I lost 7 kg in 12 weeks. I went from 86 to 79 kg. And I did it while eating more food than I've ever eaten in my entire life.
What I didn't do was download My Fitness Pal and start tracking calories. What I didn't do was start skipping meals. I didn't do the fasted rides where you end up bonking when you're like 60k from home and end up absolutely hating your life.
I didn't do any of that. But the part that's going to annoy some people in the comments and everybody's going to shout saying, "But you lost power." I actually didn't.
I got faster during this whole period. My power didn't drop at all. My energy went up.
I stopped craving junk food at 900 p.m. And never once did I feel like I was on a diet.
Now, the cycling internet is going to tell you that weight loss is simple. It's calories in versus calories out. Burn more than you eat.
Ride more. Eat less. This advice is so outdated.
And it's not just incomplete. It's actually making you fatter. It's making you slower.
And it's making you more miserable on the bike. And I can say all of that because I followed that advice for years, maybe even a decade. And it didn't work.
It doesn't work. What did work came from a World Tour nutritionist named Dr. Sam Impi, who wrote arguably the most important sports nutrition paper of the last decade.
I interviewed Sam on the podcast, and I followed his protocols to the letter, and it changed absolutely everything for me. So, here's what I'm going to do over the course of this podcast. I'm going to walk you through exactly what I did week by week, meal by meal.
The five shifts I made that nobody talks about. And I'm not sure why, and why the conventional wisdom on cycling weight loss is just wrong. It's also dangerous.
And if you stay right till the end of this podcast, I'm going to share one mistake I made in week four. Total disaster. This nearly derailed me completely.
and how fixing this mistake accelerated everything. Let me start off with the problem. Why conventional weight loss fails cyclists.
Because here's what most cyclists do when they want to lose weight. And I know this because I did every single one of these things. First, you cut the calories.
You download My Fitness Pal app. You set yourself some arbitrary deficit target. And you start eating 1,800 calories a day.
And granted, you will feel pretty smug for four days, five days, six days if you've got willpower. Then you do a hard Tuesday night chain gang ride and you come home absolutely hollowed out. You eat everything in the fridge and by Friday you've given up and you're back to where you started.
Does that sound familiar? Be honest. Second, you go on fasted rides.
You heard somewhere that riding on empty, this accelerates fat burn. It allows you to tap into those hidden fat stores. So, you roll out on a Saturday morning with nothing but a black coffee.
And yeah, maybe you do burn a little bit more fat in that session. But here's what actually happens in reality because I've been this soldier many times. Your power is in the toilet for the whole session.
You can't hold a wheel in the group. And you come home so depleted that you overeat everything in sight for the next 36 hours. So, the net result, you've actually consumed more total calories than if you just eaten breakfast and ridden properly.
Third, and this one really gets me. You start restricting carbs all the time. No pasta, no rice, no bread, no chocolate milk because some influencer on Instagram told you the carbs are the enemy.
And this is where it gets genuinely dangerous though for amateur cyclists. Because when you chronically restrict carbohydrates, three things happen. One, your hard training sessions suffer.
You can't hit the numbers anymore. Your intervals are total garbage because you're not giving the body the fuel it needs to actually create a training adaptation. Number two, your recovery just goes off a cliff.
Train wreck. Because you're not replenishing glycogen. You're not rebuilding.
You're just accumulating fatigue with nothing to show for it. And thirdly, and Sam Impy was very clear when he spoke to me about this. Chronic underfueling is one of the fastest ways to totally fall out of love with the bike entirely.
You start skipping rides. You get sick more often. You sleep badly.
You start building this guilt around food. And worst of all, you start blaming yourself instead of blaming this broken system. So that's the problem.
The standard approach to cycling weight loss treats nutrition like a simple maths equation. Eat less, lose weight. But your body doesn't work like that.
Your body's not a calculator. It's an adaptation machine. And if you don't fuel it correctly, it doesn't just slow down.
It fights against you. So what did I do? Well, I implemented a framework which I want to walk you through now.
Fuel for the work required. So how does this actually work? Well, the answer comes from that concept, fuel for the work required.
And it was developed by Dr. Sam Impy and Professor James Morton, who I'm hoping to get on the podcast really soon at Liverpool John Moore University. And it's not a diet.
It's, as I said, it's like a formula, a framework. So here's why it's so powerful. It flips everything you've been told on its head.
Instead of eating the same thing every day, regardless of what you're doing, the way most diet plans actually work, you match your nutrition to the specific demands of each training session. Day by day, meal by meal. Let me break down this with a real example from my own training week.
So, Monday, I typically do a lot of my podcast work. That's a rest day. I'm not training, so I don't need a lot of carbohydrates.
So, I eat a lower carb day on Mondays. plenty of protein, good fats, some vegetables. I'm still eating well.
I'm not starving by any means, but I'm not loading up glycogen stores that I don't need. Tuesday for me is normally a hard interval session that I get done in the morning. It's threshold work sometimes, like at the moment.
And this is where I need to hit the numbers. So, the meal before that session, I get proper carbohydrates in. We're talking almost two grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight in the pre-ride meal.
For me, this is like 170 grams of carbohydrates. It's like a big bowl of porridge with a banana, toast, some Nutella, some honey. And during the ride, I'm taking on about 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour.
I'll try and take this from a mix of sources from like gels. I I love for endurance stuff. Gels, drink mix, whatever works.
Wednesday, I'm back to the uneasy spin, recovery rides, coffee ride with the lads. So, I'm back to lower carbs because I just don't need them. I'm not trying to perform, so I let my body do its thing.
Thursday's another hard session. So, fueling goes back up. You see the pattern?
On days where performance matters, you fuel for performance. On days where it doesn't, you pull back and you let your body tap into the fat stores and build that metabolic efficiency. Slight sidebar for one second.
How I've actually been doing this in practical terms is I've been using an app every single day called Hex, Hexis, and it's developed by Dr. Sam Impy, who I've referenced here, and his co-founder, Dr. David Dawn.
And about 40% of all world tour riders are now using this app, too. If you want to try it out, you can find it in the App Store, the Play Store, and I do have a code for it, so you can go see if that code still works. Sam gave it to me when he was on the podcast.
It's just code roadman, R O D M. Try it at checkout, and it should knock 25% off your monthly or annual cost. It is cheap as chips to sign up, but 25% still never hurts.
Okay, back to the podcast. This pattern of alternating the amount of fuel is what the professionals actually do. I'm not sure when the pros started fueling like this.
My guess is around 2016 when James Morton was at Team Sky because I know this strategy helped Chris F win the 2016 Tour to France. Team Sky back then, now Inos Grenaders, they built their entire nutritional strategy around this concept. And the beautiful thing is it works even better for amateurs because we've more easy days in our schedule than the pros do.
we've more opportunities for a natural calorie deficit to build up without ever actually feeling like we're dieting. The key insight, and this is the thing that changed everything for me, it's that you're not restricting anything at all. You're periodizing.
You're being strategic. You eat more on hard days. You eat differently on easy days.
The weekly calorie deficit, it takes care of itself. You never feel deprived because on the days you need food, you're actually eating loads of food. Sometimes your jaw hurts.
So, I had Yonas Abrahamson on the podcast who uses Hexus and eats like this and he said on his hard days, he mechanically struggles to get through the amount of chewing he has to do. His calories are so high. So, I tried to break this down and when I had this conversation with Sam, I broke this down into five shifts.
This was a way to help me understand it. So, let me give you kind of the five shifts that I put into my diary at the time. These are five specific things I've changed over 12 weeks.
These are the shifts that took me from 86 to 79 kilos while eating more than ever before. So shift number one is I stopped eating the same thing every day. Now this sounds obvious, I know, but for years I was on autopilot.
Same breakfast, same lunch, same dinner, regardless of whether I was doing a 5h hour Sunday spin or I was sitting at my desk editing podcasts all day. The moment I started matching my carb intake to my training load, the weight started coming off. Not because I was eating less overall, because I was eating the right amounts at the right times.
Shift number two, I fueled my hard sessions properly, like actually properly. And this was counterintuitive because I used to think eating less before a hard ride would help me lose weight faster. Like the long ride was an opportunity for me to create that deficit.
But that's totally backwards. when I started eating like 170 grams of carbohydrates before my Tuesday really hard and Thursday really hard sessions and taking that 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour during the ride, my power numbers went up, my recovery improved, and because I wasn't coming home absolutely destroyed, falling in the door. That meant I wasn't binge eating afterwards and reaching for the Deliveroo pizza.
The net result was actually fewer total calories over the course of the week, even though I was eating more around training times. Since this video has been recorded, I've actually lost the weight. I've gone from 88 to 80 kg.
I can't actually believe it because the crazy thing is I'm eating way more than ever before. Some days my jaw is actually getting sore. I'm eating so much.
But I feel amazing on the bike. My power numbers are not quite back to my best, but I'm trending there very fast. But importantly for me, my big hesitation when I got back training was, yes, I had the time available to train, but I couldn't do it if it meant sacrificing energy, the focus to come and have highlevel conversations on the podcast.
And I have so much energy off the bike. Like, I'm coming in the door fresh after three-hour rides. It's wild.
I've never experienced it before. And I want you guys to check this out. I chatted with Sam Offair and his co-founder David at Hexus and they've hooked up an amazing discount code for the Roadman listeners.
So if you want to try Hexus for yourself, it's honestly the biggest leap that I've seen in cycling ever. Forget aerodynamics, it's fueling properly. So if you go over to Hexus Hexis.
live and you use the code roadman when you're checking out, you're going to get 25% off your Hexus plan. Go just test it out. Trust me, it's a game changer.
The third shift, I train my gut. This is something Sam was emphatic about when I had him on the podcast. Your gut is a trainable organ.
It's like any muscle. Most cyclists treat their gut sensitivity as a hard limit. I can't eat more than 40 grams an hour or I'll get stomach cramps.
I hear this all the time on club spins. But that's not a limit. That's your starting point.
You can train it. Yeah. If you can only eat 40 grams, start at 40, but build 50, 60, 80, 90.
push upward, see where the limit is. You practice with different products. You mix glucose with fructose sources.
You do this in training, not on race day. And by week eight, I was totally comfortable taking 90 grams an hour all the time with zero gut issues whatso whatsoever. Before I would have been doubled over on the side of the road or going to the bathroom like quite frequently with that sort of carb intake.
The fourth shift I took, I stopped being afraid of food on rest days. I created this like morality around food in my head which I hated and it's a trap that I think a lot of cyclists fall into. You have a rest day and you think I'm not burning anything today so I'll barely eat.
Well, rest days are when your body actually rebuilds. So, you still need adequate protein. You still need good nutrition.
You just pull back on carbohydrate consumption because you don't need the glycogen on those days. I was still eating three solid square meals on a rest day. And I was never hungry.
I was never miserable. I just wasn't eating bowls of pasta when I was sitting on the couch for six hours. Shift number five, and this was a big one.
I committed to the process for 12 weeks without looking at the scales and having a judgment around it every day. I weighed myself once a week. Every Monday morning, same time, same conditions.
And here's the reality those 12 weeks. It wasn't linear. There was setbacks in this.
Week one, I think I lost like a kilo and a half. Week two, nothing. Week three, maybe half a kilo.
Week four, I remember because I actually went up and I nearly panicked and threw the whole what did he say? Threw the baby away with the bath water. But I got on to SAM and I trusted the process because I understood the science behind it.
And from week five onwards, it's been pretty consistent. Half a kilo to a kilo most of the time and all the way down to 79 kg, which I find myself at now. That's 7 kg gone.
Now, the mistake that I mentioned at the start that nearly ruined everything for me because I promised I'd tell you about this mistake. I made this in week four. And this is important because I think a lot of you will make the same mistake.
In week four, I started feeling really good. I could see the scales was going the right way for me in weeks one, two, and three. But like any cycles, I got a little bit greedy and I thought to myself, how can I hack this process?
How can I accelerate this weight loss? Because I'm trying to get towards 77 for race season. the weight was coming down like everything was good.
My training was going well and as I say I got greedy. I thought if eating lower carbs on easy days is working well. What if I go low carb on the odd hard day too?
Surely I'll accelerate fat loss. So I remember the Tuesday session I went out with minimum carbohydrates. I didn't eat properly beforehand.
I definitely didn't hit that 170 gram recommendation I was talking about. It was an absolute disaster. Like I couldn't hold any of my power targets.
I blew up halfway through. I came home, ate absolutely everything I could find, and the next morning, the scale was up a kilogram. And that's when Sam's principle really clicked for me.
Under fueling a hard session, it doesn't just ruin the session, it ruins the 48 hours that follow because you don't recover properly. You overeat to compensate. Now you go into this guilt spiral of trying to undereat and you lose the train and adaptation you were trying to create.
Fuel for the work required. It's not just a nice idea. It's not a slogan.
It's the whole point of this video. It's the whole point of this system. You earn the deficit on easy days.
You invest that fuel on hard days. The moment you try to be too clever that you try to cut corners on both, the whole system collapses. I promise you, I won't make that mistake again.
It was horrific. Every rider chases that feeling. The one where the bike just disappears.
Where the pedals turn easy and the road hums beneath you. And for a few fleeting seconds, everything just clicks. No effort, no noise, just flow.
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Parley Cycles, engineered for that feeling that keeps us coming back. Okay, so this week I want to break it down and show you what it looks like. So step one, you just need to look at your training plan for the week.
Open up your training peaks account and now let's start identifying sessions which are the hard sessions. I'm talking intervals, tempo, threshold, V2, max sessions, anything where you need to hit a power target and which the sessions are aimed to drive that upper adaptation, you know, the hard work. Now secondarily, identify the easy sessions.
You know, you can use a traffic light system if you want on this. Identify the easy sessions, endurance rides, coffee rides, activation sessions, yeah, recovery spins, anything like that. Now, step two, work two meals backwards.
So, the meal before the session and the meal the night before. So, say if it's a morning session, you're looking at dinner the night before and you're looking at breakfast that morning. That's where you're going to try and up your carbohydrate consumption.
So, for the meal before, I'll typically go with two grams per kilogram of body weight. If you're an 80 kilogram rider, that's like 160 grams of carbs. It's quite a bit of eating.
For me, my go-to is in the morning. their like porridge, their bananas, their toast, their bagels, Nutella, but whatever works for you. Eat it like at least 90 minutes to two hours before your ride.
If it's a race, I'll try and push that to three hours before. Step three, during hard sessions, start practicing on the bike fueling. Begin at 40 grams an hour.
If you haven't done this before, that's maybe roughly one gel depending on the brand you're using. Try it with different sources. Try a gel energy drink and building it up over time.
Step four, on easy days and rest days, pull back on carbohydrate consumption. Not to zero, but you're just looking to eat more protein and prioritize that. More vegetables, fewer starchy carbs.
You're still eating well. You're just not loading glycogen that you don't need. Step five, you need to be patient with this.
You need to zoom out and give it space to compound, space to work. Give it minimum eight weeks to observe the changes. Don't change absolutely everything two or three days later.
If this isn't working, commit to the framework. Weigh yourself once a week. Track your power and training peaks and trust the process.
If you want to go deeper on the science behind all this, I sat down for a really long form podcast with Dr. Sam Impy. I think it's like 90 minutes or two hours.
I'm going to link that episode in the description down below. It's thoroughly worth watching. It's maybe the single most important conversation I've had on this podcast about nutrition.
He explains the research behind everything I've just told you in a way that'll make you rethink everything you thought you knew about fueling. 7 kg in 12 weeks is what I lost. Eating more food than ever before.
Power numbers up, energy up, and for the first time in years, I actually enjoy eating without this bakedin morality again. No guilt, no restrictions, no white knuckling my way through another calorie deficit that always going to fail. Just a simple framework.
Fuel for the work required. Match your nutrition to your training. Stop eating the same thing every day and give your body what it actually needs when it actually needs it.
If this video helped you, please hit subscribe. We put out videos like this every single week, breaking down the stuff that actually makes you faster on the bike without any of the fads. And I also am curious.
Drop me a comment below and let me know what is your biggest struggle when it comes to nutrition and cycling. I read every single one of the comments. See you in the next video, folks.