Can you lose weight and still train hard? Part III: the runner and the bodybuilder

In my quest to find out whether you can lose weight and still train hard, I’ve talked to lightweight rowers and club rowers and the message has come through loud and clear that the answer is yes, so long as you’re disciplined and consistent. It can even – gasp – be fun. Today it’s the turn of the non-rowers – and I’ve come up with some pretty impressive ones, I think you’ll agree.

Up first is the fabulous Ursula Hirschkorn, a journalist, blogger and undisputed Queen of Weight Loss. She writes a brilliant and refreshingly candid blog, Run, Woman, Run and manages to make time for four small sons as well as training for this year’s London marathon. Impressed? You should be.

This is what Ursula looked like before she started on her regime. Although claiming to be happy, she has since admitted that she wasn’t. As she wrote in a newspaper article about her experience, “Being fat is miserable, joyless and soul destroying and saps your confidence on a daily basis.”

Being a determined type, when Ursula decided to do something about it, she went about it with dogged persistence. And listen to this. In the space of one year, Ursula lost six stone in weight. Six stone! That’s 84lb, or 38.1 kg. In one year.

Ursula achieved this extraordinary feat without resorting to meal replacements or crazy regimes; she did it with good old-fashioned exercise and healthy eating.

And here’s what Ursula looks like now.

This is what she told me about combining diet with exercise:

” I knew that I was in for the long haul so I had to find a way to lose weight that I could live with, rather than feeling like I was going on a ‘diet’ that would come to  an end the moment I had lost the weight.

“I knew that I had to change my life entirely, which is why I decided on a mix of exercise and diet. It worked really well as my enthusiasm for getting fitter really gave me something to focus on when I was losing weight. It also gave me a new interest in life and a reason to get out of the house and do something for myself.

“I started off by entering a 5K run which went much better than I expected, followed by a couple of 10Ks and I am now training for the marathon.

“As for coping with hunger and training – well if you eat well that shouldn’t really happen. I eat all the time, three meals plus at least two snacks, but it’s all healthy stuff, low carb, high protein. I found that if I didn’t eat enough I actually didn’t lose as much as it tended to mean that my body started to store fat again.

“Though I do think the key to losing weight is not to think that doing lots of exercise means you can eat what you like. I never thought ‘Oh well I have been to the gym, so I can have a chocolate bar or a piece of cake’. Trouble is that if you take that approach it is so easy to eat away all the weight loss benefits of working out. I ate the same whether  I had been to the gym or not.

“This of course all came off the rails with the marathon as I simply can’t battle the hunger with this level of training. But I hear that putting on 5lbs when training for a marathon is pretty common. I just plan to get the run out of the way and then return to a more varied diet of exercise and bringing my eating back under control once the hunger of endurance training abates!”

For my second dose of inspiration, I turned to Nicola Joyce, a fitness journalist, copywriter and blogger, who writes the addictive blog The Fit Writer.

I think Nic would be the first to admit that when it comes to exercise, she’s a bit of an extremist. She used to be a cross channel swimmer and once swam right round the entire island of Jersey, so she doesn’t tend to do things by halves.

Cross channel swimming requires a layer of body fat for insulation, and here’s what Nic looked like when she was training for her channel crossing – in her words, “muscley and fat”.

Ever up for a challenge, Nic moved on from swimming the channel, via triathlon, and eventually settled on natural (ie. non-steroidal) bodybuilding for her next endeavour. This required a huge change in her body composition. Although she’d always been muscular, she needed to build a lot of muscle and become extremely lean in order to display the muscles.

Bodybuilding involves an off season in which dietary restrictions are relaxed in order to build muscle and strength, and a preparation season in which body fat is lost in preparation for competitions (Nic calls this Notch Watch as she gradually tightens the notches in her training belt). Last year Nic embarked on her first season and managed the extraordinary feat, having started from scratch, of placing second and third in two British finals in 2011.

This is what she looked at in competition – quite a difference, huh?

I caught up with Nic this week and this is the result of our chat:

Nic: Yes I bring cardio in to bump up fat loss, but don’t do too much otherwise there will be no “tricks left up my sleeve”. Most of my fat loss comes from the diet side of things, and strength/size/mass comes from how I train. Even weight training can have a cardio effect if you do it fast enough. Yesterday’s leg session was a massive hit to the metabolism/CNS – I felt like I’d run a 10k race or something!