It is often touted that if you’re looking to lose weight you should aim for no more than 2 pounds per week.
Why?
Well you could easily lose more but the theory is that if you do this regularly you will start to lose too much muscle.
As athletes when performance is your goal, losing muscle is not generally a good idea.
The problem with fat loss is that eventually muscle will be lost, unless you can find a way of convincing your body to hold on to it – this is usually done through strength training and higher protein diets – both of which you should already be engaging in my opinion.
If though your primary aim is fat loss, you may have to accept a short term fall in performance, which will lead to longer term performance gains.
So, what to do this week?
My first suggestion would be if possible, find a way of increasing training volume slightly. Most people find the idea of training more easier to implement than changing their eating habits. The problem with this as I’ve stated before is that there are so many hours in a day and juggling all those balls is already challenging enough.
My suggestion then is this:
Each morning on waking and before you shower set your stop watch for 5 minutes.
Then complete 10 press ups followed by 20 bodyweight squats until the 5 minutes is up – This will obviously burn some extra calories and hence create a energy deficit – assuming you don’t eat like a pig!
Secondly, it is important to be honest about your energy intake.
I’ve noticed a trend that people start to fill in my fitness pal until they have a bad day, when they just don’t fill it in?
Why?
Well because they can’t deal with the pain that will cause.
It hurts to see that you’ve made a mistake – that you’ve eaten too much and hence WON’T reach your goal.
So, instead they just bury their head in the sand, hope it goes away (which it doesn’t) and then record the next good day.
This creates this story in our heads that we are actually eating well.
Well, yes if all we do is examine our good days we can easily convince ourselves of this, especially when we hide from the bad.
In my private coaching group – The Total Triathlete, members post their food daily.
Not just the good food either, if they have a bad day then they tell me and the group and then they get back to work.
They don’t hide.
They don’t hope for the best.
They accept a mistake, don’t beat themselves up but learn from it, move on and make progress.
That is hard on your own.
When you join you also get my book – The Triathlete Nutrition Code which gives you all the info you need to set up your diet perfectly for you.
Check it out:
http://www.nutri-tri.com/the-total-triathlete/
Jamie “Have a GOOD week” Leighton