best cycling option

musclemama78

I am 5 foot 6, 156lbs, exercise 5-6 days a week including weights and cardio, and I have determined my maintainence calories to be around 15000 per week. My goal for the week is 11500 calories. I plan to count on weekdays and be reasonable on the weekend (ie cheat meals, not days, and not overdoing it). I'm going to guess my weekend calories will be about 4200 which leaves me 7300 to play with during the week.
What option do you think is better?

Option 1- daily zig zag
M-W-F- 1625 per day
T-TH 1200 per day

Option 2- low cal with mid week spike
M-T-TH-F- 1325 per day
W- 2000


I fee like Option 1 may be easier because I find it hard to go under 1500 a day, so I'd only have 2 hard days. But I also feel like I'm still in such a calorie deficit for 5 days that my metabolism will slow.

Thoughts?

jkoenig1980

I think you are over thinking it.

Personally I shoot for a 40p/40c/20f on workout days and 55p/25c/20f on non work out days. But that is just what seems to be working for me.

heybales

If you ate exactly the same amount daily, and your daily activity varies, and especially your exercise takes different amounts of calories off the top to power you through a workout, then you have automatically left your body with different amounts of calories to do it's metabolic functions with.
That's zig-zag.

About the furthest from zig-zag is MFP style, set amount daily plus exercise calories, because you are leaving your body almost the same daily to work with.

Purposely causing zig-zag with no consideration of what the workout is is about the worst. You could have big days you really do need to eat more, but you have it as a low day. Then a big eating day has very little activity on it, and you just ate 300 over TDEE, or at maintenance perhaps.

Now, if M-W-F is a nice strong lifting workout in the morning, then that is right on. More food to use for repair.

musclemama78

That's a good point about workout varying. I lift a lot of weights so I DO want to eat more on my lifting days for sure. I think I will take it week to week and plan it out so I have 2 low activity days and keep it around 1200, 2 high activity days around 1600, and make a 3rd high activity day 1900 (and aim for Wednesdays on that). Of course all of these numbers are give and take a bit. I do find that if I go low too low for more than a few days I stall right away. Or I just get cranky and binge! I'm better off with a controlled spike. If I say I'll eat 1400 calories M-F and spike on the weekend, by mid week I'll binge on bad things. I don't keep TOO much in the house but Ihave a 1 and 7 year old. So it's there.

jacksonpt

I think you're over complicating things.