Eating
In some ways, cycling again at this point in my life has become for me a story about eating. And, like a lot of stories, there are high points, low points, tension, intrigue, moments of despair, and ultimate triumph. One of the main lessons I've gleaned is, it's amazing how little most of us know about what we put into our bodies and what the effects can be.
When I got on a bike again, I was overweight and out of shape, a typical story for most people getting back into cycling after a hiatus for building a career and starting a family. In order to lose weight, I began taking notice of what I was eating, but cycling alone began to peel the pounds away, so I didn't analyze my diet too much. I really didn't know that much about hydration or carbohydrates at that point, so I didn't know what I was doing wrong. Ignorance ruled.
Once I was able to train harder, ride longer, and go faster, I began to create some gaps in my nutrition plan. My hydration was obviously inadequate, and my recovery was, in retrospect, an abomination. But, at the time, I thought I was doing pretty well, because I was losing weight and feeling stronger. I was faster, and I was riding centuries. I bought some more things to drink on the bike and for recovery, and a box of gels. It seemed sufficient.
Juggling my dietary options became a new dimension of my life. To lose some weight, I'd trim out a part of breakfast, or stop eating a type of food wholesale (no ice cream, no cheese, etc.). Instituting these simple rules made avoiding some foods very easy. However, looking back, this was a form of fad dieting at its worst, and didn't make much sense.
Another approach I drifted into was to be disciplined throughout most of the day. I'd start with a small breakfast, snack a little, have a small lunch, snack a little, and so on. The problem became the "and so on." What I soon discovered was that starting with dinner and continuing throughout the rest of the evening, I would be so famished that I would devour anything in my path, including cookies, cereals, nuts, and such. I was holding my weight, but at a price -- I was grumpy, unfocused, and lightheaded if I stood too quickly, throughout most of the day, mainly because of this poor nutrition pattern. My favorite primary care physician, when consulted about the lightheadedness and after giving me a once-over, diagnosed it properly. "Maybe you aren't eating enough," she said. I scoffed, but she was right.
I simply couldn't bring myself to believe I had to eat more. To me, that meant eating more food. What I didn't know is that it meant eating the right food at the right times.
During all of this, I resisted getting analytical. Enter Google Spreadsheets and the Nutrition Data web site. After reading a couple of cycling nutrition books and getting the quantitative aspects through my thick skull, I decided to create a spreadsheet to track my eating habits. Because Google's spreadsheets are virtual, I could enter data from work or home or on the road, and track what I was eating. Because Nutrition Data has a great database, I could look up nearly anything and get the right portion size and actual data. What I found was that my "diet early, gorge late" habit was giving me sparse nutrition through the afternoon, and then I was almost making up for it with the evening chowdown. However, even at that, I was probably chronically depleted of glycogen, due to training and poor recovery. The effects of this -- foggy thinking, bad mood, poor recovery, and such -- were very apparent. And, as with so many things, the symptoms created an inability to think clearly about the cause. Foggy thinking isn't the best state for epiphanies.
However, bull-headed analytics had shown me the problem I'd created for myself through iterations of dietary voodoo. Once I corrected these things using basal metabolic rate (BMR) estimates for daily caloric intake, percentage allocations for carbs, protein, and fat, eating timed with the goal of eliminating late-evening snacking, and actual caloric consumption for rides with matched recovery, including 0.5 g of carbs per pound consumed in the first 30 minutes after a ride, everything fell into place. My mental acuity returned, from morning until night; my sense of humor came back to where it had always been; I recovered from rides faster; incidents of lightheadedness after rides disappeared; and I rarely snacked before bedtime. Best of all, my average speeds rose yet again, I felt better, and riding 3-4 days straight didn't leave me a burned out heap of glycogen-depleted human anymore.
What I learned from the analyses I conducted was that when I added up what I was eating before I made these improvements, despite it seeming plentiful from a visual perspective, it wasn't adequate from a nutritional perspective. A sandwich and two Fig Newtons were not an adequate lunch, for example. It looked OK, but it wasn't even close. With the new plan, it looks like I'm unloading a day's rations when I get out my lunch, but I know that this is what I need for a nice, big mid-day intake of about 800 calories. It will last through until I have a smaller dinner, and balances out a smaller breakfast. The facts from the analysis had to emerge to trump what I was using before, which was just visual feedback informed by a wish to lose weight, a combination that was producing very misleading guidance.
Looking back, it seems somewhat ridiculous that eating properly took me so long to dial in. All the numbers were in front of me, all the information had been published, and the math is absurdly simple. I was just reluctant to implement it, and probably a little lazy. Also, ironically, I was too tired when I needed it most, because my diet was so poor. After 2-3 weeks of tracking my daily eating by calories, carbs, fat, and protein, as well as hydration, calories burned riding, and nutrition on the bike and during recovery, I know what to do. It's completely different than what I was doing, but it works a lot better. I have feedback that is much more meaningful than just what it looks like I'm eating.
Ultimately, with a lot of details in the midst about what foods to include, the basics still seem to be: Eat a good breakfast, a good lunch, and a good dinner; don't snack; eat 0.5 g of carbs per pound of body weight after a long ride (smoothies are great for this); eat more carbs later (bagels are great); and drink plenty of fluids.
And track your diet using a spreadsheet, real data, and goals. Do the math. You might be surprised at how far off-target you really are with your eating.
When I got on a bike again, I was overweight and out of shape, a typical story for most people getting back into cycling after a hiatus for building a career and starting a family. In order to lose weight, I began taking notice of what I was eating, but cycling alone began to peel the pounds away, so I didn't analyze my diet too much. I really didn't know that much about hydration or carbohydrates at that point, so I didn't know what I was doing wrong. Ignorance ruled.
Once I was able to train harder, ride longer, and go faster, I began to create some gaps in my nutrition plan. My hydration was obviously inadequate, and my recovery was, in retrospect, an abomination. But, at the time, I thought I was doing pretty well, because I was losing weight and feeling stronger. I was faster, and I was riding centuries. I bought some more things to drink on the bike and for recovery, and a box of gels. It seemed sufficient.
Juggling my dietary options became a new dimension of my life. To lose some weight, I'd trim out a part of breakfast, or stop eating a type of food wholesale (no ice cream, no cheese, etc.). Instituting these simple rules made avoiding some foods very easy. However, looking back, this was a form of fad dieting at its worst, and didn't make much sense.
Another approach I drifted into was to be disciplined throughout most of the day. I'd start with a small breakfast, snack a little, have a small lunch, snack a little, and so on. The problem became the "and so on." What I soon discovered was that starting with dinner and continuing throughout the rest of the evening, I would be so famished that I would devour anything in my path, including cookies, cereals, nuts, and such. I was holding my weight, but at a price -- I was grumpy, unfocused, and lightheaded if I stood too quickly, throughout most of the day, mainly because of this poor nutrition pattern. My favorite primary care physician, when consulted about the lightheadedness and after giving me a once-over, diagnosed it properly. "Maybe you aren't eating enough," she said. I scoffed, but she was right.
I simply couldn't bring myself to believe I had to eat more. To me, that meant eating more food. What I didn't know is that it meant eating the right food at the right times.
During all of this, I resisted getting analytical. Enter Google Spreadsheets and the Nutrition Data web site. After reading a couple of cycling nutrition books and getting the quantitative aspects through my thick skull, I decided to create a spreadsheet to track my eating habits. Because Google's spreadsheets are virtual, I could enter data from work or home or on the road, and track what I was eating. Because Nutrition Data has a great database, I could look up nearly anything and get the right portion size and actual data. What I found was that my "diet early, gorge late" habit was giving me sparse nutrition through the afternoon, and then I was almost making up for it with the evening chowdown. However, even at that, I was probably chronically depleted of glycogen, due to training and poor recovery. The effects of this -- foggy thinking, bad mood, poor recovery, and such -- were very apparent. And, as with so many things, the symptoms created an inability to think clearly about the cause. Foggy thinking isn't the best state for epiphanies.
However, bull-headed analytics had shown me the problem I'd created for myself through iterations of dietary voodoo. Once I corrected these things using basal metabolic rate (BMR) estimates for daily caloric intake, percentage allocations for carbs, protein, and fat, eating timed with the goal of eliminating late-evening snacking, and actual caloric consumption for rides with matched recovery, including 0.5 g of carbs per pound consumed in the first 30 minutes after a ride, everything fell into place. My mental acuity returned, from morning until night; my sense of humor came back to where it had always been; I recovered from rides faster; incidents of lightheadedness after rides disappeared; and I rarely snacked before bedtime. Best of all, my average speeds rose yet again, I felt better, and riding 3-4 days straight didn't leave me a burned out heap of glycogen-depleted human anymore.
What I learned from the analyses I conducted was that when I added up what I was eating before I made these improvements, despite it seeming plentiful from a visual perspective, it wasn't adequate from a nutritional perspective. A sandwich and two Fig Newtons were not an adequate lunch, for example. It looked OK, but it wasn't even close. With the new plan, it looks like I'm unloading a day's rations when I get out my lunch, but I know that this is what I need for a nice, big mid-day intake of about 800 calories. It will last through until I have a smaller dinner, and balances out a smaller breakfast. The facts from the analysis had to emerge to trump what I was using before, which was just visual feedback informed by a wish to lose weight, a combination that was producing very misleading guidance.
Looking back, it seems somewhat ridiculous that eating properly took me so long to dial in. All the numbers were in front of me, all the information had been published, and the math is absurdly simple. I was just reluctant to implement it, and probably a little lazy. Also, ironically, I was too tired when I needed it most, because my diet was so poor. After 2-3 weeks of tracking my daily eating by calories, carbs, fat, and protein, as well as hydration, calories burned riding, and nutrition on the bike and during recovery, I know what to do. It's completely different than what I was doing, but it works a lot better. I have feedback that is much more meaningful than just what it looks like I'm eating.
Ultimately, with a lot of details in the midst about what foods to include, the basics still seem to be: Eat a good breakfast, a good lunch, and a good dinner; don't snack; eat 0.5 g of carbs per pound of body weight after a long ride (smoothies are great for this); eat more carbs later (bagels are great); and drink plenty of fluids.
And track your diet using a spreadsheet, real data, and goals. Do the math. You might be surprised at how far off-target you really are with your eating.
posted by Recycled Cyclist | 8:05 AM
2 Comments:
Did you have trouble logging your meals when eating out? I mean some ingredients are obvious but others would be difficult.
Also, would you be interested in sharing your (blank) spreadsheet?
Nutrition Data has a surprising amount of information on a lot of standard fast food. For fancier meals at restaurants, tracking what you eat exactly can be a problem, so I've resorted to the tactic of eating basic foods I can track (fruits, vegetables), avoiding the big no-no's (desserts, sauces, butter-laden stuff, etc.), and eating out infrequently. Thanks for the comment!
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