Robeman, today I want to talk to you about how you can lose weight. Let's cue that intro. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question. This podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Robeman Podcast. Roadman, welcome back to another Roadman Cycling Podcast. Today I want to talk about a topic which I know is valuable to so many listeners and that's how to lose weight. I'm going to give you guys before the end of this podcast, tree, really simple, really actionable tips to lose weight. And as we all know, losing weight is one of the most effective ways to improve your cycling performance, especially when the road goes upwards. Roadman, before I dive into today's podcast, I'm going to ask you to head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony under scorewatch. Go over there, have a little look around, have a look at the video. What I'm asking from you guys is to get me the price of a point of beer once a month to just say thanks for the content. On your end, it might seem like a small gesture, on my end, it helps the podcast keep going forward and I'm big into reciprocity so as I thank you for anyone that boys meet at Point of Beer once a month I'm going to give you access to the secret podcast. This is where I give my best material to patreons who support it. So we've a bit of a rising tide gone over there where people help and people so if you want to be prior to that whole movement please head on over to patreon.com the link is in the bio. If you can't afford times are tough with Covid no hassle you can continue to enjoy this roadman podcast, free of charge. Okay, let's talk about weight loss for cycling, watts per kilogram. If you're new to the podcast or you're new to this concept, we have two variables which really determine our cycling performance, especially when we're going uphill. We control in a torrid variable of CDA, which means coefficient of frontal drag, how narrow we are when we're on the flat, but we're not going to try that in now. We're going to talk about an uphill scenario. So we have two variables. We have what the power we're putting down the pedals, how much force we can exert, and we have weight, how much the physical mass of our body and the bike combined. So with most of our bikes are roughly around the legal limit at the moment, but most of us can, even the leanest rider among us, can probably lose a couple of kilograms. If you're completely honest with yourself, you can probably lose a little bit more than that. I know I can especially sit in here in October as I record this podcast after a much per down season due to Covid. So if just to illustrate how important losing weight is, if you're to lose 1kg, keep everything else consistent, you're going to be a minute faster over a 10km climb. So that's absolutely huge. to try and get 10, 15 watts is so, so much hard work. But to lose three, four kilograms, it's a little bit of hard work, but it's a lot, lot easier with the sort of concepts I'm gonna talk to you about today. Sometimes when you lose weight, you will lose power, but having looked at studies, you rarely lose enough power to negatively affect that power to weight ratio. So, losing weight is almost always beneficial for your performance. So, losing weight, the typical paradigm we see, It's this short-term restrictive diet that really focuses on willpower. And the reason we see these diets failing time and time again, where people initially lose the weight and then they regain the weight is they're predicated on a horrible feeling called hunger. How many of us want to feel hungry?
It's a miserable feeling. You're cold, you're irritable. It impacts every other area of your life. if you head back to Erasera, raise on Detra on this podcast, it's cycling for health, happiness and longevity. All those sound complete opposite and tisces of being hungry, cold, miserable, irritable. So, I come to you with a solution today. Most diets that you're gonna hear about, read about, they are focused on manipulating one of the macros to avoid this hungry feeling. So they're lower carbohydrates, more like keto type stuff where they focus on high fat, high protein, or as they're restrictive on fat, which was the traditional diet or some combination of the two. I'm saying to you, ditch all that. I'm saying to you an easier way. I love the Pareto principle. This idea of 80, 20, welcome what 20% of effort can give me 80% of the results because that's going to get me a long, long way there. And it's going to avoid a lot of the misery. So, if anyone's read the book, Thinking Fast and Slow, it's this idea that we have Type 1 and Type 2 decision-making pathways. It's a great book if you haven't read it, but that's a side note. So an example for me to illustrate what the difference is between a Type 1 and a Type 2 decision pathway. When you started driving, initially it was very mechanical. You had to start thinking, okay, clutch, nail change gear, release clutch on the accelerator. you fast forward, you know, a year and the girls out there, I know what I'm talking about, they're doing their makeup, they're doing their hair, they're listening to the radio, they're on the phone, although you shouldn't be because you're probably going to kill a cyclist. They're not thinking about clutch off the clutch change gear on the accelerator. They've automated this process. It initially took discipline to build a habit of driving, but then it automated it. It no longer takes mental energy. It's torn from a Type 1, very conscious process to a Type 2 automated behavior. So that's what I want to do with our diet today. So I'm asking you to make 3 primary shifts in your diet. Number 1, no eating before a bed. Draw a line on eating before a bed. Look, it's not a hard line to sand. I say 2.5 to 3 hours. If it's 2 hours, 44, if it's 2.5 hours, it's not the end of the world. really I say two and a half hours is a good enough place to be. You just don't want to be eaten in that two hours before bed. The reason is so blood sugar level especially carbohydrates you don't want to be eaten in that two and a half hours before bed because blood sugar levels get raised by carbohydrates and this is a problem for two things. So initially it's going to raise your blood sugar levels but then while you're asleep you're going to get a radical drop in in your blood sugar levels. So you're gonna wake up in the middle of the night or definitely the next morning and you're gonna be absolutely starving. So we wanna have a stable blood sugar level gone to bed. That's the first reason for not eating, especially carbs close to bed. The second reason, which is super important for our recovery, but also our ability to lose weight when we sleep, is carbohydrates inhibit the production of melatonin. That's our sleep hormone. That's the reason we wear blue-like blocking glasses in a couple of hours before bed. Hopefully we all wear them or Aoptix is the brand that I have no connection with, but I love the company and I've recommended men roadmap and resources. I've linked them there. Go check that out. Carbohydrates inhibit the production of melatonin or sleep hormone. So a high sugar diet, if you're someone that eats cereal gone to bed, if you're someone that's smacked some biscuits and tea two, three years before bed, that's a bad, bad idea for those two reasons.