I am now in my third week of strength training and things are going well. Since I have cycled down my riding (no pun intended), I have started modifying my diet to accomodate winter training and weight loss. During the season it is important to keep a high amount of carbs in my diet to fuel all of my workouts. Having experienced a couple bonk situations, I tended to eat more carbs than necessary and not lose fuel or muscle mass. Better safe than sorry, as they say. This meant that while other riders were losing weight, I was mostly maintaining. I’m not at a dangerous weight or anything close, but it will not hurt to start climbing a few pounds lighter in the spring.

The first major challenge was Thanksgiving. Since I have already settled into a routine, such a massive meal had the potential to derail my training. I’ll tell you what — that food tasted delicious and I could have kept eating and sitting on the couch for days, weeks even. Fortunately I made some good choices over the holidays and was back on my plan by the weekend.

When making the transition, I found that carbs are everywhere. Even when trying to keep carbs down, I still ended up eating over 200g, which is plenty more than I need. It took some work at the grocery store reading labels and experimenting with foods carefully to find the best options for me. Right now I have cut out just about all fruits and increased vegetables. For breakfast I still have a light nutrition bar and a protein source. I then try to eat either a salad as one meal and a lean meat and veggie as the other. That combined with some light snacks throughout the day, including a healthy fat and and another protein is getting me where I need to be.

After three weeks plus Thanksgiving, I am already getting results. My weight has slipped a couple pounds already and I have dropped a belt notch. My goal is to only lose five pounds over the season. At this pace, which may or may not continue, I’ll be losing well below that. Losing too fast will be a good problem to have, as I’ll gradually add some more carbs and work on weight maintenance.