A few years ago I lost 7kg in 12 weeks. 86kg down to 79kg. Power didn't drop. Energy went up. I stopped craving sugar at nine o'clock at night, and the cycling actually got better through the process rather than worse.
The thing I didn't do, that the cycling internet would have told me to do, was track calories on My Fitness Pal. I didn't skip meals. I didn't do fasted rides until I bonked sixty kilometres from home and hated my life. The "ride more, eat less" model is the default amateur approach to body composition and it's the reason most amateurs spend years stuck at the same weight while their training stalls.
The actual model is different and the experts on the podcast have been remarkably consistent about it. The conversation is the same whether you're talking to Dr David Dunne at INEOS, Alex Larson on recomposition, Dr Sharon Madigan at Sport Ireland Institute, or Dr Tim Podlogar at Tudor Pro Cycling. The shift in how pros think about weight loss is real, and amateurs are years behind it.
What Dr Dunne actually said
When Dr David Dunne — who's worked with INEOS, EF, and Uno-X — was on the podcast, his core message was unambiguous. "Lighter is faster" is the cycling paradigm that's keeping amateur cyclists stuck. The detailed conversation is in Dr David Dunne on cycling weight loss, but the headline position is this: the right body composition isn't achieved by under-eating into a target weight. It's achieved by fully fuelling training, periodising deliberate composition phases, and arriving at races already lean from work done weeks or months earlier.
The crash-dieted cyclist who arrives at the start line at 5% under their normal weight typically underperforms the well-fuelled cyclist at their normal weight. The watts lost to muscle catabolism and hormonal disruption outweigh the watts gained from the lower mass. Worse, the crash-dieted cyclist recovers poorly, gets sick more often, and finishes the event in worse condition than they started.
Dunne's framing was that pros do composition work in specific blocks during the off-season or early base, where the training intensity is lower and the small caloric deficit doesn't compete with performance adaptation. By the time the race phase arrives, the composition work is already done. The pro arrives lean as a function of months of careful preparation, not weeks of restriction.
This is the model amateurs need to adopt. Build the composition in deliberate phases. Protect performance through the rest of the year.
My own 7kg test
The detail of how I lost the weight is in the 9kg eating more episode, and the headline numbers are surprising even to me looking back at them.
Daily caloric intake went up from approximately 2,400 to approximately 3,100 across the 12 weeks. Protein intake went up from around 100g to around 150g. In-ride fuelling went up from approximately 30g/hr of carbohydrate to approximately 70g/hr. Rest day calories came down slightly, perhaps 200–300 calories below training day intake. The net result was 7kg of body mass lost, with the kind of body composition shift that retained muscle and dropped fat.
The mechanism, looking back, was simple. The previous version of me was chronically under-fuelling training and over-eating in the evenings — typical amateur pattern where the rider rides 90 minutes hard at lunch on an empty stomach, then makes up for it by eating everything in the fridge at 9pm. The metabolism slows, the cravings dominate, the weight holds.
The fixed version was eating to the training. Properly fed before rides, properly fuelled during rides, properly recovered after rides. The 9pm cravings disappeared because the body wasn't fighting a famine. The cumulative caloric intake was higher, the body composition was leaner, and the cycling was better. This is what Dunne meant by "fuel for the work required."
Alex Larson's recomposition framework
Alex Larson is a sports dietitian who specialises in recomposition — losing fat while protecting muscle and power. Her framework, covered in the Alex Larson body composition episode, differs from straightforward weight loss in several specific ways.
Protein gets prioritised. 1.8–2.2g per kg bodyweight per day during a composition phase, slightly higher than the 1.6–1.8g maintenance dose. Spread across 4 meals. The aim is maximum muscle protein synthesis support while running a modest energy deficit.
The deficit is small. 200–400 calories per day below maintenance, not the 700–1000 calorie deficits popular diet apps default to. The small deficit produces 0.3–0.5kg of fat loss per week — slower than a crash diet but with muscle and power preserved through the process.
Carbohydrates flex with training. Bigger carb days on training days, smaller on rest days. The deficit comes from rest day reductions, not training day reductions. Protein and fat stay steady; carbohydrate is the variable.
Strength training is non-negotiable. Two sessions per week of structured heavy resistance work during the composition phase. Without it, some of the loss is muscle, which costs power and drops metabolic rate.
The Larson framework produces sustainable composition shifts that hold across the season. The crash-diet approach produces fast loss followed by fast regain — the body adapts to the famine, the cyclist returns to normal eating, and the weight comes back with interest.
Dr Madigan's timing rule
Dr Sharon Madigan — Sport Ireland Institute Head of Performance Nutrition — added a critical timing principle in her weight loss episode. Don't stack restriction with heavy training blocks. The body can handle one major stress at a time. Adding a caloric deficit on top of a high-intensity training block produces neither weight loss nor performance gain — it produces stalled training, compromised recovery, and minimal composition change.
Her practical framework: identify the parts of the year where training load is naturally lower (October/November off-season, mid-base phase, post-race transition) and place composition work there. During build phases and race phases, hold weight steady or even gain slightly to support the training load.
The masters cohort specifically benefits from this timing principle. Older athletes have less recovery capacity, so stacking deficits with heavy training accumulates fatigue faster. A masters cyclist who tries to lose 5kg in the middle of a build phase usually ends up under-recovered, under-trained, and the same weight three months later.
Uri Carlson on chronic under-eating
The most counterintuitive finding from the podcast nutrition conversations is that many amateur cyclists who can't lose weight are eating too little, not too much. Uri Carlson's work on this pattern in masters and amateur athletes training 10–12 hours a week showed it consistently: high training load, modest caloric intake, body weight stable or rising despite the apparent deficit.
The mechanism is metabolic adaptation. Chronic under-eating combined with heavy training produces a body that has effectively reduced its metabolic rate to protect against perceived famine. The thyroid output drops. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis declines (you sit more, fidget less, take fewer extra steps). Hormonal markers shift. The body holds onto fat stores because it interprets the situation as a survival challenge.
The counterintuitive fix is to eat more, especially on training days. Adding 300–500 calories per day, mostly in carbohydrate around training, often restarts the metabolism within 2–4 weeks. Weight initially stays the same or rises briefly, then begins to drop steadily as the body trusts that fuel is coming and stops protecting fat stores.
This pattern is particularly common in female masters cyclists. The combination of body image culture, training load, and aging metabolism produces chronic under-eating that's hard to identify and harder to reverse without explicit intervention. The energy availability tool gives a working estimate of whether daily intake is matching the training load.
Dr Podlogar on the calorie calculation mistake
Dr Tim Podlogar at Tudor Pro Cycling flagged a specific maths error amateur cyclists keep making, covered in the pro cycling stay lean episode. The mistake is calculating caloric intake as if every day is similar.
The math reality: a four-hour training day burns roughly twice the calories of a sedentary day. Most amateur cyclists eat only modestly more on big training days. The result is large deficits on training days and modest surpluses on rest days. The body responds to the training day deficits, not the rest day surpluses, and the net effect is the metabolic adaptation pattern Carlson identified.
The fix is matching daily intake to daily output. Big training days get big food days. Rest days get smaller food days. The deficit, if there's one, sits on rest days only. The training days are fully fuelled. Composition shifts over months as the small rest day deficits accumulate, while training quality stays high throughout.
This is what Podlogar means when he talks about pros staying lean. They don't undereat. They match the eating precisely to the work.
Body composition vs scale weight
The scale measures total mass. Body composition measures the ratio of fat to lean tissue inside that mass. The two can diverge sharply and they often do during well-executed composition work.
A cyclist on a 12-week composition block might lose 3kg of fat and gain 1kg of muscle (from strength training). Scale weight drops 2kg; body composition shifts substantially more than that. Watts per kilo improves disproportionately because the lost mass was fat (non-power-producing) and the gained mass was muscle (power-producing).
The opposite pattern is the crash diet: 5kg lost on the scale, of which perhaps 2kg is muscle and 3kg is fat plus glycogen and water. The cyclist is lighter but weaker. Watts per kilo can actually drop despite the weight loss, because the power loss is larger than the mass loss.
The tools matter for tracking this properly. DEXA scans give the most accurate body composition reading. Bioelectrical impedance scales are less accurate but workable for tracking trends over months. The race weight calculator gives a realistic target based on performance body fat ranges rather than aspirational numbers from cycling magazines.
Practical periodised approach
Here's what a year looks like for an amateur cyclist who wants to shift body composition without compromising performance.
October–November (transition into base). Light composition work. 300-calorie deficit on rest days only. Maintain weight on training days. 0.3kg per week loss target. Strength training twice weekly. Total expected loss: 2–3kg across 8 weeks.
December–February (base phase). Hold composition. No deficit. Match fuelling to training. The aerobic adaptations from base training need full caloric support.
March–April (build phase). Hold composition. Full fuelling. Body weight stable or rising slightly with muscle gain.
May (peak). Final composition adjustment if needed. Very small deficit (100–200 calories) on rest days only. No more than 1–2kg of adjustment in this phase, and only if needed.
June (race phase). Full fuelling. Race weight already established. No composition work during competition.
July (post-race transition). Light, intuitive eating. Some weight gain is normal and healthy. Restart cycle.
This produces 2–3kg of sustainable composition shift per year, depending on starting point. For most amateur cyclists, that compounds to meaningful change across 2–3 years while preserving training quality and performance throughout.
The performance cost of going too lean
The other side of this conversation: how lean is too lean. The "lighter is faster" assumption breaks down past a certain point, and the symptoms are predictable.
Below 8% body fat for males or 14% for females, hormonal disruption starts to bite. Testosterone drops in men. Menstrual function disrupts in women. Immune function declines, leading to more illness. Bone density erodes. Recovery slows. Mood deteriorates. The watt-per-kilo gain from lower mass is wiped out by the watts lost from hormonal dysfunction.
The pros operate close to the edge of performance body fat because they're paid to maximise short-term performance and have full support systems around them. Amateur cyclists who try to replicate pro body fat ranges typically pay for it within 3–6 months with overtraining symptoms, frequent illness, or stalled performance.
The race weight that produces the best amateur outcomes is usually 1–2 percentage points of body fat above the pro range. A male amateur at 10–12% body fat with strong fuelling and strength work outperforms the same rider at 7–8% body fat with stressed hormones and compromised recovery.
The hidden topic
Body composition is the topic the amateur cycling audience cares about most and talks about least openly. The conversations in the Not Done Yet community about this are some of the most engaged because it's the topic riders are most embarrassed to discuss publicly. The framing matters. This isn't dieting culture. It's performance body composition built carefully across a year.
The cyclists who lose weight and keep it off, while continuing to ride well, are not the ones who try the hardest. They're the ones who structure it the most carefully. Periodised phases. Full fuelling around training. Strength work to protect muscle. Patience with the slow rate of sustainable change.
What to do next
Start with the Plateau Diagnostic — four minutes, free, returns the one change most likely to move your numbers. Chronic under-fuelling is the most common amateur problem and shows up as the limiter for far more cyclists than they expect. Then use the race weight calculator to set a realistic target based on performance body fat ranges, not aspirational numbers, and the energy availability tool to check whether your daily intake is matching your training load. For a guided composition pathway, the weight loss coaching programme is the direct route.
The Not Done Yet community at $195/month runs regular Q&As on body composition. The most common questions: how to plan a composition block around a target event, how to break through a weight plateau without crashing training, how to handle the body image piece while staying performance-focused. For full one-on-one programming with integrated nutrition and composition periodisation, the Roadman Method at $297-397/month is the structured 12-month route.
The lighter-is-faster reflex is wrong. Fuel for the work, periodise composition into specific phases, protect performance, and let the body shift slowly over months. That's the model the pros use, scaled. The result lasts longer than any crash diet ever did.