Well done on your weight loss so far! Impressive stuff. I don't really have much definitive stuff to say as I'm not a nutrition expert, but to my understanding you have to be very severely under nourished over quite a long period of time before your body will start metabolising your muscle - people with chronic diseases, cancer, severe malabsorption syndromes and eating disorders, essentially. Your body goes through a lot of other sources of fuel before reaching the point where you start thinking about breaking down muscle in order to generate glucose! So maybe you can read up on it as I'm not 100% but really I don't think you have to worry about your body being forced to break down your own muscle just in order to get by - unless you're about to suddenly stop eating altogether!! I'm not quite sure where the shift occurs but as I said, I'm pretty definite it's at a much more extreme end than just 1,500+your cycling calories/day.
If you're relatively active and moving throughout the day (excluding your cycling sessions) then daily requirements for a man are supposedly 2,500 calories (2,000 for women). If you're sedentary then it'll be less, but if I were you I think I'd address the contents of your diet (healthier foods!), try to work out how many calories you're taking in per day at the moment, and then see if you can cut maybe 500 off and just see how it goes, e.g. aiming for 2,000. To be honest you could probably do this no problem just by changing the types of food you're eating and yet still remain full, which would also have the knock-on of helping with your health in general. It's much more likely to be successful than making a dramatic calorie intake shift if you do things a bit more gradually and in steps, or so I've always thought. I also don't know how much taking into account cycling calories will help - the daily guidelines requirements take into account 30 mins of physical exercise, after all. Aiming for 2,000 or 2,500 (guideline amounts) and then just not bothering to count in cycling calories and treating those as your calorie deficit might also work out quite nicely. If you're going to cycle daily anyway, what's the point of doing it that way round?
If you're relatively active and moving throughout the day (excluding your cycling sessions) then daily requirements for a man are supposedly 2,500 calories (2,000 for women). If you're sedentary then it'll be less, but if I were you I think I'd address the contents of your diet (healthier foods!), try to work out how many calories you're taking in per day at the moment, and then see if you can cut maybe 500 off and just see how it goes, e.g. aiming for 2,000. To be honest you could probably do this no problem just by changing the types of food you're eating and yet still remain full, which would also have the knock-on of helping with your health in general. It's much more likely to be successful than making a dramatic calorie intake shift if you do things a bit more gradually and in steps, or so I've always thought. I also don't know how much taking into account cycling calories will help - the daily guidelines requirements take into account 30 mins of physical exercise, after all. Aiming for 2,000 or 2,500 (guideline amounts) and then just not bothering to count in cycling calories and treating those as your calorie deficit might also work out quite nicely. If you're going to cycle daily anyway, what's the point of doing it that way round?
