Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
That's all good, as far as it goes. I see folks here saying, oh, you don't need pre or post, or even during fuel for most workouts, because your ordinary diet will supply the carbs and calories. But think about that for a minute. I have a daily diet which keeps me within a pound of the same weight week after week. The food is different every day, all 3 meals, my wife likes it that way and it's fine with me. She cycles through about 400 different dinner recipes.
Then I add in workouts, 6 days/week, week after week, totaling only ~3Mj/week, but guess what happened? After a couple weeks at that level, I couldn't do it anymore. I wasn't overtrained, felt fine, slept well, it was just that the pedals felt heavy and I didn't have any endurance. Obviously enough, that works for one ride, but not for a lifestyle unless you're going to start counting calories or increasing the size of every meal recipe to suit whether or not you're working out that day and how many calories you expect to burn. For me, that's insanely complicated. My wife cooks a big pot of something and we eat it for 2-4 days, not consecutively of course because we eat different food every day, but spread out over the week and planned ahead for for 2 weeks, partly because Covid, and partly because that's how we've done it for decades.
The by far more rational approach is to simply add calories to each day according to the energy expenditure or some approximation to that, and mostly carbs with a some protein. We've gone back to doing what we've always done successfully: we have a startup drink and a recovery drink every day we work out. The startup drink is always the same, but the recovery drink varies in carb calories depending on the workout. No more problems, steady energy every day, very slow weight loss, no more dropping by a pound the next day.
Chris Carmichael is full of it, that one has to put out 1700 kj before one deserves a recovery drink, much less a startup. Sure, once a week one can do that fine, but do that every day and you're going down the drain and real fast. It doesn't work, not even at my miserably low power output unless all you do is work out and plan and create meals.
If you exercise consistently there isn’t really any more planning involved than what you do for your baseline 3 meals/day. How did you decide how much to eat for each meal? Like most, you likely arrived at reasonable portions based on your natural hunger and satiation levels. If you’re consistent with exercise those meals, or the number of them, would get bigger or more frequent to compensate. You don’t need to get out the scales and weigh every gram of food if you weren’t already doing that for your baseline.
Pre-Covid I used to commute about 60km day. Mon to Fri I would burn an extra 1400kJ/day so I naturally just ate more frequently. I couldn’t (or didn’t want to) eat that much extra during or immediately after the rides but had no problem eating more frequently during the day. I couldn’t make it to lunch without a mid morning snack and usually had something mid afternoon as well. These days I ride inside at the end of the day, maybe 700-1000kJ. I’m consistent and end up eating more during normal meals and snacks so I don’t go to bed too hungry. I just have water on the bike and prefer real food to sugar drinks. Longer rides on the weekend I’ll eat and drink on the ride but it doesn’t come anywhere close to replacing the calories burned while riding.
if you exercise consistently, it’s not difficult to eat enough during the day to compensate for your normal exercise routine. It might get a little more complicated if you exercise less frequently or only occasionally but in those cases it also doesn’t matter as much if you don’t compensate for every calorie burned while riding.