Every winter, a version of the same plan takes hold across the amateur cycling world. The season's over, the numbers slipped, and the fix seems obvious: get lean. Cut the calories hard, ride a bit more, and turn up in spring as a climber. It almost never works, and Tim Podlogar can tell you exactly why.
Podlogar isn't a diet-book salesman. He's a carbohydrate-metabolism researcher at the University of Birmingham and a nutrition consultant to Tudor Pro Cycling — the team Fabian Cancellara built — so he spends his days at the intersection of the science and the sharp end of the sport. When he came on the podcast, the through-line of everything he said was the same: get lean if you need to, but never at the cost of the training. The training is the point.
Lose weight, but slowly
The first thing Podlogar does is take the aggression out of the deficit. The numbers he's comfortable with are smaller than most amateurs want to hear.
He wouldn't advise going more than around 500 to 700 calories of deficit in a day at the absolute most — and crucially, less than that if the next day or the next session is hard. Go bigger, he said, and you make too much damage; you simply won't recover for the next one. That phrase — you won't recover for the next one — is the whole argument in six words. A deficit isn't free. You pay for it in recovery, and if the payment is too big, the next session suffers, then the one after, and soon you're leaner but slower, which is the exact opposite of the goal.
To put it in context, he pointed out how easily a single ride moves the maths. A four-hour ride at a couple of hundred watts can burn five, six, seven, even eight hundred calories of difference on its own. So the deficit doesn't need to come from heroic starvation. It can come from the riding itself, with food kept high enough to protect the work. Our guide to losing weight by fuelling for the work required walks through exactly this balance.
Think session to session, not day to day
The most practical idea Podlogar offered was a small shift in how you frame a day, and it changes everything.
Most people calculate calories from midnight to midnight. Podlogar's suggestion is to calculate them from one training session to the next instead. So your "24-hour period" becomes the window from when you finish Thursday afternoon's session to when you finish Friday afternoon's. You take that window and you fuel it for the work that's coming — which is just fuel for the work required applied to the clock rather than the calendar.
Why does this matter? Because the midnight-to-midnight frame routinely underfuels the hours that matter most. If your hard session is Friday morning, the food that powers it is eaten Thursday evening and Friday breakfast — but a calendar-day accountant might "save" calories on Thursday night to hit a daily target, and arrive at Friday's session empty. Reframe the window around the sessions and you naturally put the fuel where the work is. You can read more on getting daily intake right in our daily carbohydrate guide.
The survival-mode trap
Podlogar reserved his clearest warning for the riders who ignore all of this and go to the extremes anyway, because the failure mode is so predictable it's almost a law.
When you push the deficit too far, he explained, your energy expenditure off the bike goes down, recovery worsens, and everything just shuts down — the body drops into survival mode. And then it bites back. The extreme restriction makes you binge eat on certain days, and you're into a yo-yo effect that, as he put it, is well described in the literature. You don't get the lean, lasting result you were chasing. You get a fortnight of misery, a blowout weekend, and a body that's learned to defend its weight harder than before.
This is the part the winter-shred crowd never factors in. The body is not a spreadsheet that obediently subtracts a kilo per 7,000-calorie deficit. It's an adaptive system that notices a famine and responds by conserving, downregulating, and eventually overriding your willpower. A modest deficit flies under that radar. A savage one trips every alarm it has. The deeper psychology of this is something we dig into in the lighter-faster myth.
The honest question about your weight
Maybe the most useful thing Podlogar said wasn't a number at all. It was a question to ask yourself about whether you should be chasing leanness in the first place.
His framing was simple. If you perform well at a low body mass and you don't struggle with eating or holding that weight, then that's probably what you're after — carry on. But if you're really struggling to keep the weight low no matter what you do, if you have to starve yourself to hold it, then ask the honest question: what happens if I eat a little bit more, carry a bit more weight, but finally manage the training sessions I kept failing before?
That's a liberating reframe for a lot of amateurs. The lightest version of you is not automatically the fastest version of you. If holding a low weight is costing you the quality of your training — the intervals you can't complete, the long rides you limp home from — then a slightly heavier, properly fuelled, fully trained version will beat the gaunt one every time. Power is built in sessions you can actually complete.
And while you're fuelling: the ratio that matters
Because Podlogar's research home is carbohydrate metabolism, it's worth taking one practical thing from that world too. He noted that while a lot of gels even a few years ago were still glucose-only or used the old 2:1 glucose-to-fructose ratio, the research had been clear for a long time that something closer to 1:0.8 is the ratio that works for most people.
The reason is absorption. Glucose and fructose use different transporters in the gut, so combining them lets you take in more total carbohydrate per hour than glucose alone, which hits a ceiling. If you're building toward higher in-ride fuelling, choosing products around that 1:0.8 ratio is how you get there without overwhelming your stomach — the mechanism behind the carbohydrate-per-hour numbers the pros hit.
When to lose weight, and when not to
Podlogar's framework also implies a question of timing that most amateurs get wrong: when in the year to do this. Because losing weight and building fitness pull against each other — one needs a deficit, the other needs fuel — trying to do both hard at the same time usually means doing both badly.
The sensible window is well away from your hardest training and your key events: a period when the training is more about consistency than peak intensity, so a modest deficit can run without sabotaging the sessions that build your engine. Try to lean out in the middle of your biggest training block, or in the weeks before a goal event, and you compromise the very work that the weight loss was supposed to serve. You arrive at your event lighter but flat, having traded watts for grams in the worst possible ratio.
It connects back to his session-to-session principle. If the next session is hard and important, fuel it — that day is not the day for the deficit. Spread the small daily deficit across the easier days and the easier phases, protect the hard work whenever it appears, and the weight comes off slowly without the engine ever noticing. The riders who get leaner and faster are almost always the ones who separated the two jobs in time rather than forcing them to compete. This is the same logic behind periodising nutrition around the demands of the training rather than treating diet as a constant.
The takeaway
Podlogar's method isn't a diet. It's a discipline of restraint in service of the training. Keep the deficit modest — 500 to 700 a day at most, less before hard sessions. Fuel the window around your sessions, not the calendar day. Stay well clear of the survival-mode extremes that trigger the yo-yo. Be honest about whether chasing leanness is helping or hurting your actual riding. And when you do fuel, use the ratio that lets your gut do its job.
It's less dramatic than the winter-shred fantasy. But it's how a man who fuels World Tour riders thinks about it, and it has the considerable advantage of working.
Hear the full conversations with Tim Podlogar on the Roadman podcast. For the bigger picture on fuelling and body composition, read the lighter-faster myth, and bring your questions to the community on Skool.