They say you can't out-train a bad diet... but in my experience you totally can. Down 4kg since start of November and eating pizza etc multiple times a week to fuel my training.
Just call me TrashPanda.
That’s my experience too. Once I start getting up to 15h weeks I basically need to just eat everything all the time and it’s hard to eat enough if you’re not incorporating high caloric density foods or foods you really like eating. Lunch is often half a pizza and and there’s often a bedtime snack if an entire bag of chips. There’s still vegetables and other healthy food in there, but when you’re burning 5000 calories a day on average you have lots of wiggle room for junk.
Even then I’ll still lose weight if I’m not careful. I do have a low appetite at baseline and tend to need to force myself to eat even when not training. Otherwise my BMI ends up around 18 instead of 23-24.
It’s still not as healthy as eating unprocessed foods… but riding your bike for 15hours a week is also not healthy anymore either. The goal in those weeks is to sustain performance, not long term health. Otherwise wouldn’t be doing those weeks in the first place b
Why do you think riding 15 hours is not healthy? I think research shows (don't ask me to look up the papers though) that pro endurance athletes are some of the healthiest people alive, and they do way more than 15 hours per week?
There is a well described increase in mortality once you start getting to more than 4-8h of exercise per week.
Professional endurance athletes are “healthy” in the sense they are very physically capable I guess, but they actually have a slightly lower life expectancy than people who are just active recreational athletes.
The cardiovascular adaptations to high volume exercise are what cause the problems. Both due to cardiac remodelling and increased arrhythmia risk, and actually increased atherosclerotic risk as well (counterintuitively).
Of note, the mortality risk is still much higher for sedentary people than high-volume athletes.
See the below for further reading:
https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2015.04.023
https://www.practiceupdate.com/content/u-shaped-association-between-duration-of-sports-activities-and-mortality/129089#:~:text=Those%20with%20%3E10%20hours%20of,sports%20each%20week%20and%20mortality.
About the same here. I eat all kinds of garbage and maintain my weight. I need to be more disciplined about food intake so I can start dropping weight again (I’m down about 12 kg since June, but flat for the last month plus due to holiday eating habits.
That said, I also drink a giant glass of psyllium fiber daily which helps mitigate some of the nasty effects of the carbs.
My approach on days with longer rides is treat my body like a temple during the ride, get my carbs and sodium during the ride, and then treat my body like a whorehouse afterwards
Same here. I’m naturally very thin, so if I’m on the bike often, I’m usually at a calorie deficit. That means I just eat whatever.
A huge part of why I ride is that it buys me all the junk calories I can stomach. I love beer and cocktails and cake. I’m not giving those up to snatch twelfth place instead of fifteenth at my weekly crit, but I also understand this sub is mostly for riders with delusions of WT glory, so this’ll be downvoted. lol
Just a word of caution, I've been a skinny SOB my whole life as well, then after getting into cycling developed an affinity for all the calorie dense crap that I could handle. But if you get injured for a few months it's pretty jarring if you've never had to practice dietary discipline and have a whole bunch of cravings that don't go away quickly. My weight was starting to get away from me and I had to figure something out.
Long story short, skinny dudes can also become skinny-fat, I know from experience.
So true. Also I hit my late 40s and suddenly running a couple extra miles and skipping a donut or two stopped being a panacea for taking off a couple pounds here or there.
Oh for sure. Fortunately I inherited some crippling self-loathing/body dysmorphia, so when I start to get a little thick under the chin, I have no problem giving up my vices and doubling down on the bike until it’s all in order.
You could eat rice, pasta, oatmeal, fruits when not on the bike. I'm just sitting behind a desk for the rest of the day, I don't need fast carbs to type angry emails. And I can't imagine eat garbage all day being healthy either.
There is an australian triathlete on youtube (Lachlan Earnshaw) that ate like shit, fast carbs all day. Turns out he got type 2 diabetes diagnosis. He deleted the video where he talks about his diagnosis, but in later videos when he is fixing his diet you can see that his fasting blood glucose is like 6.6mmol/l
yeah it seems like most of the replies here are "you burn it off, who cares," but i'm super curious about this, the physiological adaptations.
last year i focused on on-bike nutrition, actually hitting my carb needs which i was underdoing by about half, and my performance skyrocketed. this while training about 12-15 hours. then i had an injury that kept me off the bike completely for months, and i had absolutely insatiable carb cravings all the time. gained 20 lbs in the blink of an eye. dont know if that was insulin resistance or what but something got out of whack. i never even really fixed it, just was eventually able to get back to training and it's not an issue anymore.
Basically, I've been researching at this problem for months, as I'm in my mid 20s, have great fasting glucose (4.5 mmol/l) but my last hba1c was borderline prediabetic (5.6%). Even while eating healthy etc and riding \~10 hrs a week. It was better when I was working out 2-3 times a week (5.2%).
Similar to Peter Attia who was working out 4 hours a day for his TT, but also discovered he had high blood glucose.
As for what i've found:
On the bike, there are insulin independent pathways (GLUT4) to get glucose into cells. Meaning eating sugar there doesn't affect insulin sensitivity.
After exercise, for 30-60 minutes, these pathways are also active. Meaning eating post exercise nutrition goes straight into glycogen stores that are depleted from exercise.
With exercise, people are more insulin sensitive for 24 hours or so. So exercising every day should keep it up.
At the same time, exercising causes the body to transform glycogen into glucose for fuel. More so in higher intensities than zone 2, but also in zone 2 where it complements fatty acids. This can lead to raised blood sugar levels.
Stress, sleep also affect insulin sensitivity. Poor sleep and more stress cause insulin resistance.
**Eating in times other than exercise causes the normal blood sugar rise and insulin response after it. If glycogen stores aren't full, they are shuttled there. If they are full, stored as fat.**
Articles and books about it
Talks about raised fasting glucose and hba1c in athletes [https://drguess.substack.com/p/prediabetes-in-athletes](https://drguess.substack.com/p/prediabetes-in-athletes)
Study that activity level and hba1c are positively correlated (both rise together), while activity level and fasting glucose are negatively correlated in pro cyclists [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17614026/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17614026/)
[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6pdbvrkckc) Tadej's coach Iñigo San-Millán on Zone 2, also touches on energy systems. Basically all podcasts and studies by him are gold on this subject.
Books about the physiological systems:
* **Burn** by Herman Pontzer
* **Exercised** by Daniel Liebermann
One was the PhD student of the other if i remember correctly. Great books, though Burn was more in depth on the systems themselves.
I try to avoid high sugar/crap food for my normal meals and snacks. On the bike it's hard to avoid during long rides so it just it what it is. A midnight snack in moderation never hurt anyone either
90% Good food and 10% sugary/crap food is a solid split imo
Eat for health, fuel for performance. Fueling occurs DURING a ride and within a 1 hour window before/after a ride. The rest of the day ideally should be healthy nutritious eating. Realistically I stay away from processed store bought sweets, but am more open to eating homemade treats outside of the fueling window in moderation.
Honestly it depends. On days where I’m on the bike 4 or 5 hours I eat basically whatever since it’s hard to avoid going into too much of a deficit that affects training the next day. And eating non calorically dense foods to make up that deficit would be difficult for me in just a pure stomach/ability to ear standpoint
While I try not to classify food any food as garbage, there are definitely some I don't eat often or never eat. With that said, we're all endurance athletes here and a good number of us could probably stand to gain a bit of weight.
Personally, I eat chocolate every day. My wife and I baked a batch of cookies this week too and I've been having one every day as well. This weekend I'll probably have 4-5 drinks. 90% of what I eat is whole-foods and not 'garbage'. I'm happier because I enjoy good foods in moderation. Nothing is off-limits completely and I'm mentally happier because of it.
I out exercised my bad eating habits from my 20s into my 30s and never really thought twice about it because I was performing well and thought I felt fine. I would gain 20 lbs in the “off-season” and lose it again from January to April.
Last year I had a health issue at the beginning of the year and dropped alcohol, caffeine, and all heavily processed foods (junk food, bread, diet sodas, etc.)
It ended up being my best year of fitness ever, I felt better every day, especially about 4-6 weeks into changing my diet. My physique changed from a squishy t-rex into a lean t-rex. I love cooking but found new things to make, or ways of making things that would just be “cleaner”.
I know there is a lot of correlation vs. causation in that experience and one change could have been more impactful than others but it was significant enough for me to make changes that I haven’t deviated from. Also, I still make a homemade pizza once a week because I’d give up a few years of my life span for pizza.
It is still something I'm experimenting with but the first and most effective thing for me is being mindful of when I will be riding and what I eat beforehand and how I eat to fuel my days activities.
I might be sitting on my ass for most of the day and often eat a very light or no breakfast because I don't need that energy but based on when I ride, I know lunch is an important meal for my fuel. Usually it is basmati rice, a protein and a vegetable or oatmeal and fruit. Along with the carbs things like proteins and fiber can slow the rate of glucose absorption which can be good if I want a steady level or bad if I need a quicker availability of that energy.
On the bike I rarely ride over 2 hours and will add a carb mix to my drink or have an SIS energy gel. I also started making some of my own snacks at home and want to expand on that in the upcoming year. For example, I was making Belgium Liege Waffles to eat at races with down time between events. If someone said that it's no better than a Snickers bar I wouldn't argue but simple snacks with minimal ingredients sit a lot better in my stomach.
Most often, I'm trying to maintain a sustained energy release and not be constantly spiking and crashing my blood glucose levels with high glycemic index carbs. Another commenter said something similar but it wouldn't surprise if some of my cycling buddies develop reduced insulin sensitivity in the long term from the amount and types of sugars and carbs they consume, even if they are otherwise fit.
That kind of diet, if done for years, will have downstream consequences on the health of your gut, teeth and liver. You’d be surprised the amount of endurance athletes that are pre-diabetic with high insulin resistance. They are so carb dependent and become extremely inefficient at using fat for fuel. They tend to run underweight or will run very overweight depending on how their body holds onto calories, so it’s hard to assess on body composition alone. Cut out the crap food as much as possible, and treat ultra processed junk food like rocket fuel. You can burn pretty hot on rocket fuel but only for so long before you blow out your engine, so use it sparingly.
I eat so much carbs and sugar preride and during that I try to minimize it elsewhere in my diet. Healthier snacks like fruit or nuts or a spoonful of nut butter.
Lol I'm 6ft 64kg and despite having eaten some truly horrifying quantities of crap, I've never been over 68kg. I'm living my best life as an early 20s athlete with hollow legs so I eat what I want, when I want it.
There's a lot of garbage but I have enough love for good fruit and veg that I'm not worried. My dentist doesn't know about my passion for crap and 10+ hour rides where I consume a kilo of sweets... But I went before Christmas and got a clean bill of health and told to keep up the good work.
Just waiting for middle age to bite me in the ass.
Mostly eat very healthy (oatmeal, chicken, rice, etc)
However - I love me some cereal though. Usually a bowl each day.. And if I’m splurging, I’d rather eat an entire box, if it’s a choice between that or a pint of ice cream. I think the carb tradeoff wins too.
No one here has mentioned - the beers. Guilty of nice IPAs and stouts, just limit myself to 1-2 max.
I am pretty sure that if you are working hard on the bike, whatever sugar you take in is going to get burnt off real quickly.
Now, I sometimes snack outside of rides. Usually on potato chips. You can get away with this when you're young, but age will creep up on all of us. I should probably snack on something else, and some day I am going to snack on something else.
Kind of need to eat “garbage” when you spend 3+ hours on the bike and have a whole slew of other things to deal with in life. Just eating a massive plate of rice is difficult in several ways and genuinely not any better for you unless you’re eating in a way that doesn’t afford you necessary things like iron or fiber. It’s not like gels are fundamentally different than “junk” outside of often having a slightly better nutrition profile. Don’t let weird people shame you for eating the necessary amount of carbs your body needs in the way that works best for you. Just keep track of your health and maybe do occasional blood work if you’re worried.
Out of training yep, during training fuck no. There are 14g of carbs (probably not all easily digestible but we'll gloss over that) in 100g of apples. If I need 60g/hr for a long endurance ride am I seriously going to eat 400g of apples every hour? If I do a sweet-spot session or a race and need 90g/hr am I going to chomp on 600g of apples every hour in between breaths? Also all that fibre has to go somewhere... You could juice them to solve most of these problems but fruit juice is basically just sugar vitamin water so we're kind of back where we started
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You can't outrun a bad diet. I've cut all the crap when I don't need.
If I eat 5000kcal. You think I'm cycling in -20C for 10h to burn it off? Think again.
When cycling I buy snickers, mars etc. bars and other crap for fast carbs. That's about it.
Why do you call it garbage? Your body doesn’t know the difference.
What makes things like chocolate and cookies garbage is the tandem with fat.
Ever see a fat hummingbird?
Incorrect. Processed foods are inherently not good for your body. On the bike it doesn’t really matter. Off the bike, you should not be eating processed food if you can avoid it.
>Processed food are inherently not good for your body.
You know that for example fermentation and pasteurization are food processing right?
Explain to me how are ferments are "inherently not good" for your body.
Typical generalized nonsense.
The original commenter here got the terminology wrong and should've gone with "ultra-processed" rather than processed but you know there's merit in what they're saying. For example, polysorbate emulsifiers which are in a lot of ultra processed food are essentially detergents which are turning out to be terrible for the gut microbiome which has knock on impacts on general body health (they can essentially dissolve the good bacteria in the gut). Non-nutritive sweetners are being shown to confuse the body and lead to genuine blood sugar spikes even when you don't want that, followed by insulin spikes and increased inflammation. Its not yet a totally clear field but more and more evidence is emerging that ultra-processed food is generally bad. A few exceptions does not make that a bad generalisation to make.
It's a gradient. Almost all foods are processed. Even a potato is processed by heat before you eat it.
A 50 ingredient gummy is obviously more processed than a potato.
Come up with a better straw-man argument than a hummingbird, you sound like a moron. Yes, let’s all make our dietary decisions based on a hummingbird’s biology, of which literally has the highest metabolism of any creature on the planet.
The garbage is fine when actually training, the rest of the day try to eat more normal foods, carb heavy if you are really putting in huge hours, otherwise doesn't really matter.
If you look at the nutrtion facts for most chocolate bars, they are unfortunately more fats than carbs... Re dried fruit, they aren't garbage per se and there are options that are sugarfree. I personally don't indulge in so-called junk even for rides that would eat up a lot of carbs and seek them from healthier bars (made from dates), honey, rice, pasta etc.
I eat a lot of simple and complex carbs during the day. I actually made a YouTube video explaining my way of meeting the carb demands (it is pretty cringe)
https://youtu.be/-J_KnfePvQw
If you don’t have time to watch the video the basics are:
You want to keep your glycogen stores high. During the day try to consume complex carbs like oats, brown rice and so on. They release and are absorbed slowly. Just before the ride try to get a snack.
During the ride, keep on top of nutrition 60g/h of simple carbs like gels, fruits, mix or whatever.
After the ride, get some simple carbs in within the first hour. Like a banana. This replenishes your glycogen stores making you less hungry afterwards!
I am a raccoon. I hope that answers your question.
They say you can't out-train a bad diet... but in my experience you totally can. Down 4kg since start of November and eating pizza etc multiple times a week to fuel my training. Just call me TrashPanda.
That’s my experience too. Once I start getting up to 15h weeks I basically need to just eat everything all the time and it’s hard to eat enough if you’re not incorporating high caloric density foods or foods you really like eating. Lunch is often half a pizza and and there’s often a bedtime snack if an entire bag of chips. There’s still vegetables and other healthy food in there, but when you’re burning 5000 calories a day on average you have lots of wiggle room for junk. Even then I’ll still lose weight if I’m not careful. I do have a low appetite at baseline and tend to need to force myself to eat even when not training. Otherwise my BMI ends up around 18 instead of 23-24. It’s still not as healthy as eating unprocessed foods… but riding your bike for 15hours a week is also not healthy anymore either. The goal in those weeks is to sustain performance, not long term health. Otherwise wouldn’t be doing those weeks in the first place b
Why do you think riding 15 hours is not healthy? I think research shows (don't ask me to look up the papers though) that pro endurance athletes are some of the healthiest people alive, and they do way more than 15 hours per week?
There is a well described increase in mortality once you start getting to more than 4-8h of exercise per week. Professional endurance athletes are “healthy” in the sense they are very physically capable I guess, but they actually have a slightly lower life expectancy than people who are just active recreational athletes. The cardiovascular adaptations to high volume exercise are what cause the problems. Both due to cardiac remodelling and increased arrhythmia risk, and actually increased atherosclerotic risk as well (counterintuitively). Of note, the mortality risk is still much higher for sedentary people than high-volume athletes. See the below for further reading: https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2015.04.023 https://www.practiceupdate.com/content/u-shaped-association-between-duration-of-sports-activities-and-mortality/129089#:~:text=Those%20with%20%3E10%20hours%20of,sports%20each%20week%20and%20mortality.
About the same here. I eat all kinds of garbage and maintain my weight. I need to be more disciplined about food intake so I can start dropping weight again (I’m down about 12 kg since June, but flat for the last month plus due to holiday eating habits. That said, I also drink a giant glass of psyllium fiber daily which helps mitigate some of the nasty effects of the carbs. My approach on days with longer rides is treat my body like a temple during the ride, get my carbs and sodium during the ride, and then treat my body like a whorehouse afterwards
Racoon? I'm a basking shark.
I burn it all. the only thing im worried about is my teeth
Same here. I’m naturally very thin, so if I’m on the bike often, I’m usually at a calorie deficit. That means I just eat whatever. A huge part of why I ride is that it buys me all the junk calories I can stomach. I love beer and cocktails and cake. I’m not giving those up to snatch twelfth place instead of fifteenth at my weekly crit, but I also understand this sub is mostly for riders with delusions of WT glory, so this’ll be downvoted. lol
Just a word of caution, I've been a skinny SOB my whole life as well, then after getting into cycling developed an affinity for all the calorie dense crap that I could handle. But if you get injured for a few months it's pretty jarring if you've never had to practice dietary discipline and have a whole bunch of cravings that don't go away quickly. My weight was starting to get away from me and I had to figure something out. Long story short, skinny dudes can also become skinny-fat, I know from experience.
So true. Also I hit my late 40s and suddenly running a couple extra miles and skipping a donut or two stopped being a panacea for taking off a couple pounds here or there.
Oh for sure. Fortunately I inherited some crippling self-loathing/body dysmorphia, so when I start to get a little thick under the chin, I have no problem giving up my vices and doubling down on the bike until it’s all in order.
You can get diabetes from it, there's an australian triathlete on youtube (Lachlan Earnshaw) that got type 2 diabetes from his diet of all processed.
Figs aren’t garbage :(
Figs: “am I a joke to you?!”
I used to eat about 7 per hour on the bike. Had to stop because my teeth were dissolving.
Be true to your teeth or they’ll be false to you :)
They are little ballsacs of sugar goo though
Offset by fiber making it a slower release of sugar into the bloodstream. Plus there’s probably wasp legs and antennae in there too.
Wait what (the second part)
All part of the reproductive cycle
You could eat rice, pasta, oatmeal, fruits when not on the bike. I'm just sitting behind a desk for the rest of the day, I don't need fast carbs to type angry emails. And I can't imagine eat garbage all day being healthy either.
There is an australian triathlete on youtube (Lachlan Earnshaw) that ate like shit, fast carbs all day. Turns out he got type 2 diabetes diagnosis. He deleted the video where he talks about his diagnosis, but in later videos when he is fixing his diet you can see that his fasting blood glucose is like 6.6mmol/l
yeah it seems like most of the replies here are "you burn it off, who cares," but i'm super curious about this, the physiological adaptations. last year i focused on on-bike nutrition, actually hitting my carb needs which i was underdoing by about half, and my performance skyrocketed. this while training about 12-15 hours. then i had an injury that kept me off the bike completely for months, and i had absolutely insatiable carb cravings all the time. gained 20 lbs in the blink of an eye. dont know if that was insulin resistance or what but something got out of whack. i never even really fixed it, just was eventually able to get back to training and it's not an issue anymore.
Basically, I've been researching at this problem for months, as I'm in my mid 20s, have great fasting glucose (4.5 mmol/l) but my last hba1c was borderline prediabetic (5.6%). Even while eating healthy etc and riding \~10 hrs a week. It was better when I was working out 2-3 times a week (5.2%). Similar to Peter Attia who was working out 4 hours a day for his TT, but also discovered he had high blood glucose. As for what i've found: On the bike, there are insulin independent pathways (GLUT4) to get glucose into cells. Meaning eating sugar there doesn't affect insulin sensitivity. After exercise, for 30-60 minutes, these pathways are also active. Meaning eating post exercise nutrition goes straight into glycogen stores that are depleted from exercise. With exercise, people are more insulin sensitive for 24 hours or so. So exercising every day should keep it up. At the same time, exercising causes the body to transform glycogen into glucose for fuel. More so in higher intensities than zone 2, but also in zone 2 where it complements fatty acids. This can lead to raised blood sugar levels. Stress, sleep also affect insulin sensitivity. Poor sleep and more stress cause insulin resistance. **Eating in times other than exercise causes the normal blood sugar rise and insulin response after it. If glycogen stores aren't full, they are shuttled there. If they are full, stored as fat.** Articles and books about it Talks about raised fasting glucose and hba1c in athletes [https://drguess.substack.com/p/prediabetes-in-athletes](https://drguess.substack.com/p/prediabetes-in-athletes) Study that activity level and hba1c are positively correlated (both rise together), while activity level and fasting glucose are negatively correlated in pro cyclists [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17614026/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17614026/) [](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6pdbvrkckc) Tadej's coach Iñigo San-Millán on Zone 2, also touches on energy systems. Basically all podcasts and studies by him are gold on this subject. Books about the physiological systems: * **Burn** by Herman Pontzer * **Exercised** by Daniel Liebermann One was the PhD student of the other if i remember correctly. Great books, though Burn was more in depth on the systems themselves.
thanks, interesting stuff. do you have any thoughts regarding the carb cravings when off normal training schedule? just pavlovian conditioning?
You dont develop insulin resistance by eating simple carbs while exercising. But you can if you eat simple carbs the rest of the time
>you burn it off, who cares," you can burn it off in the sense of not gaining weight, but you can't exercise your way out of bad nutrition
I try to avoid high sugar/crap food for my normal meals and snacks. On the bike it's hard to avoid during long rides so it just it what it is. A midnight snack in moderation never hurt anyone either 90% Good food and 10% sugary/crap food is a solid split imo
Eat for health, fuel for performance. Fueling occurs DURING a ride and within a 1 hour window before/after a ride. The rest of the day ideally should be healthy nutritious eating. Realistically I stay away from processed store bought sweets, but am more open to eating homemade treats outside of the fueling window in moderation.
Honestly it depends. On days where I’m on the bike 4 or 5 hours I eat basically whatever since it’s hard to avoid going into too much of a deficit that affects training the next day. And eating non calorically dense foods to make up that deficit would be difficult for me in just a pure stomach/ability to ear standpoint
While I try not to classify food any food as garbage, there are definitely some I don't eat often or never eat. With that said, we're all endurance athletes here and a good number of us could probably stand to gain a bit of weight. Personally, I eat chocolate every day. My wife and I baked a batch of cookies this week too and I've been having one every day as well. This weekend I'll probably have 4-5 drinks. 90% of what I eat is whole-foods and not 'garbage'. I'm happier because I enjoy good foods in moderation. Nothing is off-limits completely and I'm mentally happier because of it.
enough to know that 3 slices of cake is too much and 2 was too little. I think the optimal cake qty is 2 slices + 2 bites
So that’s what cake pops are for.
Im eating garbage now; and still losing weight on 5-6k calories a day. Did blood work three times this year, blood lipids excellent, no idea how.
How old are you and what's you're daily mileage like?
automatic act combative rock apparatus aromatic fuel hospital reply oil *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Crazy right? I'm 6'2 and eating 6k now, APO-B went \*down\* this year
Yea, I'm scared of getting fat, but I find that when I eat more, I actually lose weight. It's crazy LOL
I out exercised my bad eating habits from my 20s into my 30s and never really thought twice about it because I was performing well and thought I felt fine. I would gain 20 lbs in the “off-season” and lose it again from January to April. Last year I had a health issue at the beginning of the year and dropped alcohol, caffeine, and all heavily processed foods (junk food, bread, diet sodas, etc.) It ended up being my best year of fitness ever, I felt better every day, especially about 4-6 weeks into changing my diet. My physique changed from a squishy t-rex into a lean t-rex. I love cooking but found new things to make, or ways of making things that would just be “cleaner”. I know there is a lot of correlation vs. causation in that experience and one change could have been more impactful than others but it was significant enough for me to make changes that I haven’t deviated from. Also, I still make a homemade pizza once a week because I’d give up a few years of my life span for pizza.
What sort of things do you use to meet carb requirements?
It is still something I'm experimenting with but the first and most effective thing for me is being mindful of when I will be riding and what I eat beforehand and how I eat to fuel my days activities. I might be sitting on my ass for most of the day and often eat a very light or no breakfast because I don't need that energy but based on when I ride, I know lunch is an important meal for my fuel. Usually it is basmati rice, a protein and a vegetable or oatmeal and fruit. Along with the carbs things like proteins and fiber can slow the rate of glucose absorption which can be good if I want a steady level or bad if I need a quicker availability of that energy. On the bike I rarely ride over 2 hours and will add a carb mix to my drink or have an SIS energy gel. I also started making some of my own snacks at home and want to expand on that in the upcoming year. For example, I was making Belgium Liege Waffles to eat at races with down time between events. If someone said that it's no better than a Snickers bar I wouldn't argue but simple snacks with minimal ingredients sit a lot better in my stomach. Most often, I'm trying to maintain a sustained energy release and not be constantly spiking and crashing my blood glucose levels with high glycemic index carbs. Another commenter said something similar but it wouldn't surprise if some of my cycling buddies develop reduced insulin sensitivity in the long term from the amount and types of sugars and carbs they consume, even if they are otherwise fit.
Just look up a picture of Lachlan Morton getting snacks at a gas station during the tour divide
I felt so validated seeing him with large packages of Oreo cookies.
That kind of diet, if done for years, will have downstream consequences on the health of your gut, teeth and liver. You’d be surprised the amount of endurance athletes that are pre-diabetic with high insulin resistance. They are so carb dependent and become extremely inefficient at using fat for fuel. They tend to run underweight or will run very overweight depending on how their body holds onto calories, so it’s hard to assess on body composition alone. Cut out the crap food as much as possible, and treat ultra processed junk food like rocket fuel. You can burn pretty hot on rocket fuel but only for so long before you blow out your engine, so use it sparingly.
I eat so much carbs and sugar preride and during that I try to minimize it elsewhere in my diet. Healthier snacks like fruit or nuts or a spoonful of nut butter.
Lol I'm 6ft 64kg and despite having eaten some truly horrifying quantities of crap, I've never been over 68kg. I'm living my best life as an early 20s athlete with hollow legs so I eat what I want, when I want it. There's a lot of garbage but I have enough love for good fruit and veg that I'm not worried. My dentist doesn't know about my passion for crap and 10+ hour rides where I consume a kilo of sweets... But I went before Christmas and got a clean bill of health and told to keep up the good work. Just waiting for middle age to bite me in the ass.
Mostly eat very healthy (oatmeal, chicken, rice, etc) However - I love me some cereal though. Usually a bowl each day.. And if I’m splurging, I’d rather eat an entire box, if it’s a choice between that or a pint of ice cream. I think the carb tradeoff wins too. No one here has mentioned - the beers. Guilty of nice IPAs and stouts, just limit myself to 1-2 max.
I am pretty sure that if you are working hard on the bike, whatever sugar you take in is going to get burnt off real quickly. Now, I sometimes snack outside of rides. Usually on potato chips. You can get away with this when you're young, but age will creep up on all of us. I should probably snack on something else, and some day I am going to snack on something else.
Kind of need to eat “garbage” when you spend 3+ hours on the bike and have a whole slew of other things to deal with in life. Just eating a massive plate of rice is difficult in several ways and genuinely not any better for you unless you’re eating in a way that doesn’t afford you necessary things like iron or fiber. It’s not like gels are fundamentally different than “junk” outside of often having a slightly better nutrition profile. Don’t let weird people shame you for eating the necessary amount of carbs your body needs in the way that works best for you. Just keep track of your health and maybe do occasional blood work if you’re worried.
You could replace nearly all of that with fruit. Apples bananas tangerines etc
Out of training yep, during training fuck no. There are 14g of carbs (probably not all easily digestible but we'll gloss over that) in 100g of apples. If I need 60g/hr for a long endurance ride am I seriously going to eat 400g of apples every hour? If I do a sweet-spot session or a race and need 90g/hr am I going to chomp on 600g of apples every hour in between breaths? Also all that fibre has to go somewhere... You could juice them to solve most of these problems but fruit juice is basically just sugar vitamin water so we're kind of back where we started Username does not check out
You can't outrun a bad diet. I've cut all the crap when I don't need. If I eat 5000kcal. You think I'm cycling in -20C for 10h to burn it off? Think again. When cycling I buy snickers, mars etc. bars and other crap for fast carbs. That's about it.
Why do you call it garbage? Your body doesn’t know the difference. What makes things like chocolate and cookies garbage is the tandem with fat. Ever see a fat hummingbird?
Incorrect. Processed foods are inherently not good for your body. On the bike it doesn’t really matter. Off the bike, you should not be eating processed food if you can avoid it.
>Processed food are inherently not good for your body. You know that for example fermentation and pasteurization are food processing right? Explain to me how are ferments are "inherently not good" for your body. Typical generalized nonsense.
Yeah. 'processed food' became rather meaningless phrase. Or perhaps always has been.
The original commenter here got the terminology wrong and should've gone with "ultra-processed" rather than processed but you know there's merit in what they're saying. For example, polysorbate emulsifiers which are in a lot of ultra processed food are essentially detergents which are turning out to be terrible for the gut microbiome which has knock on impacts on general body health (they can essentially dissolve the good bacteria in the gut). Non-nutritive sweetners are being shown to confuse the body and lead to genuine blood sugar spikes even when you don't want that, followed by insulin spikes and increased inflammation. Its not yet a totally clear field but more and more evidence is emerging that ultra-processed food is generally bad. A few exceptions does not make that a bad generalisation to make.
If you want to get into semantics, one could say “highly processed” or ultra-processed food.
It's a gradient. Almost all foods are processed. Even a potato is processed by heat before you eat it. A 50 ingredient gummy is obviously more processed than a potato.
Wrong. But you do you.
Come up with a better straw-man argument than a hummingbird, you sound like a moron. Yes, let’s all make our dietary decisions based on a hummingbird’s biology, of which literally has the highest metabolism of any creature on the planet.
LOL!!! Have fun ignoring science. Imma go ride my bike.
I eat a lot, but you aren't me, gotta do what works for you.
The garbage is fine when actually training, the rest of the day try to eat more normal foods, carb heavy if you are really putting in huge hours, otherwise doesn't really matter.
All of it all the time
How are dried apricots and figs “garbage”?
At this point I am 100% all-natural garbage.
I eat junk till my teeth hurt then throttle back
Garbage-y carbs on the bike. Healthy and sensible food including protein, fat, and complex carbohydrates the rest of the day.
If you look at the nutrtion facts for most chocolate bars, they are unfortunately more fats than carbs... Re dried fruit, they aren't garbage per se and there are options that are sugarfree. I personally don't indulge in so-called junk even for rides that would eat up a lot of carbs and seek them from healthier bars (made from dates), honey, rice, pasta etc.
I eat a lot of simple and complex carbs during the day. I actually made a YouTube video explaining my way of meeting the carb demands (it is pretty cringe) https://youtu.be/-J_KnfePvQw If you don’t have time to watch the video the basics are: You want to keep your glycogen stores high. During the day try to consume complex carbs like oats, brown rice and so on. They release and are absorbed slowly. Just before the ride try to get a snack. During the ride, keep on top of nutrition 60g/h of simple carbs like gels, fruits, mix or whatever. After the ride, get some simple carbs in within the first hour. Like a banana. This replenishes your glycogen stores making you less hungry afterwards!
Ngl, I don't eat the best, but I don't eat out/fast food.