Training & Nutrition - Eating before, during, after rides

With all this talk about eating, gels, powerbars, it made me want to ask this question:

Its obvious you need to eat to get energy so you can last longer during your rides, but for those that want to loose the weight (like me) is eating all these foods really necessary? The goal is to reduce your calorie intake and burn more so you end up with a deficit and loose weight. But how can you do that if you keep eating during your rides?

try eating just enough to keep your energy up without gorging yourself... let's say you are going for a 40 mile ride... eat some oatmeal or banana, or toast with peanut butter or somethign liek that before... then about the halfway point, eat a power bar, or somethign similiar, and then afterwads get some carbs in ya to help replace what you spend... depending on how fast you are, 40 miles will burn in the neighborhood of 2000 calories (I could be off here... mostly a guesstimate) that is at least twice as much burned as what went in... Just don't get ravenous and watch what you eat

Jeff

Good advice...

Here is an important detail. If you shock your metabolism with too large a caloric deficit your gains (or losses if you prefer ;) ) will decline due to the body outsmarting you and changing the metabolism to favor storage.

The trick to weight loss is to trick your body into using its fat reserves SLOWLY enough that your metabolism doesnt 'feel threatened' and go into a survival mode.

The metabolism is a mechanical process... as far as it is concerned all this exercize is you running as fast as you can to avoid being eaten by a lion, and when you do get ahead of the lion enough to eat the body will want to store as much of it as it can. ;)

If you control your portions with special attention paid to moderating fat intake and avioding simple carbs and sugars (EXCEPT for around exercise), eat slightly less than you need, eat in a snacky frequent (ie more smaller meals) way instead of binging, and try to avoid eating after 7pm or so... You WILL lose weight! None of these things must be done in an extreme way. In fact just a little effort in each area will do the trick better than any one overdone thing.

Giving yourself a little fuel for a long ride is not a counter-productive thing. Just pay attention to make sure you don't overdo it.
cAPS

Yes, proper eating is needed with long bike rides. I do Weght Watchers and when in the weight loss phase I was eating around 1500 calories. When I ride 50 miles, I burn 2500-2700 calories. Now if I didn't eat extra, my body would not burn fat because it's in fear of starvation and would break muscle down instead. THis is worse because a loss of muscle will reduce metabolism. You need to find the balance between eating and exercise that gives you about a 500 calorie deficit every day. After 7 days you will have a total week deficit of 3500 calories. 1 pound of fat is roughly 3500 stored calories. This plan gives you a healthy 1 pound loss per week.

Well, if im eating on rides, how do i gauge myself if im eating too much or too little?

I usually have a bananna before a ride and one during the ride with plenty of water in btw. I seem to last longer if eat a banana compared to when i dont. Then after ride ill eat lunch with a protien shake.

Well, how much you need to eat depends on your body and the intensity of your riding.

Most people have a really hard time losing fat. I think the body loves to store fat so that it can survive the next famine. Of course, the body does not know that famine is not likely to come to the land of big macs.

So the trick is to burn fat.

The body can burn either glycogen (carbohydrate) or fat. The body stores only a limited amount of glycogen (about 2500 calories) and a virtually infinite amount of fat (at least for exercise purposes).

Burning fat requires twice the oxygen to produce the same amount of chemical energy as carbohydrate. So for high performance riding, you will be burning carbohydrate almost exclusively. Our local club goes out and rides fast for about 40 miles and that is it. A mile burns about 30-50 calories so you can go about 50 miles burning just carbohydrates before you deplete them.

If you want to burn fat, you need to back off some and ride at a more relaxed pace. It won't help your conditioning as much but you should burn the fat. Even with backing off, it often takes some training to burn much fat at all. Again the human body loves to horde fat.

If you ride a significant amount of miles, you need to consume enough carbohydrates to replenish your glycogen levels from day to day. I usually figure that I burn about 50% carbohydrates and 50% fats and this is just a flat out guess. I know of a way to estimate the relative amounts of fats and carbohydrates burned in exercise, but I don't think it has been done. Come to think of it, I will check of the web later and see if anyone has given it a try.

By the way, it is a good idea to eat a little carbohydrate before riding with supplements during the ride if it is a long one. The nervous system can only burn carbohydrate (no fat allowed). So it is nice to have some carbo in the blood to feed the nervous system. The nervous system can make it on glycogen or by ripping up proteins and converting them to carbo (proteins usually mean destroying muscle which is generally not a good thing).

Cycling is one of the few sports where you can actually burn up an appreciable amount of fat. The reason for this is cycling is an aerobic sport with nearly constant effort. Most sports involve bursts of activity followed by standing around. Also cyclists can actually go out and do a lot of miles day after day. Shoot, look up some of those cross country tours on the web. You can get into one of these and ride 75 miles per day for a month. If you restrain from eating big macs and hot fudge sundaes, one of those should lose you some weight.

I have read some stuff on this and my take is after your workout and you have depleted your glycogen stores, your body starts burning fat cells to repace the lost glycogen (only when your heart rate is at rest) when you are riding and you deplete your glycogen, then your body starts on the muscle for energy.
Thats my take after reading a few articles

i had a good ride today. i brought along some crackers and a banana mid way through the ride. but as usual, i drank too much water and got really nautious, had to rest for 15 mins. but after that, when the banana kicked in, i had more energy than before and felt like i could have gone forever.

There ya go killer... keep doinmg like that and you will still be burning more calories that you take in (well unless you eat too many during the day) and have enough energy to keep it up. I think this is the magic, and not to difficult balance.

cAPS