Renee Eastman explains the details of the five mistakes people make in losing weight endurance athletes, which she published in a blog post on the CTS website. From overcompensating for nutrition deficits to fad diets to short-term fixes and misplaced belief that cardio drives weight loss, learn how to use slow and boring tactics to have the best results in losing weight while maintaining performance goals.
Eastman is a Premier Coach for CTS with over 20 years of experience coaching endurance sports. She has a master’s degree in Exercise Science and is a NASM-certified nutrition coach.
Listen in as she and host Dirk Friel discuss the pitfalls that can hinder your training adaptations and how to balance calorie restriction with training, including practical approaches that can be maintained as part of a lifestyle.
Stand Out Quotes
“There’s a phrase I got from working with Stacy Sims, and it’s ‘focus on preloading your workouts instead of reloading your workouts.'”
“[Most athletes think] “I’m just going to ride off all this weight right off,” you know, all these calories. Most calories you burn during exercise are from carbohydrates, right? Carbohydrate is the fuel of exercise. We mentioned that I do a lot of lab testing and physiological testing where we’re actually measuring our carbohydrate and fat oxidation rates. I know you just had a great podcast on Zone Two (with Dr. Iñigo San Milan).
Being able to oxidize fat for fuel. But where you’re fat max, if you will, usually it’s going to be at most in zone two. And for a lot of the athletes that I see, it’s just over zone one. I can see somebody, you know, in our protocols, [who] we started at 75 or 100 watts and go up that they’re already 50/50 (fat to carbohydrate burn rate) at best. The few people who are what we call metabolically efficient, they might be 70/30 split at the low intensities. But by the time you’re getting to about 70%, certainly 75%, of a threshold, you’re seeing a majority of carbohydrates.”
“And even if you do all those things, if you’re in a calorie deficit every day, you are impairing what you can do.”
If somebody is trying to sell you something, that’s a red flag. [Or if it’s] sign up with me, and I’ll give you all the secrets. Yeah. Or if they’re trying to sell you supplements, like, “You’ve got to take this supplement and that supplement and this drink and you eat this thing,” or, you know, it if it sounds too good to be true or it sounds really good, it’s probably is a gimmick or a hack.
“You know, going on vacation for a week, that might be the week to really focus on your diet. I always tell people if they’re going on vacation, especially if they’re worried about weight management, focus on your protein intake. You mentioned the satiating, have your carbohydrates in vegetables, sauces, you know, like closer to nature. You don’t need the highly calorie-dense carbohydrates. If you’re on vacation and you’re not doing a lot of activity. Yeah. And that’s when you want to really focus on your diet and maybe even a calorie deficit on your vacation. Definitely not very fun, but it’s much better than getting back from your vacation being, “Oh, I’ve got to double my training volume and whack my calories in half.””
