A question about weight

[Eden]

I think that it is a combination of what OTG and KSH were talking about. When we first started to do a lot of cycling my husband and I would come home ravenous. Seriously we would want to eat and eat.. (still happens after races sometimes ), but now it seems like even long rides as long as they are not really fast - a lot of zone 4, zone 5 stuff don't affect us like that. I can go out and do 4 or 5 hours on the bike and still feel like a small lunch will do fine.

I don't have a before V02 to make a comparison, but I did get one recently and I found on it that I burn a majority of fat calories well into Zone 3. I'm assuming that before when I would come home feeling starving I was burning up mostly my ready carbs, and because of this I would feel very hungry and eat a lot. Now because I am burning more stored fats I don't get the feeling that I am hungry as much so I don't eat as much.

My weight loss history over several years has been - 10 lbs lost very quickly over about 2 weeks when we did a bike tour in Spain. Believe me I was not eating terribly healthy foods during this, so it had to be that it was just not possible to eat more calories than I was burning. After that I gradually lost another 10 or 12 over about 1/2 a year, since then my weight has been very stable, though I think I still have been building muscle and losing fat.

For some people I think that it must take a huge amount of base training to get the system trained to use fats rather than carbs - and it can be very difficult to actually go as slow as you are told you must, but it you don't do that slow speed training you won't get your body burning up those fats so the cycle of training hard and feeling very hungry continues.