Loosing Weight Too Quickly?

neneboricua

Hi all,

I'm relatively new here. Been on the site for a month but this is my first post. this last month, I've lost almost 10 pounds and am wondering if it's healthy to lose weight that quickly... I'm sure most people would be thrilled with loosing 10 pounds in a month but in my case I'm not sure. The reason is that one month ago I started at 146lbs and a few days ago I hit 137lbs. I'm a 5'8" 33 y/o guy with a desk job.

Before anyone thinks I must be crazy for trying to lose more weight, let me explain a little bit. I was always "husky" as a kid and reached my max weight of a little over 170lbs in my 20's Eventually I found an activity that I truly love: road cycling. Just riding my bike and learning about proper fueling for exercise I dropped 20lbs in about a year (so down to 150lbs). I was perfectly happy and healthy at 150lbs, but I slowly started becoming more competitive as a cyclist and realized that I had good genes for it (too bad I realized this at the age of 29 and not 16). I naturally dropped a few more pounds until i got to my steady weight of around 145-147lbs, which I maintained for about 2 years. Riding a bike so much gave me the ability to eat pretty much anything I wanted (within reason). Some of my weekend rides burn 4,000+ calories (I use a heart rate monitor to gauge my efforts during training). When doing long, multi-day events, I literally cannot eat enough food to avoid a calorie deficit.

As I've become more competitive on the bike, I realized that to maximize my potential, I needed to have the most amount of power for the least amount of weight. After talking to coaches who looked at my body/skeletal type, we determined that my ideal racing weight was 138lbs. This would help me maximize my power/weight ratio. So I downloaded the MFP app on my phone and thought I would give it a shot. I entered a goal of losing just 1 pound per week. Well, 4 weeks later, I've lost almost 10lbs.

I enter in every bit of food I eat and all of the exercise I do. I have two software packages that analyze my heart rate data for my workouts and they both give me different calorie info. So I average the two of them and that's the number I enter into MFP for my exercise on that day. I make sure to have proper recovery meals after my workouts and during the rest of the day I eat the calories I burned earlier on the bike.

I hit my goal weight a few days ago an am making sure it's stable before I switch to a maintenance mode. I wouldn't mind being a little under my goal weight as this would give me room to add a few pounds of muscle.

Should I be worried about loosing these 10 pounds so quickly or could it be that although I have a desk job, my activity level (I ride an average 10-12 hours per week) has changed my metabolism or something so that it more closely matches someone with a more active job so that my BMR is higher than I really think it is? I'm just trying to come up with an explanation of loosing this much weight so quickly when I didn't have all that much to lose in the first place. Above all, I want to make sure that I stay healthy.

csplatt

I think you'll get your answer soon enough, when you see how easy you maintain. I can understand wanting to go under a little so you have some wiggle room.