Those last 10 pounds

Your second, modified daily intake looks pretty good. You already work out plenty but some lifting sessions wouldn't hurt.

Time to roll the coasters!!

why pass on the dinner salad?? cut the starchy carbs at dinner to smaller or nothing and eat a bigger salad it'll feel you up better and you'll get more nutrition

Want to lose weight? Simple. Eat less.

Also stop drinking gatorade it's just sugar water with some sodium.

The eat less is not a good answer. Michael Phelps reportedly ate 12,000 calories a day. The same principle works for all - though 12K calories too much for 99.999% of us.

Eating good & often makes your body a furnace & is a good long-term eating habit. ***THAT'S FOR ANYONE***, elite or hobby jogger.

Wrong.

Eat less is a great answer. It all comes down to calories. Eat too many calories, you get fat. Period.

A bottle of G2 gatorade has less than 100 calories and I drink one before my AM workout. Cut that out and my workout will suffer because I haven't eaten since last night and am low on fuel. The people that say eat less dont help. Obviously I am looking to reduce caloric intake, but I want to find a good balance/nutrient combo to train hard with plenty of energy while also losing 10-15 pounds over 8 weeks

To lose 10 pounds (of fat) in a week you need to cut 625 calores per day. That's 4375 per week. 35000 over 8 weeks. Boom there goes 10 pounds of fat.

Listen, theres no magic to it. You have to burn more calories than you take in. THAT'S IT!

You eat way too much. Replace the gatorade with water.

Your post-AM workout seems a lot higher than proteins and fats than you need after endurance work. You really don't need fat (peanut butter) immediately after swimming/running/cycling, you do need lots of carbs (they'll go right back to your glycogen stores if you eat them soon enough after your workout), and you only need a little bit of protein (4:1 carb:protein is what I've heard most often).

In any case if you plan on restricting intake to hit some arbitrary number that's in your head (which I do not recommend, since in my case it led to muscle loss and a higher body fat percentage) I would do it on the off-season. Eating at a deficit is going to mess with your training and there's no way around that. If you want to focus on eating for better performance for now though then that's good. You're going to get a lot of troll answers off of LetsRun though, so you might want to look into seeing a dietitian.

To clarify, I mean the second, proposed post-AM workout meal. The first one honestly looks a lot better in terms of recovery.

or you can just train harder and not worry about your weight. if you are training well and eating healthy, weight will work itself out to where you should be.

Cut the sugar, bread and banana. You're welcome.

you guys are fvcking idiots. eat less is not the right answer. eat well is. you could eat your bodyweight in spinach and not gain any weight.

also, to clarify:

if you ate more calories on an 80/10/10 carb/protein/fat low fat raw vegan diet, then you would lose a lot more weight (read: fat) than someone who eats the typical american diet.

it's all dependent on what type of fuel and how often you eat. if you don't eat very often your body goes into survival mode and stores energy as fat. if you eat several small meals your body's metabolism is constantly running therefore you don't store as much fat.

additionally, limiting calories is only really important if your fuel is poor, such as fast food. in that case then yes you would want to cut cals because most of the cals come from fat.

i could go on and on about this..

If his bodyweight in spinach is more calories than he burns than yes he will gain weight. You people are dumb.

Ex Phys wrote:

If his bodyweight in spinach is more calories than he burns than yes he will gain weight. You people are dumb.

not true. he's doing a lot of cardiovascular exercise and spinach is basically all carbs and protein

Oh you're right. The calories in carbs and proteins don't count. I can eat 10lbs of sugar (100% carbohydrate) and not gain a pound. You have no idea what you're talking about.

I am very bad at sticking to diets but have a similar issue with the last ten pounds in the run-up to races - especially when doing lower mileages.

What worked best for me so far is Intermittent Fasting. You say you have two hard days? Great. Eat normally on them, before and after training. Then, on another couple of days a week, just skip a meal. Once you're 4 hours from the last meal, you will definitely be losing weight, so just prolong the window.

I do very well by either

(a) skipping breakfast and hanging in until 1pm, in order to get 16 hours since the last meal; or

(b) morning run, eat a SMALL amount (maybe 50 calories per mile run), then hang in until mid afternoon.

Yes, you will feel hungry. But the hunger doesn't actually get any worse as time goes by. The trick is to tell yourself that the hungry sensation is "fat evaporating from the body" (a great image from a physicist who lost a lot of weight), and to have a short term target. Then don't go crazy afterwards. Also, doing longer low intensity stuff while fasted (maybe easier bike rides) is a great way to burn off fat.

The real problem with this 'last ten pounds' stuff is that your body badly wants to put it back on, so you can't take the whole weekend off with impunity.