Unlock Ultimate Athletic Potential: Top Weight Loss Strategies for Peak Performance

For athletes, achieving the ideal weight is a delicate balance. The ultimate goal is to be "light and lean" while remaining "strong and healthy," maximizing performance and achieving those peak moments of training. It requires attention to detail and a strategic approach to nutrition and training.

The Crucial Role of Nutrition

Nutrition is more important than exercise for endurance athletes who want to lose weight. Athletes should prioritize performance development in their exercise routines. Training solely to burn extra calories can lead to overeating or overtraining by under-fueling, neither of which promotes fat loss.

Understanding the Time Factor

Fat loss is a gradual process, whereas water loss can occur rapidly. Focus on fat loss and practice patience. Avoid drastic calorie deficits. A daily deficit of 300 to 500 calories is a good goal for healthy, long-term fat loss that can be sustained while building fitness. Severely restricting calories can trigger starvation mode, which impairs fitness development and prevents fat storage. Extreme under-fueling can harm training and cause problems like hormone imbalances, bone loss, and immune system suppression. To achieve optimal race weight, maintaining good health is essential.

Timing Weight Loss with Training Intensity

During lower-intensity off-season and base training periods, there is more nutritional flexibility. The fueling and recovery needs are too high to maintain a calorie deficit while building fitness during higher-intensity build, peak, and race periods. Take action and create a detailed plan to reach your ideal race weight, rather than waiting until eight weeks before your peak race or assuming weight will drop off during training.

Safe and Effective Weight Loss Strategies

Follow these steps to lose 0.25-1.0 pounds of body weight per week. If you're within 3-5% of your race weight, steps 1-3 may be sufficient.

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Eliminate Soda: Start by removing all soda, including diet soda.
Cut Out Junk Food: Eliminate alcohol, candy, cakes, chips, sweets, and all junk food. This alone may be enough for some athletes to lose weight gradually.
Maintain a Calorie Deficit: Aim for a daily deficit of 300 to 500 calories.
Fuel Training Sessions: Before, during, and after training, don't skimp on nutrition.
Reduce Carbs on Rest Days: Reduce carbohydrate intake on rest and recovery days, as training glycogen depletion has little impact on fitness progress. Eat a light, low-carbohydrate, high-protein dinner the night before a rest day.
Practice Portion Control: Athletes already eating a whole food, nutrient-dense diet should begin their weight loss journey with portion control because even the healthiest foods can be overeaten.
Prioritize Sleep: Get eight hours of sleep per night because sleep deprivation inhibits fat loss.
Maintain Protein Intake: Maintain normal protein intake despite a lower overall daily calorie intake. Increase the proportion of protein in your daily diet to 25-30% of daily calorie intake. Focus on lean protein sources such as meat, fish, seafood, and eggs.
Load Up on Vegetables: Fill half your plate with veggies at most meals.
Eat Fruits in Moderation: Fruits are healthy but should be eaten in moderation.
Utilize Nutrient-Timing Techniques: Instead of a recovery drink after training, time your training session to end at mealtime and eat one of your daily meals for recovery. This can eliminate 250 to 400 calories from your daily intake without any drawbacks.
Limit Grazing: Focus on meals and avoid snacking while watching TV, working, or surfing the internet.
Fast Overnight: Avoid eating for a period of time each night.
Avoid Cheat Days: Cheat days and cheat meals will knock you off your weight loss trajectory.
Identify and Change Calorie-Packing Habits: Identify times when you pack in unneeded calories as a habit and create a strategy to change it.

The Importance of Tracking Progress

Keep a food diary using an app or traditional methods to track calorie intake for three days. To make informed dietary decisions, learn about the nutrient profiles of foods you eat.

Track your body weight or body fat percentage in TrainingPeaks and graph it over time using their dashboard tool. Seeing your milestones and goals achieved on a chart is motivating.

Additional Tips for Staying on Track

Join a Challenge: Join a challenge for social support and motivation.
Educate Yourself: Read up while losing weight to keep your mind focused and brain waves full of information leading you down the right path to your goal.
Set Realistic Goals: Set realistic goals and provide rewards for yourself.
Remove Temptation: Throw out all junk food from your fridge and pantry.
Use Smaller Plates: Use smaller plates to help with portion control.
Incorporate Glycogen-Depleted Training: Add a glycogen-depleted training session. Once or twice per week do a steady 30 to 60-min aerobic training session in heart rate zone 2 or power level 2 in a fasted state first thing in the morning. Refuel with breakfast immediately after.

The Pitfalls of Very Low Carbohydrate Diets

Distance runners need more carbs than people who aren’t training. Running uses both glucose in the blood and your stores of glycogen. Eating plenty of carbs helps ensure that these energy stores are ready to support your training.

Addressing Nutritional Needs Specific to Runners

Running changes your body and your nutritional needs. Iron deficiency can affect women and even have an impact on their running performance. Menstruation puts people at higher risk of iron deficiency, and if iron isn’t replenished in the diet, decreases in hemoglobin can occur and bring on anemia.

Optimizing Meal Timing for Performance

The best time to eat a full meal is about two to three hours before you hit the road, track, or trail. If it’s been more than three to four hours since you’ve eaten, a carbohydrate-rich snack a half-hour before running can ensure you have adequate glucose available before you head out. If you are training for a marathon or distance event and are going to be out for over an hour, you will want to bring some fuel with you.

Post-Run Nutrition for Recovery

It’s common for people not to feel hungry after a run, but a snack or light meal of complex carbohydrates and protein within the first hour after running can help replenish glycogen stores and support recovery and rebuild stressed muscles.

Dynamic Energy Balance

Energy balance (energy intake vs. energy expenditure) is a dynamic process that assumes that numerous biological and behavioral factors regulate and influence both sides of the energy balance equation. Thus, changing one side of the energy balance equation (energy intake) can and does influence the other side of the equation (energy expenditure).

The energy cost of weight loss does not always equal 3,500 kcal/lb (7,700 kcal/kg) and changes over time even when the level of energy restriction is held constant. Active individuals, especially lean athletes, who desire weight loss should not restrict energy intake too dramatically to avoid loss of lean tissue. Reducing energy intake by a designated amount (e.g., 300-500 kcal/d or any amount that is appropriate for the current exercise training program) vs.

Weight Management in Lean Athletes

There are many elite and recreational athletes that have normal or low body weights and body fat. Yet these individuals may want to lose weight and fat to improve sport performance, make the team in a weight class sport, or achieve an aesthetically pleasing body shape. When these individuals want to lose weight, it is imperative that the risk of introducing disordered eating behaviors is minimized. In addition, inappropriate weight loss can introduce nutrient deficiencies important for sport performance, such as dehydration, inadequate protein and carbohydrate intake, and low micronutrient intakes.

Managing safe weight loss in lean athletes who need to meet a designated weight on competition day (e.g., lightweight rowers, jockeys or wrestlers) can be difficult. If dehydration is used to achieve this weight loss the health consequences can be severe. Few athletes are naturally light-weight enough for these types of competitive sports, so weight loss will be required prior to competition. If athletes are young and growing this is not the time to severely restrict energy intake.

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Weight Management in Overweight/Obese Athletes

Conversely, there are overweight/obese athletes where weight loss could reduce the risk of chronic disease, and improve their overall health and ability to participate in sport. For example, Borchers et al. Finally, at least 30% of children in the United States are overweight/obese and many obese children may participate in sports. For these children, fat loss may be necessary to reach a competitive and/or healthy body composition.

Determining a Realistic and Healthy Body Weight

There are no charts that provide the optimal or healthy weight for an athlete competing in a designated sport. However, the following criteria can be used to determine a realistic and healthy body weight for an athlete, regardless of their activity level. Thus, an optimal body weight should promote good health, sport performance and be attainable. If an individual is constantly dieting or weight cycling, they may be trying to achieve or maintain an unrealistic body weight. Some sports (e.g., ski jumping, wrestling and cycling) may require an unreasonably low body weight during the competitive season.

Dietary Behaviors for Fat Loss and Lean Tissue Maintenance

The following section highlights evidence-based diet behaviors that can help athletes and active individuals reduce body fat while maintaining lean tissue and prevention of weight regain. Changes in exercise strategies or training routines are not addressed, since coaches typically determine these for the athlete.

A low-energy dense diet is high in whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and incorporates low-fat dairy, legumes/beans, and lean meats and fish. Overall the diet is lower in fat and reduces or eliminates beverages containing kcal, especially sweetened beverages and alcohol. The energy density of a diet or a food is determined by measuring the amount of energy (kcal) for a given amount (g) of food (Table 1). It is high in fiber and water, and lower in fat, which means one can consume a greater volume of food for an overall lower energy intake and yet feel satisfied. A 10% decrease in dietary energy density will result in a ~10% decrease in energy content. There is less reliance on reducing portion size and counting calories. These diets make one feel full and satisfied after a meal, thus reducing the risk of recidivism.

Timing of Food Intake

For the athlete, timing of food intake around exercise training and spreading food intake throughout the day will ensure that the body has the energy and nutrients needed for exercise and the building and repair of lean tissue. Refueling after exercise is especially important for the athlete who wants to lose weight. This approach can help prevent the athlete from becoming too hungry and consuming foods or beverages not on their diet plan. Thus, the post-exercise dietary routine needs to include fluids for rehydration, carbohydrate in the form of low-energy dense foods (e.g., whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains) to replenish glycogen, and high-quality low-fat protein for building and repair of lean tissue. Because many athletes may not have these foods readily available after exercise, they must plan ahead and strategically use sport foods and/or healthy snacks to meet their energy and nutrients needs while staying within their diet plan. If possible, the best way to address refueling after exercise for athletes who are trying to reduce energy intake is to plan a healthy meal immediately after exercise and training. This will help reduce the need for the post-exercise snack. For example, an early morning workout can be immediately followed by a hearty breakfast, which then refuels and rehydrates.

Importance of Adequate Protein Intake

Most athletes have little trouble consuming adequate amounts of protein; however, when energy intake is restricted some protein sources may be reduced. For many athletes, the majority of the energy and protein comes in a large meal at the end of the day. Thus, the athlete needs a diet plan that allows for the strategic consumption of adequate high quality protein throughout the day, but especially after exercise and at breakfast. Higher protein diets have been associated with increased satiety and reductions in energy intake.

Avoiding High-Energy Sweetened Beverages

Energy-containing sport drinks are appropriate to use around exercise, especially intense exercise of long duration and in extreme environments. However, other high energy sweetened beverages and alcohol can derail any individual trying to lose weight, including the athlete. They add extra energy to the diet without increasing satiety or reducing the amount of food consumed with these beverages.

Dynamic Energy Balance and Weight-Loss Predictions

As indicated above, the static energy balance equation does not work well for predicting weight loss. To better predict weight change in response to changes in energy intake or expenditure, one must account for the dynamic energy imbalances that occur. To address this issue researchers have developed mathematical models to simulate how alterations in energy deficit result in adaptations of fuel selection and energy expenditure to better predict body weight and composition changes.

Avoiding Extreme Dietary Practices

Although it is tempting to use extreme dietary practices, especially very low energy diets (< 1,200 kcal/d) that result in rapid weight loss, the athlete should avoid these diets. Combining severe energy restriction with an intense endurance and/or strength training program can actually result in metabolic adaptations that reduce the effectiveness of these two factors on weight loss. In addition, they are extremely stressful for the athlete and cannot be sustained for long periods. Research has shown that slower, more reasonable weight loss in athletes (~0.7% loss of body weight/week) helped preserve lean tissue while improving strength gains over more severe weight loss (1.4% weight loss/week). Increased risk of poor nutrient intakes, including essential nutrients, due to limited food intake.

Managing Weight During the Off-Season

Management of weight is an ever-increasing challenge in societies where good-tasting food is convenient, relatively inexpensive and abundant. Developing a weight management plan is essential for everyone, including athletes that expend high amounts of energy in their sport. Weight loss can be difficult and may change body composition unfavorably; thus, managing weight during the off-season is especially important to avoid performance-damaging rapid weight loss during competition. Weight management plans need to be individualized.

Dietary-Nutritional Strategies for Fat Loss in Resistance-Trained Athletes

During the weight loss phase, the goal is to reduce the fat mass by maximizing the retention of fat-free mass. Caloric intake should be set based on a target BW loss of 0.5-1.0%/week to maximize fat-free mass retention. Protein intake (2.2-3.0 g/kgBW/day) should be distributed throughout the day (3-6 meals), ensuring in each meal an adequate amount of protein (0.40-0.55 g/kgBW/meal) and including a meal within 2-3 h before and after training. Carbohydrate intake should be adapted to the level of activity of the athlete in order to training performance (2-5 g/kgBW/day). Caffeine (3-6 mg/kgBW/day) and creatine monohydrate (3-5 g/day) could be incorporated into the athlete’s diet due to their ergogenic effects in relation to resistance training.

General Weight Loss Tips for Athletes

Lose fat during the off-season: It’s very difficult to decrease body fat and reach peak fitness at the same time.
Avoid crash diets: If you cut calories too drastically, your nutrient intake may not support proper training and recovery.
Eat less added sugar and more fiber: Athletes should aim to eat no less than 1.4-1.8 grams of carbs per pound (3-4 grams per kg) each day.
Eat more protein: Athletes should aim to consume 0.8-1.2 grams per pound of body weight (1.8-2.7 grams per kg) of protein each day.
Spread protein intake throughout the day: Eating 20-30 grams of protein every 3 hours, including right before bed, may help maintain muscle mass during weight loss.
Refuel well after training: Consuming a good amount of carbs and protein immediately after training can help maintain your sports performance during weight loss.
Do strength training: Strength-training exercises can help prevent the muscle loss often experienced during a period of weight loss.
Increase calories gradually after you reach your goal: Increasing your calorie intake gradually after a period of weight loss may help minimize weight regain.
Record your portions: Measuring your portions and keeping track of what you eat is scientifically proven to help you get better results.
Drink enough fluids: Drinking liquids before a meal, whether it’s soup or water, can help you consume up to 22% fewer calories at the meal.
Eat slowly: Aim to take at least 20 minutes for each meal.
Avoid alcohol: Alcohol is a source of empty calories.
Get enough sleep: Research suggests that too little sleep can increase hunger and appetite by up to 24%.
Reduce your stress: Mental and physical stress can also prevent proper recovery.

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