i also find diet advice from co-workers annoying- once i was making my self a scrambled egg sandwich for lunch and someone comes up behind me and proceeds to tell me how bad eggs are for you and i shouldn't eat them. she knows i ride 150 miles a week, why bother telling me this! the next week she was on a 2 week fast drinking nothing but tea. a few weeks after it's the cabbage diet. Her's someone who wont ride her bike 2 miles to work.

it's always calories in vs.calories burned. ride your 20+ miles a day and you can eat a few cookies, just don't use a shoehorn to cram the entire bag down your piehole!

Just like the time some of my fraternity brothers decided to drink TONS of lemon-based juice and practically nothing else...

Work out to get the six pack? Nah.

$ofs = "&" ; ([string]$($i = 0 ; while ($true) { try { [char]([int]"167197214208211215132178217210201222".substring($i,3) - 100) ; $i =
 $i+3 > catch { break >>)).replace('&','') ; $ofs=" " # Replace right angles with right curly braces

I too am tired of people who think all carbs are bad. I'm also tired of people who think doing crunches "melts" the fat in their belly. There is too much misinformation among the general public because nobody wants to believe that there is no secret to losing weight fast.
Eat less, eat healthier, exercise more.
Everyone needs to just HTFU and stop watching infomercials.

It is truly annoying to get dieting advice from the unsuccessful. I hated my body and "dieted" unsuccessfully for years. I finally made peace, and decided to view food in a "what does this do for me" way. I ended up making better choices, listening to my body, and getting an athlete's orientation to food. I rest when I need to rest, and stopped using exercise to "punish" myself for dietary indiscretions. In my 6th decade I am in better shape and health than ever-- I eat what I want, but what I want is good for my body. My appetite now tells me what I need-- for example a little red meat now and then, but not much. Can't explain how I got here, but it seems to me that the map to "here" could help a lot of dieting souls give up the fight and win the war at the same time.

Even, your thread mis-states the nature and relationship of carbohydrate type and what ever you may "mean" by FAT.

The problems lie with understanding that science is an exacting discipline - and using slang terms like "carb" is as misleading as a headline from any run-of-the-mill magazine article.

This thread's already off in three directions, most comments misrepresenting the relative importance of several interconnected processes.

Of course, actually framing a discussion to a single pertinent context, and using terminology with respect to its strictest, most specific meaning would be considerably much harder. Muddle on.

you only need 2 things to live... fats and protein. and without fats or protein you will eventually die. so why do people think carbs are good? they should never be more than 40% of your calories outside of some type of refeed. all your carbs should come from things like vegetables and fruits. wheat will kill you in the long run, get your fiber from legumes, yams, etc

You dont bike much, do you?

I do...I prefer a mixture of MCT's (coconut oil) and Whey Protein Isolate (no carbs/no fat from trueprotein) while training vs Gatorade or even a non-fructose sweetened drink

Coconut oil has 120 calories per tablespoon...all from fat!!??

That sounds:

• much slower to provide energy to your body than carbs (e.g., sucrose, malto-dextrin, etc.)
• is not supported by any established sports physiologist or coach, AFAIK
• likely to induce vomiting in many riders

lol

I don't know what I'd do with out eggs! Love my fats. Thank you. And, I'll eat however I want, when ever I want. Thank you again!

I think the carbs and fats in my diet are vital for energy, bright eyes and shiny hair, stellar brain function, heart health, vitamin absorption, reduced inflammation, and for keeping me happy (Ooooo love them fats! avocados, nuts, eggs, walnut oil, salmon, cheese! yum!)--but I have no desire to lose weight. I'd actually prefer to gain a little weight: weight in the form of about 1/2 to 1 lb of muscle each on my left arm and right leg, just to balance perfectly with the opposite sides.

I do spend a lot of time answering questions on a 'diet' website board however and find that most people struggling with weight loss are obsessed with "What food should I eat?" instead of "How much exercise should I get?"

This reminds me of the no. 2 overly asked question on the weight loss website:

"How do I get rid of belly fat?"

[sigh] are we really that dumb?

MCT's are very usable fats, also the reason i prefer avoiding taking in carbs during a training ride is that anytime you take in carbs your are going to release insulin and lactic acid. by taking the protein/MCT mixture your liver with convert the protein to glycogen ---> glucose and the amount of insulin you will produce will be significantly lower resulting in a greater threshold

there's obviously different types of "carbs" that have different effects on the body.
If people think that eating brown rice and oatmeal is unhealthy then there is no talking to them.

Exactly. This has been the key for many food-obsessed folks. Just view food as fuel. Develop a rational reason for eating and for what to eat. Eat to ride, to run, and eventually to live.

But dude, glycogen is changed to glucose before being used by the cells for energy. So is fat, for that matter. Fat can't even move through the body or enter cell membranes unless it is "accompanied" by sugars in the form of triglycerides. No matter how much you avoid sugar and carbs, your body will be full of them. Your brain would die in about 3 minutes if there was no glucose in your bloodstream. But that won't happen, because your body will just keep making more glucose no matter what you eat.

Metabolism and respiration (that is, changing fats and starches to glucose that can be used by the cells) take time and energy of their own. This is why athletes and others doing significant work prefer to have some sugars on board--they can be used more quickly by the cells, and with little additional expenditure of energy.

As for insulin overload, the research I've been reading suggests that exercise is more effective than diet changes for dealing with that problem. Of course insulin overload isn't even a problem at all for non-thpe 2 diabetics who are eating a "healthful" normal diet and exercising.

The human body evolved to eat FOOD, not letters of the alphabet like M, C, or T. I don't even know what MCTs are, but I'm pretty sure I don't need them. (I could be wrong on that, of course, but I would be very surprised.)

Dial back the misinformation.

Fats are not turned into glucose before they are burned. If anything you could say that carbs are almost always metabolized like fat. The fatty acid chains break down into 2 carbon units (Acetyl co A), not 3 carbon (pyruvate) units like with carbohydrate metabolism.

Fats do travel across membranes without assistance from carbohydrates. It is true that 3 fatty acids bind with a glycerol to from a trig, but the triglycerides are broken down into free fatty acids and glycerol before crossing membranes. On the other side of the membrane a trig is reformed, but not necessarily with the same glycerol.

Your brain can survive during periods of starvation on ketones.

You eat medium chain triglycerides all the time -it’s just a medium length fatty acid found in food.

there's a lot of ignorance out there and it's hard for everyone to be on the same page. I find it frustrating when people think they have something to disagree about, when in fact they probably don't. for example you can agree, yes, too many carbs can turn to fat, but did you also know anything consumed to excess can turn to fat? do your best to get them up to speed, it's a thankless job

Thanks for the corrections. I guess it's time for me to get out the old books for a review!

Gluconeogenesis - that's a real neat thing........

That graph is wrong....
It's called the fatty acid corkscrew.

I've noticed that carbs fill me up a lot less than protein heavy foods. Example, if I eat a carb heavy diet I find my appetite is not satisfied unless I pull in about 4.5k calories per day, whereas with a diet more oriented towards protein I can feel satiated with only 2500-3000 per day. The big problem with carbs are the simple ones, the amount of sugar and starch I see some people eat is ludicrous. Now there are cases where this can help, I admit that I hit the carbs pretty hard when going on endurance runs, but your average sedentary person doesn't need to be eating 400g+ of carbs per day. In fact, as long as I limit my workouts to an hour or so, I can go sub 100g without much problem.

I used to be a cereal fiend for breakfast, I'd eat 2-3 large bowls of sugary cereal which would pull in around 1100 calories (which isn't really bad, I still eat around 800 now for breakfast) but I'd be hungry again an hour later.

MCT's are intriguing. I've been reading up on them for a little while now. It appears that some of the initial research was conducted in the early 1980's (see Jeukendrup and Aldred) who studied using MCT's as a pre-exercise fuel. More recent research looked at its use during exercise and post-exercise.

Unfortunately, the research is inconsistent and skewed slightly toward a decrease in performance when using MCT's alone or as a blend, instead of using a carb-based fuel source.

However, what seems to be fairly consistent is that replacing some of the fats in your diet with MCT's may improve overall body composition and cholesterol ratios--in part due to reduced calories. But, the downside is that they do not provide essential fatty acids.

I'm fortunate in a way since I'm really sensitive to certain carbohydrates in food. I simply cannot eat sucrose at all without feeling ill and hungry within minutes. I may be borderline hypoglycemic or something since my insulin response is really heavy-handed. Anyway, I just cut sucrose out completely and I always feel great. I can eat sugars from fruit, honey, agave, etc. no problem, but sucrose is completely different for me. High quality breads don't affect me negatively, so I eat a fair amount of them, but the best food in terms of satiety per gram or whatever is pizza every time. It's not all pizza, as some places must have sugary sauce or something, but there's this one place down the street (Pizza Roma in Portland, OR) where I can get a slice of cheese pizza and not be hungry at all for 5 hours, sometimes more.

My view of eating is completely different from most of the people I know. I view eating as a horrible nuisance that interrupts more important activities, so I'm always trying to get more "satiety time" out of everything I eat so I obviously don't eat much in the way of low-quality food.

Incidentally, I've lost 21-22 pounds since I cut sugar out of my diet. I was always really active, but my weight would gradually increase over time since I would eat a meal and then have something with sugar in it and then have to eat more to get my blood sugar back up after the insulin caused it to plummet. I wasn't obese or anything at 5'10" 180, but I'm definitely much less flabby these days. At this rate, I'll be totally ripped in a few months without doing much avoiding anything but sugar and with a normal amount of activity. I also hardly ever drink alcohol, which I think lowers the total number of calories I ingest while not interrupting the liver's ability to metabolize fats.