing manipulating carbs, fat, and protein to lose weight, specifically, will cutting carbs from your diet help with weight loss or not? At the end of the video, I'll give you an example of an optimal day of eating to facilitate weight loss and optimal performance on the bike. Welcome back to another video. My name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS. I've done a video on weight loss before, but it's such an important topic for cyclists that it really deserves a refresher. For the majority of riders, losing weight can be one of the most effective ways to improve your cycling performance, especially when climbing. If you're not familiar with power to weight ratio, basically it's a way of measuring how strong a climber you are and it's expressed in watts per kilogram. To display just how powerful losing excess body weight can be, let's take a look at an example. Let's say we have a 70 kilogram rider who can do 300 watts for 20 minutes. So that's 4.28 watts per kilogram. Now let's say we have a 65 kilogram rider riding right next to the first rider. The lighter rider would only have to produce 279 watts to keep up on a climb. Those who ride with a power meter know that an extra 21 watts on your 20 minute power could take months of training to achieve. Now losing five kilograms of body weight is no easy task either, especially if you're already relatively lean and oftentimes losing weight comes with a loss of power but it's usually not enough to negatively affect power to weight ratio. In fact, most of the time not too surprisingly, losing weight will increase your power to weight ratio unless you're starting to get really lean. If you're even a recreational cyclist, you probably already understand this. Less body weight means that you can go faster uphill but let's go ahead and get into the meat of this video because as many of us have come to learn, losing weight is a lot easier said than done. So what is the best way to go about doing it? Dude, what are you like 17 or something? I'm pretty sure you could eat nothing but Wendy's triple baconators and still look like that. I mean, that's pretty much what I eat and well, look at me. Right, I get it. As a strapping young man, my metabolism is traveling at the speed of light and I should just wait until I turn 40 and then see what happens. Everything that I'm about to say in this video is based off what the science has to say and not personal anecdotes but if you're a regular viewer of this channel you already knew that. Let's start things off by addressing why diets don't work. Most diets work in the short term by somehow getting you to restrict calories which is necessary for weight loss. The problem is the counting calories and reducing how much you're eating without addressing what you're eating will lead to hunger and living in a state of constant hunger is simply unsustainable. A select few will be able to lose weight this way but they're the outliers and they have to constantly monitor portion size and this is why the vast majority of people who go on diets fail and regain the weight back. Hunger is something that we need to overcome if we want to lose weight but how exactly do we go about doing that? Some have suggested that manipulating macronutrient ratios by following a high fat low carb diet or a high carb low fat diet or any combination in between is the solution. Let's see what the science has to say. This study comparing diets with different compositions of fat, protein and carbohydrates took 811 overweight adults and put them onto four different diets with a range of different macronutrient ratios. What they found was that reduced calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients they emphasize. So basically it didn't matter whether carbs, protein or fat was restricted at least when it came to weight loss. However, this study didn't come to the same conclusion finding that fat restriction led to more body fat loss than carb restriction even when calories were equal. So what's the difference with this study? Why are they showing more fat loss with fat restriction when the other study showed no difference? It's because this study actually looked at changes in body fat while the other study only looked at changes in body weight. If you're just looking at the scale, the low carb diet did result in more weight loss but not more fat loss. The reason low carb diets result in greater lean mass loss mainly through the loss of water weight. Glycogen is your body's stored carbohydrates and glycogen contains water. When you deplete your glycogen stores by following a low carb diet, that water goes with it. The difference between having full and depleted glycogen stores could be four pounds or more. So when low carbers step on the scale and see this it's hard not to get excited but this isn't the kind of weight that you wanna be losing. In fact, low carb diets may have a negative impact on body composition even when done with regular exercise. This study on the effect of the ketogenic diet on body composition during resistance training had subjects complete an eight week resistance training program on a ketogenic and non ketogenic diet. Not surprisingly, the non keto group gained almost a kilo of muscle but the ketogenic group actually lost a small amount of muscle mass and they concluded that the ketogenic diet might not be useful to increase muscle mass. This is somewhat ironic considering that the ketogenic and other low carb diets are pretty popular right now amongst body builders and gym rats. So I don't know if you guys knew this but hypergain beast mode mass gainer raw addition in the cupcake flavor has zero grams of carbohydrates. So you don't have to worry about getting knocked out of ketosis when making those gains. All right, but at the end of the day gravity doesn't care whether you're lighter because you have less fat or less water. So in that sense low carb still wins, right? Well, not exactly. Cause remember our ultimate goal is to actually ride faster and following a low carb diet certainly won't help with that. This review on carbohydrate dependence in endurance athletes concluded that despite renewed popular interest in high fat, low carb diets for endurance sports, fat rich diets do not spare carbohydrates or improve training capacity and performance but instead directly impair rates of muscle glycogenalysis and energy flux. From this review on periodized nutrition for athletes the ketogenic diet has received considerable attention in the popular press and many claims have been made recently. However, it is important to realize that to date not a single study has demonstrated performance benefits of a ketogenic diet. And the evidence that carbs improve performance is overwhelming. This 2011 meta analysis that looked at 88 randomized crossover studies on carbohydrate consumption and endurance performance came to the conclusion that carbohydrates show a large benefit to performance. Basically, low carb is not the method that you should choose to lose weight or increase your cycling performance. Some have suggested adopting a low carb diet in the off season and then reintroducing carbs once the season starts. But remember that most of the weight that you lose on a low carb diet is water weight. And once you reintroduce carbs again, you'll gain that water back. So right now you may be thinking, well, if low carb isn't the answer, then surely low fat is. I can eat all the white bread and Coca-Cola I want as long as I keep the amount of fat I'm eating to a minimum. No, that's not what I'm advocating for here either. And in fact, at least when it comes to weight loss it may be beneficial to forget about macronutrients entirely and even forget about calorie counting. Yes, that's right, no calorie counting. If you're counting calories, that means that you're gonna be hungry and as we've already established that isn't sustainable. Instead, focus on what you're eating and in particular make sure that it's low in calorie density, meaning that for a given weight of food it has relatively few calories. A study on energy density of foods effects on energy intake took 18 subjects and provided them with meals for two days during three separate testing sessions. In these three sessions subjects consumed either low, medium, or high energy density or calorie density meals. The results showed that significantly more calories were consumed for the higher energy density conditions even though the amount of food by weight was relatively similar. Calories consumed were around 1800 calories for the high energy density group and below 1400 calories for the low. The study concluded that energy density influenced energy intake independent of macronutrient composition and that subjects reported no difference in feelings of hunger or fullness. Carbs, protein, fat, that wasn't as important as the overall calorie density of the diet and these results have been shown over the long term as well. A study on energy densities effects on weight change over six years took 186 subjects and measured the energy density of their diet. Six years later they found that energy density of the diet did not change for the individuals and that a higher energy density was associated with weight gain and a higher BMI. The study concluded that low energy density diets moderate weight gain and that a lower energy density can be achieved by consuming more fruits and vegetables. This review on dietary energy density and body weight looking at many studies confirmed this concluding that their findings highlight the growing body of scientific evidence suggesting a relationship between energy density and body weight and that consuming diets low in energy density may be an effective strategy for managing body weight. So this whole low calorie density thing sounds pretty good in theory but what does it actually look like? What will you actually be eating? As we can see from this calorie density chart foods with the lowest calorie density are vegetables averaging just 0.3 calories per gram and then fruits averaging just 0.7 calories per gram. These are the foods that should take up the bulk of your diet unprocessed in their whole form. That unprocessed bit is critically important. As you can see for example there's a huge jump in calorie density when going from unprocessed carbs to processed carbs and unprocessed plant-based protein sources like beans, chickpeas and lentils are generally lower in calorie density than more traditional animal-based sources. In fact the more you center your diet around whole plant foods generally the lower it is in calorie density and the easier it becomes to lose weight without restricting food. In this study on a whole food plant-based diet for the treatment of obesity, heart disease and diabetes they took obese and overweight subjects and put them on a whole food plant-based diet. They concluded that to the best of our knowledge this research has achieved greater weight loss at six and 12 months than any other trial that does not limit energy intake or mandate regular exercise and these results have been confirmed in the literature. This is the reason why those following fully plant-based diets on average have the lowest BMI even over vegetarians and pescatarians. This does not mean that a plant-based diet is the cure-all. A vegan could eat nothing but french fries and Oreos and be way worse off than somebody who eats a lot of plants but also has some meat in their diet. What we can learn from these studies is that the more whole plant foods we eat especially fruits and vegetables and the fewer processed foods we eat the easier it is to lose weight. Let me take you into a day of eating for me so I can show you what this looks like. For breakfast I usually have two bowls of oatmeal with a scoop of peanut butter or other nut butter, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and a banana. Notice how I didn't put a mouse in here. That's because generally I don't measure. I eat enough to be satisfied and a proper diet allows you to do that without gaining weight. For high-intensity or long-ride days I'll make sure that I'm well-fed with carbohydrates by either adding more oatmeal or an extra banana or two in the morning. Lunch may be beans and rice cooked with a ton of vegetables like broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, corn, spinach, kale, et cetera and again the portion size is just enough to leave you satisfied. Depending on my ride schedule I'll snack on fruit throughout the day. And then for dinner I may have black bean burgers with quinoa, potatoes, and a big salad of lettuce, onions, tomatoes, peppers, avocado, et cetera. Ugh, dude your diet looks like something that a barefoot drum circle guy with an ironic mustache and a man bun would eat. When you look at your meal make sure that vegetables are taking up the majority of your plate. The exception to this would be right before a race or a very hard workout because digestion may become an issue with such a fibrous meal in your stomach. The go-to on these days should be more simple, easy to digest carbohydrates. And if you wanna see what your pre, during, and post-workout meals should look like I made a whole video about it that I linked down in the description. The takeaway from this video is that other than fueling yourself properly with carbohydrates around your workouts stop fixating on macronutrient ratios and calorie counting and instead make sure that what you're eating is high quality in its whole form and mostly comes from plants, in particular fruits and vegetables. Thanks for watching and if you found this information helpful be sure to subscribe, like, and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.