Day 8 – 73.7kg
Cyclists are obsessive about weight. Whether it's the bike, the number and size of water bottles (the optimal seemingly is one 500ml bidon even in the tropics), or of course their bodies. This is especially important for those that like to do their thang on hills.
I'm no different yet I've never been one to stand on the scales every day, preferring the morning look in the mirror. But now I'm excited tojump on the scales when I get out of bed in the morning as the weight keeps tumbling. It surely can't last.
I've come up with a theory for the completed unexpected pace of flab-busting. It seems that the key for me is calorie deficit rather than exercise. Ok, there's no rocket science there, as less calories should mean weight loss, but not this quickly. I've been averaging about 1,700 calories of food a day (300 less than the "recommended") since the op yet despite doing no cardio at all, I've lost 1.3kg in eight days.
My weight had crept steadily up in the second half of the year despite averaging 15 hours of riding/running a week. I didn't know the number in kilos or pounds, I could just see it start to accumulate round my middle and then one of my rivals from another team called me "fat" at a race in November. While I was hardly chubby in the normal sense of the word, for somebody who is supposed to be a skinny climber, it was beginning to become a slight worry.
Two hours of fairly intense cycling should burn up about 1,000 calories and surely there was no way I was consuming in excess of 3,000 calories a day, but the mirror wasn't lying and then a weigh-in a doctor's check-up confirmed what the eye was telling me. And then when my injury first reared its head in early December and started to seriously curtail my cardio output, an additional two kilos piled on in as many weeks. It was THE worst time of the year to be out of action.
But now with no exercise and only a moderately lower intake of food I'm losing weight and it's not all muscle wasting away. I'm quite fascinated by this phenomena.
The knee itself continues to heal. Today I gingerly attempted a cobbler's pose stretch (soles of feet drawn in and meeting each other with knees bent out) and was delighted when I completed it pain free. Failure to be able to do this was one of the first symptoms of my torn meniscus back in December.
But I'm still taking it easy. I hardly broke a sweat with my little 20-minute tension-free spin on the indoor bike and I've been icing regularly and keeping my leg elevated as much as possible. There is no sign of swelling at all right now as I write this at 10:40pm, and I am stoked about that.
I'm off to bed now and already looking forward to that moment with the scales in the morning.
Cyclists are obsessive about weight. Whether it's the bike, the number and size of water bottles (the optimal seemingly is one 500ml bidon even in the tropics), or of course their bodies. This is especially important for those that like to do their thang on hills.
I'm no different yet I've never been one to stand on the scales every day, preferring the morning look in the mirror. But now I'm excited tojump on the scales when I get out of bed in the morning as the weight keeps tumbling. It surely can't last.
I've come up with a theory for the completed unexpected pace of flab-busting. It seems that the key for me is calorie deficit rather than exercise. Ok, there's no rocket science there, as less calories should mean weight loss, but not this quickly. I've been averaging about 1,700 calories of food a day (300 less than the "recommended") since the op yet despite doing no cardio at all, I've lost 1.3kg in eight days.
My weight had crept steadily up in the second half of the year despite averaging 15 hours of riding/running a week. I didn't know the number in kilos or pounds, I could just see it start to accumulate round my middle and then one of my rivals from another team called me "fat" at a race in November. While I was hardly chubby in the normal sense of the word, for somebody who is supposed to be a skinny climber, it was beginning to become a slight worry.
Two hours of fairly intense cycling should burn up about 1,000 calories and surely there was no way I was consuming in excess of 3,000 calories a day, but the mirror wasn't lying and then a weigh-in a doctor's check-up confirmed what the eye was telling me. And then when my injury first reared its head in early December and started to seriously curtail my cardio output, an additional two kilos piled on in as many weeks. It was THE worst time of the year to be out of action.
But now with no exercise and only a moderately lower intake of food I'm losing weight and it's not all muscle wasting away. I'm quite fascinated by this phenomena.
The knee itself continues to heal. Today I gingerly attempted a cobbler's pose stretch (soles of feet drawn in and meeting each other with knees bent out) and was delighted when I completed it pain free. Failure to be able to do this was one of the first symptoms of my torn meniscus back in December.
But I'm still taking it easy. I hardly broke a sweat with my little 20-minute tension-free spin on the indoor bike and I've been icing regularly and keeping my leg elevated as much as possible. There is no sign of swelling at all right now as I write this at 10:40pm, and I am stoked about that.
I'm off to bed now and already looking forward to that moment with the scales in the morning.
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