Some others might be more qualified to answer this and hopefully they will jump in but in my opinion the extra cardio is what is hindering your results.   Too much high heart rate cardio will eat away lean muscle mass.  You can do extra low heart rate, low intensity cardio like walking at a moderate pace but nothing too intense which I would think running and kickboxing would do.   Are you doing HIIT cardio at all?  

My kickboxing is HIIT cardio. We do rounds that get our intensity level up. It could just be that now is not the right time for me to do BFL with training for this race.

With all the extra training for the race you could be right.  It's just too much cardio.  Even if kickboxing is HIIT is it sticking tot he 20 minutes?   I'm no expert but I know a lot of science goes into why BFL works.  If you do too much more it will hinder results.   Not that you won't see any results.  Just maybe not what you had expected to see.  

Is it possible that all of the extra cardio is affecting your portion sizes?   You said your food choices are solid, but I'm a runner also and notice that when I throw in a longer and slower run on my free day, I end up feeling starving, and tend to stray a little from what my portion size normally is during the week.  I think Heather is also right about the science behind BFL.  If you are adding that much extra cardio, it might be a hard time to get great results from the program.   Good luck with your race and I hope you get the results you are looking for!

The Cardio Trap!

by: Michael Harris 9/24/2007

Men and women definitely work out differently, most likely because of the essential anatomic differences and hormonal differences! For example, most men really lift weights more intensely than most women do. In the area of cardio, women seem to be much more dedicated and also more sold on the idea of doing lots of cardio and doing it daily.

What seems like a good idea, though, can really become a trap. What happens when you do lots of cardio is you create increasing physical efficiency in the body. When you exercise for a long time at a pulse rate elevated sufficiently to produce a cardio effect, this makes the heart, lungs and vascular system of the body more efficient. So, at rest your heart rate is slower; your respiration rate is slower, and your resting metabolic rate becomes much slower. The combination of all this is that you burn very little fat or calories at rest compared to most others. And, unless you continually raise the work rate at which you do cardio with your more efficient body, the actual amount of calories and fat burned during the workout will drop slightly as well.

Another thing that lengthy and/or daily cardio does is to discourage your body from gaining muscle and even promote the burning of muscle under some circumstances. So, for a person wishing to produce more body muscle, and to burn fat without burning muscle, lengthy cardio is NOT the way to go. Hight intensity interval training will NOT get you fit in a way that will allow you to run 10 k races or compete in long events such as soccer games or basketball games, but it IS ideal for burning fat and preserving muscle at the same time.

On the other hand, high intensity interval training done three times a week is ideal, especially if done early in the morning in a fasted stated, having had no food for at least 8 hours. The fasted state encourages the immediate burning of body fat since there is little sugar in the blood or in the muscle and liver stores. It is done intensely enough to create lots of body heat and thereby burn lots of fat, and not muscle. Further, it just doesn’t let you get into that efficiency trap in the same way that the long slower cardio does.

For creating a lean and sculpted body, there is nothing like HIIT cardio.

Great info, Legs - thanks for the sharing!

If your food choices are solid, get scientific for a few weeks and actually count calories for all that you eat.  Use nutritiondata.com and an excell spread sheet.  Consume less that you burn and the weight will drop!!

I agree with Who is John Gault.  If you are doing BFL, kick boxing plus running, there is NO WAY the standard BFL nutrition will support that.  

You are going to need to dig a little deeper, find out your lean mass, basil metabilic rate and calories burned during your training and make sure your calories in are on a couple hundred calories lower than your calories out.  You have more than likely forced yourself inadvertantly in to starvation mode.  

If you cut your calories more than just a couple of hundred below "maintenance level" with all of your activity your losses will completely stall.  

If you don't have the patience for figuring all of that out, try increasing the serving size of good solid complex carbs (oats, sweet potato, brown rice) as your carb choices after you exercise along with your portion of protein.  Weigh and measure if need be to make sure you are eating enough (at least 4 oz potato but it wouldn't hurt to try 5 for a while).  Your body will thank you.  

Memoirs and others, please refer to the "Why BFL Works...Hussman Fitness" thread

Thanks for all the advice. It is a hard time to do Body for Life when training for this race which is basically a 16km run with a 4100ft elevation gain (running up a mountain). I think Champster09 is right.... I need to increase what I am eating until the race is over.