A question about weight

[rocknrollgirl]

Hi Guys,
I have had this question rolling around in my head that I want to ask. I do not want to offend anybody, but it is bugging me, and if I can't ask here, where am I going to ask. Right?

I have in more than one instance noticed that some of the hardest training people here have made comments about their weight. How come when doing this much training, the pounds don't just melt away?

I know calories in, calories out. I teach Bio, I get it. But with the number of calories that we are burning, why is it even an issue?

I don't have a weight issue, I am not a picker, or an emotional eater. I am careful about my fuel choices. Yea, I indulge every now and then, but for the most part, I am a clean eater.

How come I am not desperately fighting to keep weight on? Are we not really burining that much? I am freakin' hungry all the time, and I am not even doing IM distance.

What is the physiology behind this?

Confused and hungry in New Jersey...
( and hoping not to offend)

Ruth

[Offthegrid]

I can't speak for others and I'm certainly not one of the hardest training people here, but I've lost 35 pounds since September. That's an average of about 5 pounds a month or a bit more than 1 pound a week -- the exact amount recommended for permanent weight loss.

If you're interested more in the psychology, check out the book "Mindless Eating" by Brian Wansink, who studies food psychology. Basically he says people drastically overcompensate for the calories they burn through exercise. He's also the guy who studied how much people eat when they have bottomless soup bowls and how the size of the popcorn bag influences how much people will eat.

One risk of exercise is that some people subsequently overeat, thinking they are compensating for the calories they burned. They almost always overeat. The key to Mindless Eating isn’t in necessarily giving up all the foods a person loves. It’s being more naturally mindful (not obsessively mindful) as to some of the tradeoffs required.

In one study we’ve done, we found that listing the number of miles a person would have to walk if they consumed a 300 calorie bag of granola lead them to eat less than if we just had the calorie count in it. For many people, it’s not necessary that they eliminate all "bad” food, just that they trim it down.

The key to Mindless Eating, is that you can set up some of your own rules and trade-offs so nothing is off-limits as long as you see the bigger picture.

Here's a NY Times article about the same person.

[HillSlugger]

I wish I knew! I ride 4 days a week, run 2, and swim 1-2, and I'm not losing any weight at all. I assume I'm eating too much, but I secretly hope it means that I'm converting fat pounds to lean muscle pounds.

[mimitabby]

Not too concerned about my own weight, but what i have read is when you exercise you speed up your metabolism. So the furnace wants more wood to burn whether you exercise that day or not. So it's really tricky because you feel hungry. The book I just read "Younger Next Year" suggests you exercise EVERY DAY.. then you can moderate your intake better. If you ride (like I do)
2 hours one day, 4 the next and not ride 5 days in a row, the food management gets harder. I get SOOOOO hungry every day, it's annoying.

[Offthegrid]

I wish I knew! I ride 4 days a week, run 2, and swim 1-2, and I'm not losing any weight at all. I assume I'm eating too much, but I secretly hope it means that I'm converting fat pounds to lean muscle pounds.

If you really want you could track measurements, too. I took mine in October or November but haven't taken them again. I should get on that.

I have noticed that if I work out in the morning (be it swimming, spin class or running) I get ravenously hungry afterwards.

[rocknrollgirl]

Nah,
I do not want to track or measure or calculate... I just want to know the basic physiology behind this phenomenon.

What the heck?

[KSH]

It is very interesting.

I can also say, that I know that you can't judge an athlete by his/her cover. For example, when I started racing... I would see someone who didn't look as fit as me... but I tell you what, they kicked my butt. I typically cycle with people who don't look really fit, but gosh, they go REALLY FAST on a bike. So weight does not determine performance in my book.

As far as people not losing weight when training... I bet that's a huge question for a lot of people out there.

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that a lot of training might be out of the "fat burning zone" and into the aerobic zone. I have a friend who has purposely done some long slow rides on his bike (14/15 mph average versus a 18/19 mph average)... to lose weight, and it has worked.

For me, I struggled some with keeping my weight below 130 last year. I was riding all the time with some swimming... but whatever I was eating... was making me gain weight.

Last October I buckeled down on my eating habits and lost 9 pounds. Now days, I fluctuate between 121 and 125.... but I am eating like I did last year... ???? Gosh, even the other week, I seriously ate out 5 days... and I lost weight... whereas last year that would not have happened.

Of course, this year I am running... that might be the difference?

Otherwise, just because I am at a healthy weight... it doesn't mean a damn thing on the course. I am still a slow runner and mediocre on the bike. I get passed by a ton of people!

[KnottedYet]

I know my body has set points where it "likes" to be. Both size and weight.

When I'm active and happy I'm 145 lbs and a size 10-12.
When I'm sedentary and happy I'm 165 lbs and a 12-14.
When I'm miserable I can be up to 200 lbs and a size 20, whether I'm active or not.

I have the same pair of size 12 jeans that I've been going back and forth with for the last 15 years.

When my bod is at one of it's set points, it stays there. I won't weigh 140, no matter what I try. I won't settle at 160, it's gotta be 165.

Maybe yours has a set point it wants to stay at, and your metabolism adjusts to your activity to keep you there?

[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.

[Grog]

Hum, that's interesting Eden. It does remind me that whereas I became REALLY hungry the first few months I was cycling for "real" (i.e. more than 100km/week), it's now much calmer on that front, even if I exercise more overall than I did back then. Or maybe I've just gotten used to eating more or adjusted my nutrition accordingly? But I think what you say makes sense.

Other factors I think would include some genetics, metabolic rate, % body fat vs. muscle, the "age" of the fat (supposedly fat takes as much time to leave as it took buildilng up, so the "older" the fat the longer it takes to go away... but I don't know whether there is more than anecdotal evidence for that), nutritional habits, exercise habits, number of years practicing endurance sports, etc. I think someone who's been mostly sedentary for most of their life would have a steeper curve to face compared to a person who's been into sports for ever.

But I'm no physiologist.

[HappyAnika]

I said this in another post somewhere, I like to say that I defy the laws of thermodynamics. I do not obey the law of conservation of energy, I feel like I burn more than I take in, and still manage to gain weight. This winter I tracked every calorie I ate and that helped some, but I should do that again now that I've increased my activity and see how the equation balances out.

I am still confused about the "fat burning" vs. aerobic exercise. You have the camp that says you must exercise longer at lower intensity to burn fat. Then the other camp that says you should exercise at a higher intensity to burn more calories overall. Anyone have any scientific evidence to support either of these theories?

I've never had my VO2 max measured, but what Eden was saying kind of makes sense to me. Last year (my first year riding, but I'd been doing other exercise for years) I was starving all of the time and gaining weight. I know I was eating too much to compensate for the calories burned in cycling, but I was ravenous. This year I am not so hungry. My goal was to eat on long rides and some recovery food after, but otherwise to keep my meals pretty much the same. I've been able to do that without feeling like I'm starving (so far, knock on wood). I know I've made some improvement in my overall fitness, I believe I've increased my lactic acid threshold since I can go much harder for longer without getting leg cramps. So perhaps my body is burning more stored fats than carbs now . . . I'm very sloooooowly dropping a couple of pounds, as in 2 lb in the last month. That corresponds to an increase from about 3 or 4 hours a week of various exercises to about 8 or 9 hours (and 3 of those are pretty high intensity). I'd be so happy if I could loose 8 more lb by the end of the summer, but I feel like I'd have to train for 20 hours a week and only eat 500 calories a day to make that happen.

[Grog]

Oh, and I wanted to add:

- I've often read that when you're training for something is not the time to try to loose a lot of weight. Ex: it's not a good idea to train for a marathon in order to loose weight. It's already enough of a stress for your body to run that marathon, trying to loose weight by buildling a calorie-deficit every day would not be a good thing, energy-wise.

- It takes more energy to get a heavier body to move (simple physics). So the heavier the person, the more that person will have to eat in order to exercise more. Bigger athletes just can't live on 1200 calories a day, or they wouldn't have the energy to be athletes.

- Now the psychology: People of all body shapes are concerned about their weight. My whippety sweetheart, with a BMI of about 20 if not 19, and about 3-4% body fat, keeps an eye on what he eats and often feels "fat". If you just had a soundtrack of him, no video, you'd think maybe he's indeed overweight. Sure, in his case, having 1 pound more fat and 1 pound less muscle would mean loosing precious seconds up that hill he's racing on. Competitive runners can get similarly, dare I say, obsessive about having the perfect body mass composition. It's all relative...

Again not sure this helps but you sure raised an interesting topic.

[Grog]

I am still confused about the "fat burning" vs. aerobic exercise. You have the camp that says you must exercise longer at lower intensity to burn fat. Then the other camp that says you should exercise at a higher intensity to burn more calories overall. Anyone have any scientific evidence to support either of these theories?

Can't provide a source, but my understanding from talking to various coaches and sports specialists is that both are actually true. It's just that most people can't sustain the higher intensities (that burn more calories) for very long, so it's better to keep a lower intensity going for longer, more often, hence the higher calorie expenditure at the bottom line.

[Wahine]

I have in more than one instance noticed that some of the hardest training people here have made comments about their weight. How come when doing this much training, the pounds don't just melt away?

I know calories in, calories out. I teach Bio, I get it. But with the number of calories that we are burning, why is it even an issue?

How come I am not desperately fighting to keep weight on? Are we not really burining that much? I am freakin' hungry all the time, and I am not even doing IM distance.

What is the physiology behind this?

Confused and hungry in New Jersey...
( and hoping not to offend)

Ruth

Gotta keep this short. So ask questions if it doesn't click.

Physiologically speaking, new activity will burn calories at a higher rate - simple biology there. As we exercise longer, our efficiency changes and we may not burn as many calories for the same amount and intensity of exercise. This has to do with efficiency of metabolism as well as efficiency of movement/biomechanics.

Also, while many of us are burning fat, we are also storing glycogen in our muscles. For every 1 gram of glycogen stored, you have to store 3 grams of water. That's a lot of extra weight in the muscle. This would be particularly true for you because you're doing a lot of work at LT so you're body will be tending toward storing glycogen in the muscle.

I actually gained weight when I trained for my first IM, I think mostly due to glycogen storage.

Metabolic hormone levels drop drastically in trained athletes if they restrict their caloric intake below 80% of required calories for normal daily function + caloric expenditure during exercise. This is in effect a physiologic starvation response and will pre-dispose storage of fat when the athlete does eat more. So a lot of athletes may be shooting themselves in the foot by not eating enough for 3 to 4 days, (changing their metabolic hormone profile), then binging because they think it's OK once in awhile.

Finally, a lot of people eat on rest weeks and rest days the same as they do on training days and I think that tends to cause some fat storage. Your body is trying to make rain while the sun shines. I don't have anything to back this up, it's just my opinion from experience with my own body and from discussions with other athletes.

Personally. I seem to have hit my set point at 140 lbs. To lose more I will have to change something. As you know, I'm training a lot. You'd think I'd be as skinny as a rail. Nope. I don't know that I will try to drop another 5 lbs. That was my goal as it would seriously improve my climbing. But I also don't want to get into that nasty situation of messing with my metabolism.

[rocknrollgirl]

Yep, that is me. Queen of LT....no long slow distance here. Long slow distance would be pretty couterproductive for the races I am training for. Xterra is going to be 2-3 hours of brutality. Especially the bike!

I am trying so hard to eat well, and eat enough to keep fueled, and not too much to avoid the gain.
But God I am friggin' hungry

I have not gained fat( yet), but I am a bit paranoid about it. I have put on muscle from mt biking over the past two years.

The food part should be easier.....