Cutting Calories without Killing Your Training, by Matt Fitzgerald

In a recent survey of nearly 3,000 endurance athletes, 54 percent of respondents reported that they were currently above their optimal racing weight. The relationship between body weight and performance in cycling and running is well known, and getting down to fighting trim is a major challenge for many competitors. The challenge lies not only in the classic dieter’s dilemma, where cutting calories causes hunger and food cravings that lead to cheating and, eventually, total abandonment of the diet. For endurance athletes, the challenge lies also in that cutting calories can rob the muscles of the energy they need for optimal performance, resulting in bad workouts and stagnating fitness.

How can you cut calories and reach your racing weight without nagging hunger and performance self-sabotage? There are three ways to achieve this balance:

1. Create a small caloric deficit


2. Manage your appetite


3. Make sure you’re getting enough carbohydrate

Let’s look more closely at each of these steps.

Create a small caloric deficit

If all you cared about was losing weight, you could reduce your caloric intake significantly—as much as you could psychologically stand—in order to shed pounds quickly. As an athlete, however, you would by doing this suffer the consequences of incomplete muscle glycogen replenishment between workouts, hence poor workout performance, and inadequate muscle tissue repair also resulting in poor workout performance as well as increased injury risk.

Research has clearly shown that anything more than a moderate daily caloric deficit wreaks havoc on exercise performance. For example, a 2005 study involving Senegalese 400m sprinters showed a significant performance decline in a set of 3 x 250m intervals during Ramadan (a month during which Muslims eat only after sundown) compared to before the holy month.  The reason was clear. Blood tests showed that the athletes were suffering from severe hypoglycemia when they exercised more than 10 hours after their last meal.

A daily caloric deficit of 200-300 calories per day is sufficient to promote weight loss but not so large that it is likely to sabotage your performance, as long as you consume adequate carbohydrate. To create this deficit, record everything you eat and drink in a typical day and total up the calories. Now trim 200-300 of the least useful calories from this list, or replace particular foods with lower-calorie alternatives. For example, replace your turkey sandwich with a chicken salad wrap with more greens than chicken.

Manage Your Appetite

It is not only the total number of calories but also the types of calories you consume and even the timing of their consumption that determine how well your appetite is satisfied. Reducing your total daily caloric intake by 200-300 calories will not necessarily increase your hunger level if you change the sources and timing in ways that serve to better manage your appetite.

Calorie for calorie, foods that contain a lot of water and/or fiber are more filling than foods that contain little of either. Fruits and vegetables contain the most fiber and water and thus provide the most satiety per calorie. This might not sound right until you learn that you’d have to eat seven or eight large stalks of broccoli to get as many calories as there are in a single Carl’s Jr. Western Bacon Cheeseburger. So simply replacing a few foods you currently eat with fruits and vegetables (as much as you want) is a good way to cut calories without producing hunger.

Research has shown that a given number of calories is more satisfying when consumed in several small spread-out meals and snacks than in just a few, especially if the first small meal is eaten early in the morning. So after you decide on a target daily caloric intake, next figure out how to divide it appropriately into a daily eating schedule that includes breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, a mid-afternoon snack, dinner and possibly an evening snack.

Make sure you’re getting enough carbohydrate

Many endurance athletes do not consume optimal amounts of carbohydrate even when they are not actively pursuing weight loss. For such athletes, a reduction of 200-300 calories per day is likely to exacerbate this inadequacy, resulting in poor workouts and slow recovery between workouts. It’s a good idea to calculate your carbohydrate intake to determine if you’re getting enough, even when you’re just trying to maintain your weight.

When you transition from a weight-maintenance regimen to a weight-loss program, calculate your carbohydrate intake again and shift some of your daily calories from fat and carbohydrate as necessary to ensure you’re getting enough. While fat and protein are important too, endurance training increases carbohydrate needs more than it does fat and protein needs and endurance athletes (in Western countries, anyway) are more likely to come up short with their carb intake than with their consumption of the other two macronutrients.

Endurance athletes are commonly advised to get 60 percent of their daily calories from carbohydrate, but this one-size-fits-all standard does not really fit all. It’s best to measure your carbohydrate needs in absolute terms (grams per day) instead of percentage terms. Click here for specific guidelines.

Comments

[Lawrence]

I agree with most of what you say Matt except the fact that carbohydrate intake really depends on your metabolic type. For more info about that please check out our site www.gsysconcepts.com

Thanks
LAWRENCE

[Bobby]

The mention of "research" this many times makes me wonder where the citations are. Can you provide them at the end of the article? thanks, Bobby