You're watching this because you want to know why you can't lose weight. The title of this video is five fixable reasons you can't lose weight. And I want to show you exactly where those roadblocks are.
Here's the truth. If you're a cyclist and you're struggling to drop weight, it's not because you're lazy or you're weak or you're broken. It's because there's these invisible forces that are working against you.
I spent years banging my head against a brick wall. Like long rides, calorie counting, early morning pre-rees, late night rides. I tried it all and the scales never really moved or sometimes worse, it actually just went up.
What I'm about to tell you will change how you look at the whole process of losing weight. Because one of these reasons is something almost every cyclist gets completely wrong. And reason number four is the one that I really avoid facing for years.
Stick with me. This one's going to hit home. Back when I was racing full-time, I can vividly remember sitting on the edge of a bed in some tiny French guest house.
My teammates were heading out for a coffee and I was staring at the Wayne scales. That was like my custom to weigh myself every morning. The Wayne scales, it hadn't budged for almost a month.
I was training 20 plus hours a week. I was counting every single calorie in the early days of My Fitness Pal and I was still gaining weight. It made absolutely no sense.
that feeling of confusion and honestly a little bit of shame. It's something I still see in road man athletes when they come into me today. So, let's break this down properly.
Five reasons, all very solvable, all grounded in science and lived experience. Reason number one, you're under fueling and then overshooting your evenings. The most common mistake I see athletes making, it's this.
They think, "Okay, I need to lose weight. So, that means I need to starve. I'm going to starve my way to being lighter.
" On the surface, this rationale makes a little bit of sense. They head out the door for a big session and they have maybe a bottle of water and a banana. They come home absolutely shattered.
And then the real damage starts. When you under fuel during training, your body is in this panic state. Cortisol rises.
Hunger skyrockets. The discipline you had in the morning to get out the door, however ill-guided that was, it evaporates and the evening becomes this calorie freefor-all. You think you're being disciplined, but your biology is outsmarting you.
Studies have backed this up time and time again. Asker Duke and Drop and Louise Burke have shown that low carbohydrate availability during endurance training leads to uncontrolled compensation eating later in the day. The fix for this is really easy.
It's fueling the work required. Like Dr. Sam Impy's paper, fuel the work required.
It's fueling the session during the day. Eat deliberately for the demands of the session. So you take back control of your evenings.
When I made this shift, and I was really slow to make this shift. The weight finally started to come off. Not fast, but steady.
And I also got back control of my energy levels in the evening. I never hit that post session slump. Reason number two.
Now, I'm going to move on to, and it seems obvious at first glance, but the way it sabotages cyclists is far more subtle than you might think. Reason number two is you're training in the wrong zones for fat loss. Now, stick with me because this seems counterintuitive as well.
When cyclists try to lose weight, they think, "Okay, I'm going to add a little bit more intensity." They think sweating more, it's like the heart back to a Rocky movie or something. They think sweating more means burning more fat.
But that's not how physiology actually works. High-intensity training is fueled mainly by glycogen. Your body holds on to fat when it senses repeated stress without adequate recovery.
Most of your fat loss comes from consistent time spent in those lower training zones. Zone one, zone 2 rides, sessions before your first inflection point, before that LT1. Now, I know these easy sessions aren't glamorous.
There's no fireworks here. They're just slow, patient metabolic change sessions. But I cannot tell you how many athletes I've seen coming through the doors that have been whacking away doing threshold and V2 max sessions expecting that's going to help them drop weight and it just doesn't work.
A conversation I had recently on the podcast with a sports physiologists hit me really hard. He said, "Weight loss for cyclists is controlled by two things. Caloric balance and nervous system stability.
Intensity disrupts both. Zone 2 supports both." So, if you're listening to this now and you're thinking, "Oh, I might be guilty of this sin.
" The fix is easy. Anchor your week with long, chilled out endurance rides. Make sure you're not going out with that training partner who's constantly turning your endurance ride into a tempo session.
build your week on that platform of easy rides where fat oxidation can actually take place. Reason number three, now and this is where most cyclists fall into a psychological trap that they never see coming because reason three is you're ignoring liquid calories and these micro habits. And this one surprised me in my own cycling career.
There was a stage where I was doing everything right on paper, but I was still carrying unnecessary weight that I couldn't really seem to find the source of. And one of my old coaches pointing out something embarrassingly simple. He said, "Anthony, your problem's not the training, it's the unconscious calories.
Those habits that we've automated, a lot of our processes during day get automated to stop us with decision fatigue." And I had automated some calorie consumption that I wasn't even aware of. like coffee, I throw a little bit of cream into it.
I might grab a handful of trail mix or I might go a little bit heavy on the sports drink. You know, I might go with, you know, 90 grams when that session only needed 70 or a handful of Haribo for a random reason when I went over to see my nephew. None of this appears in my food diary, but it does add up like compound interest in the background.
Now, when I work with road man athletes, I often get them to track just liquid calories for a week. I'm not talking food. I'm not talking full My fitness pal regimented regime here.
We have to log everything and weigh everything. Not macros, just drinks. And the results are shocking for most people.
A lot of people, the weight loss block, it's hidden in that little bottle of drink that they're having, the smoothie on the way to work. The fix for this is it's awareness. One week of just tracking your liquid intake will open your eyes.
You don't need to even change it immediately because awareness alone usually cuts consumption in half. Let's step into reason number four now because this is one that nobody wants to talk about. It's emotional and it's not physical and it can freeze fat loss completely.
Number four, you're using food as regulation and not fuel. And this is a hard one. When I was at my lowest during my racing years, food became a way to control my emotions.
Stress, fatigue, loneliness of traveling on the road, maybe a realization I was never going to make it at the top of the sport. Eating felt like grounding me. It felt like it gave me something predictable in this chaotic life.
And a lot of cyclists use food to regulate their nervous system without even realizing it. weight loss becomes impossible because your body is it's not just eating for calories. It's eating for comfort, for stability, for self soothing.
And until you name that pattern, nothing changes. I've spoken with countless guests on the podcast about nervous system regulation and almost all agree on this. You can't outdisipline emotional eating.
You can only understand it and build new coping tools. The way to take action on this is to create a nonfood regulation ritual. So when you are feeling that emotional pull, instead of reaching for the ice cream, maybe go and take a 10-minute walk.
Do five minutes of breath work. Something like the Wimhof app is brilliant. Jump in a cold shower, do 10 minutes of journaling, something you can reach for when that instinct to self soo appears.
Let's jump to reason five because reason five ties everything together really nicely and it's the real reason that cyclists plateau without understanding why. There's something strange happening in endurance sports and cycling right now. Nobody's talking about Nomio, but everybody seems to be using it.
They've no influencer campaigns. They've no glossy ads. They just have the quiet word of mouth between riders who've seen what it does firsthand.
I spotted this on Mads Person's Instagram account. one of those little bottles and I got curious. So, I did two things.
Firstly, I booked a podcast with Dr. Philip Larson. He's the scientist behind it.
And secondly, I ran my own little bro science experiment. Here's what I done. Four days, I went out to the exact same hill and I rode the first three minutes of it.
Pretty much the same legs. Day one, I went 463 watts. Day two, 462 watts.
No Nomo, one watt difference between those two efforts. Then I added Nomio on day three, 470 watts. Next day, 472 watts.
Now, this is bro science. This isn't peer-reviewed, but honestly, it's real and it got my attention. And when I sat down with Dr.
Larson, one of the top physiologists in endurance sports, he explained why this might be happening to me. Nomio's broccoli sprout extract. It triggers something called NRF2, a pathway that helps your body adapt to stress, recover faster, and buffer lactate.
The result, cyclists in a study showed lower lactate, higher power, and faster recovery without changing their training. This isn't hype. This is the next chapter of endurance science.
And if you want to try it for yourself, the good folks at Nomio have given our Roadman listeners a discount to check it out for the first time and just see if it works. So Roadman listeners can get 20% off with the code roadman cycling 20@nomio.com.
That's use code roadmancycling 20@nomio.com. Reason five, your recovery signals are blocking your fat loss.
And let me explain because this is the missing link. Your body doesn't burn fat when it's stressed. It burns glycogen.
It holds on to every bit of fat it can because stress means threat. Many cyclists are living in a constant storm of training load, work pressure, sleep disruption, and under recovery. Back in my full-time racing days when I trained as many hours as I could.
I'd often sleep less, you know, trying to catch up with college friends. And I assumed I was doing the hard work. In reality, I was teaching my body to store fat.
My rest and heart rate, if I looked back at the signals, was elevated. My heart rate variability was suppressed. My hunger signals were chaotic at best.
And my motivation was inconsistent. Like, I'm living in France. It's a beautiful day.
I'm paid to ride a bike. Why am I struggling to get out the door? I was fighting my physiology.
Now, when I work with roadman athletes, we fix that recovery early. And by fixing that recovery, you often see the athletes start to lose weight even without touching calories. Their cortisol levels drop, their cravings reduce, their metabolic flexibility improves.
You need to recover like it's your job. Sleep eight hours, eat carbohydrates after sessions, fuel the work required, do light movement on rest days, and build a weekly rhythm that calms your system instead of shocking it and jolting it all the time. Here's what I want you to take from this video.
Because you're not broken, you're not failing. You're fighting a series of hidden barriers that almost every cyclist struggles with and they are all really fixable. Fuel your training so your evenings don't become this out of control calorie fest.
Train in the right zones, not constantly out with your half-wheeling companions. Put those unconscious calories. Understand the emotional triggers and recover like you're protecting something valuable.
You know, I'm genuinely proud of my little man cave, my escape, my safe place. It's not glamorous by any means. It's crammed into the spare room in our apartment with bikes stacked in the corner, boxes everywhere, and the smell of chain lube is just kind of hanging in the air.
But in that corner, that's where the work gets done. That's where I switch off from everything else, and I lock in on my training. And the centerpiece of it all, it's the Wahoo Kicker Bike Pro.
Honestly, it's the ultimate man cave. The thing just feels alive under you. It climbs, it descends, it shifts, all automatically.
You can dial into your exact position to the millimeter, just like your outdoor bike. And with the new setup, everything's smoother, quieter, and way more immersive. It's that perfect mix of comfort and performance that makes indoor cycling feel like a privilege, not like a punishment.
And look, I'm Irish. I'm sitting in Ireland recording this right now. I know what it's like to wake up, look out the window, see wind, rain, and sideways hail, and think, "Do I really want to be out there today?
" And that's where the kicker comes in. You can get a world-class session done right there in your safe little space, no matter what's happening outside. If you want to build your own version of that space, a place to train hard, stay consistent, and escape for a little bit, check out Wahoo at wahooitness.
com. They've got everything from the flagship Kicker Bike Pro to the Kicker Core 2, which gives you that same legendary ride feel at a killer price point. Wahoo!
Building the better athlete in all of us. Roman, if you enjoyed this video and you would like to work with me in a one-on-one coaching capacity, we do have a limited number of coaching spots for the right applicants for a project called Not Done Yet for athletes who don't feel like they're done. I don't have time to give you all the details in this video, but if you pop me an email to an antthony@romancecycling.
com, if you think you're suitable for this not done yet program for athletes who still have another chapter to be written in their cycling, I will ping you across all the details. Thanks for tuning in. If you like the video, please comment below, watch it all the way through, like it, share it into a WhatsApp group, all that good stuff.