Reddit mentions of Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance (The Racing Weight Series)

In "Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance", Matt Fitzgerald talks about how former body builder and now professional triathlete T.J. Tollakson put himself on a 1,200 calorie a day diet to lose 35 pounds of muscle in a matter of weeks as he knew that the excess muscle would slow him down just as much as excess fat. (beginning of chapter 8)


It's all about what your priorities are.



Edit: Link to the book on amazon as someone also linked and recommended it in today's official Q&A thread:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C3MFR2O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Since your weight is very much in the healthy range with a BMI of 21.8, I think a pound per week weight loss may be a touch aggressive. It means that, on average, you are eating about 500 calories per day less than you are burning. It's not dangerous to eat at that deficit, but it will impact your training and energy levels more than, say, a 200 calorie per day deficit.

I'd recommend checking out the book Racing Weight. It's all about the ideal way to get to your optimal weight for running and other endurance activities with minimal impact to your training. The key takeaway for me was to only attempt to lose weight outside of dedicated training cycles.

Personally, in my "journey" from 130 pounds to 120 (I'm 5'4"), I kept my calorie deficit really small, eating about 100-200 calories per day under maintenance for something around 1 pound per month weight loss. It was slow, but it allowed me to keep my energy up for training.

Buy Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald, it's the best resource out there on nutrition for endurance athletes.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C3MFR2O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald has a couple chapters on body type and ideal body fat percentages.

I really recommend Matt Fitzgeralds "Racing Weight", there's an entire chapter devoted to discovering your ideal race weight.

TLDR:

1. Find the ideal body fat % that corresponds do athletes in your sport/age/level
   
2. Determine what weight you would be if you were at that %
   
3. Experiment around the fringes of your ideal (e.g. is your performance in races better if you weigh 'X')
   
   The entire book is full of great tips for maintaining a healthy diet for competitive endurance athletes.

Try this link?

For better or worse I've become sort of a follower of Pete Pfitzinger. His book Faster Road Racing has become my go to resource for all things training. His break down of nutrition is only 1 chapter but I found it very helpful when I transitioned off of a Keto diet and into fueling my running. It also explains each type of run. The reason for each type of run. The proper paces and goals for each. I use the Half Marathon training plan as my daily schedule. Following this plan and the information in the book I've gone from a 2:20:xx half in May, to a 2:09:xx in July to progression runs under 2:00:xx a few weeks ago. I'm hoping to go sub 1:55:xx in 3 weeks but we'll have to wait and see on that one.

There are also some other books that come highly recommended on the nutrition front. Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald comes to mind first along with all of it's follow up cook books and web sites. I don't buy into all of his ideas but a lot of people do and some of it is really pretty sound advice.

I haven't read it personally, but this one is pretty popular.

Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald: Basically how to lose weight to get to your optimal race weight while training. Some good info in here, helped me figure out how to switch from a "diet" to a diet that supports my training.