going to bring my two cents here, as a person who has just come out of about a year-long struggle with cycling-induced disordered eating.
Have always had a good relationship with food, loved eating, and was just a furnace, metabolically speaking.
Started getting serious about road racing last year, at 26 years old, realized I could probably drop a few kgs (I had already gone down from 75kg to 69kg just by training a lot more on the road and dropping some upper body muscle - for reference, I’m 1,80m tall), and very quickly spiralled into disordered eating. I would be quite strict about calorie tracking, eating well, staying with a 500cal daily deficit, and then good food would pop up, I would binge massively, feel insane guilt, induced vomit and restart the whole cycle. Through all this I was still able to train and function normally, but my relationship with food had never been this bad.
Although I am doing much better now, a good part of it has been about being able to reconnect with hunger and fulness cues, and ditch the calorie tracking. Now I just eat good food (strong emphasis on fruit and veg, carbs and lean protein - I’m Italian so the “traditional” cuisine I was brought up on kind of lends itself to this) until I’m satisfied, while being mindful of the calorie traps.
I truly believe that calorie tracking is a great tool to be used in the short term, in order to understand just how many calories are in a few nuts, peanut butter, cheese and other foods. At the same time, it is a very rough estimation, and does not account well for very intense exercise.
A case in point: on Sunday I went on a 6h endurance ride. Burnt 3800 kcal according to my power meter. I most definitely did not eat them back on the same day, but I spent the whole of Monday satisfying my hunger (and eating a lot more than a calorie tracker would have allowed me to, given that it was a rest day), and now I feel well, rested, have not eaten too much and all that.
I know from the pod that Nate kind of went through phases with his use of calorie tracking apps, and he’s very scientific about all this, but my suggestion is to use the calorie tracking for a while, to get a sense of how many calories are in foods we commonly take as granted (and usually very calorie-dense), and then switch back to listening to our own body. Slowly eating enough to feel satisfied without going overboard is a very powerful tool to get to our optimal race weight, given the amount of training we put our bodies through (in my case, around 15h a week).
I might be able to figure it out when I get to my computer at work but maybe not -I’m a transport refrigeration mechanic & not too good with these things. The error is on the percentage tab next to my name, somehow I edited the formula for the cell rather than entering my goal weight of 65.7kg.
