timmhaan

i estimated my calorie intake, carbs, and protein for an average day and this is what i came up with:

Calories: 2500
Carbs: 330g
Protein: 80g

i'm a skinny tall guy riding about 9-11 hours a week and doing races on the side. i have a feeling i'm not eating nearly enough. the online "rough estimates" put me at needing between 2700 to 5000 calories. granted these are overly simplistic, but i seem to be falling short of that. but my weight hasn't changed in quite some time.

i'm 5'11" and about 140. where should i be in terms of calories, carbs, and protein?

JLauren

If you're weight is stable, then that suggests you're at least close to the calories you need.

Tom Stormcrowe

If you haven't lost weight, you're meeting the caloric requirements.
As long as your hair isn't falling out and your nails aren't getting brittle, you're meeting your protein needs, at least closely.

As a baseline, we need about 1 gram of protein/ kg of body mass down to a minimum of 65 grams. **NOTE: I said minimum, not maximum. you can exceed this amount.** If going high protein, remember to stay hydrated to avoid kidney damage.

As to your carbs, I don't know what type of carbs you are eating, but it seems to be enough. You aren't bonking easily in rides, right?

Last, a good multivitamin. O'd suggest an adult dose of a good childrens chewable, due to the fact that the chewables are far more easily metabolizable. You might think about the Bcomplex (B1, B6, B12) and C as well, as both are H2O soluble and can't really be taken to overdose level and are important. Thiamin (B1) is particularily important to cognitive function, for example

timmhaan

thanks - that's good info. carbs are mostly in the form of wheat breads, pastas, and cearel. i'm a little worried that i may be eating too many starchy foods, so i'm going to try to introduce some higher protein foods and more lean meat\fish in my diet.

i'm in *pretty* good shape - but not where i'd like to be, which is why i started to think twice about my diet. i'm getting some lackluster race results depsite having a structured training program. i'm certain i can make improvements with my nutrition. problem is it's kinda confusing to me!

Tom Stormcrowe

Don't go too lean though, Animal Fat provides 5X the amount of cellular energy of that which Carbs produce.

Here's a quick and dirty tutorial on cellular metabolism. We need ATP (Adenotriphosphate) to power our bodies
Kreb Cycle(Glucose Metabolism, aerobic): Cost-1ATP-Yield-30ATP
Glycolysis (Anaerobic Cycle):Cost:1ATP-Yierld-6ATP

Lipid Metabolism:Cost-5ATP-Yield-150ATP molecules to power the muscle
Protein: Cost and yield same as lipids-waste urea, hence the need to protect the kidneys with lotso water

Incidentally, there is an herbal supplement floating around as a dietary additive...don't know the brand name. It acts as an Adenosine Uptake Inhibitor. Yes, it prevents you from utilizing Kreb and Glycolysis, but at the cost of burniong protein and fat. It cam mess up your cellular metabolism and damage your heart and kidneys as well as your liver.....STAY AWAY from Adenosine Uptake Inhibitors...just a little sidebar. I know you didn't say anything about using them and I have no reason to think you are. Just an infodump for yours and others benefit. The substance has been yakked about in some of the cycling blogs I read and I started checking into effects to reinforce my theory that it is harmful, and guess what, It Is!

Tom Stormcrowe

When you eat sugary foods, try to make sure they have a moderate glycemic balance, by the way. Glucose/Galactose are monosaccharides and sucrose is a disaccharide9You need the sucrose for another reason as well, because Galactose tastes pretty nasty!). If you blend mono and disaccharides, one slows and balances the uptake of the other(That's how Ghu and Cloff Bars work), giving you a sustained burn. Pasta and cereals are good if they are the right type. Rice Flour pasta is great, for example as it's a great source of Lycopine, an essential Amino Acid our bodies need but can't make in situ. Beans are also a great source of Lycopine.The Wheat breads are better than white, however Rye is excellent as well nutritionally.

By the way, so you know where I'm getting this information, I am in Nursing school. I need to tell you though that it is NOT medical advice! Simply a bit of nutritional information available to anyone with the time and patience to dig it up and vet the info for accuracy. Keep riding and have a blast!

DannoXYZ 

Just a question, if you're eating high-GI carbs while exercising... where does it go?

timmhaan

the toilet?

ericgu

You can use high-gi carbs perfectly well when you are exercising, as long as you can absorb them easily out of your stomach. They aren't quite as optimal as a mix of high and low-gi, as they'll give you a more spikey blood sugar, but assuming you tolerate them well, you're fine.

I think of my nutrition as two different areas. There is my normal diet, where I try to eat lots of fruit, vegetables, and complex carbs. And then there's my ride nutrition, where I subsist mostly on Accelerade, which is carbs with some protein in it, along with post-ride recovery drinks. You need to be careful with the nutritional information you read, as a lot of it is designed for sedentary people.

I think Carmichaels food book is pretty good - I think it's "food for fitness", or something like that.

timmhaan

high gi carbs are strachy food products, like pasta and potatos right?

DannoXYZ 

Those would be medium-GI foods as they take time to digest, go through at about 150-200 cal/hr. High-GI is simpler-carbs like gels, energy-drinks. The fastest digestion/absorption-rate is about 250-300 cal/hr for the simplest carbs like these . I don't see how that can balance out a 800-900 cal/hr burn-rate when you're exercising...

timmhaan

okay that makes sense. that's why eating higher-GI foods is recommended for post-ride meals, right? the higher absorption rate would fill that small window of time that your body has after a workout.

is the opposite true then? lower or moderate GI foods would be better suited before a workout.

BryanW

As I understand it, one reason for doing thousands of miles of training is to teach the body to use a greater %age of fat as fuel at a given intensity. You'll never be able to refuel enough to match your caloric usage during a ride, but if you're well-trained, a lot of the deficit will be from your fat reserves. Otherwise all the deficit would come from glycogen, and none of us would last more than a couple of hours.

To the OP - again, as I understand it - you might not be performing as well as you think you should because you're not building muscle. To build muscle, you need to eat more calories than you burn off. I've heard that 500 extra a day is a good rate.

DannoXYZ 

You're right the first time, high-GI for exercising and recovery, lower-GI stuff at other times. The point I was implying was that blood-glucose concentrations and rate of uptake & burn are dynamic interactions requiring differential-equations to model; it's not static thing and the relative-rates changes with exercise intensity. With moderate to high aerobic work, there's no issues with GI of any kind really, you're trying to digest as fast as possible, but there's still no way to keep up with the burn-rate. It's not possible to get a glucose/insulin spike while you're exercising regardless of what you eat (this really only happens if you eat a giant meal while sitting on the couch watching TV). Or maybe if you're doing massively high intensity efforts without a lot of aerobic in between such as weight-lifting or sprints, yes, it may be possible to raise glucose since you're not burning it off as fast. Even then, higher insulin is a good thing because you want to make your muscle-cells absorb glucose from the bloodstream ASAP for energy.

The other aspect of aerobic exercise is that you do not need insulin to trigger your muscle-cells to absorb glucose from the blood-stream. The muscle-glycogen is being used up faster than you can replace through eating, so the cells are soaking it up as fast as you can digest, yet your blood-sugar is still dropping; the bonk is inevitable, just a matter of time. With lots of training, you can extend this time-to-bonk from 2-3 hours for beginning riders to 10-12-15 hours at a time by using a higher-percentage of fat (this still maxes out at about 250-350 fat cal/hr for the fittest athletes however). It also depends upon the speed, the slower you go, the longer you can go, but it can get awfully boring doing a century at a 10mph pace...