diet and nutrition plans

pbriggsmbr

Hi, I was wondering if anyone has any ideas on diet and nutrition plans. What I mean is ideas on what and what to avoid over the coming months before the race seadon starts. Im 5ft 6 and weigh 12.5 stone which is not light st all especially when ideally I need to be around 10 and half for the race season .

Advice would be appreciated

xisforxray

Do not go anywhere near the paleo diet.

- High carb
- Low fat
- Low sodium
- Vegetarian/Vegan
- Drink plenty of water

Check out durianriders on YouTube.

imposter2.0

xisforxray wrote:

Check out durianriders on YouTube.

well worth a look if you only want to eat bananas.

ronnierocket

Definitely go the non processed whole food option. Plan your meals and learn to cook a little especially knowing how to make a good omelette, soups. Buy a decent knife and learning how to chop, your life becomes a lot easier.

My daily diet (esp weekdays) consists of the following or similar.

Breakfast Porridge with a bit of honey, blueberries, cinammon.

Lunch would be a salad (iceberg, tomatoes, peppers, red onion, jalapenos, sun dried tomatoes) with some protein (chicken or tuna) and a home made vegetable soup(made in a batch to last the week)

Dinner would be chilli or fajitas. Possibly with sweet potato chips/wedges done in the oven. Snack on Almonds if need be.

Fallback dinner/lunches would be an omelette. Done right, they are amazing. Remember Subway does a good salad lunch that is fresh and cheap £3 with a bottle of water.

Remember your diet doesnt have to be dull or boring, mexican, indian, middle eastern, herbs in general can transform most dishes.

LegendLust

xisforxray wrote:

Do not go anywhere near the paleo diet.

- High carb
- Low fat
- Low sodium
- Vegetarian/Vegan
- Drink plenty of water

Check out durianriders on YouTube.

That advice is well out of date.

bahzob

This topic has been done to death many times before.

The answer is very simple.

(I feel I can speak with a bit of authority since I am 5'8",54 years old. Over the years I got my weight down from 90+kg to a racing weight of 70kg. For next year I want to lose a bit more so have been putting some focus on weight management and currently am 67kg/13% fat with no loss of power which is fine for now, I plan to be racing at around 65kg come 2014.)

Most important -Just eat a balanced diet of food prepared from raw ingredients. Ronnierocket's post above has some good ideas. This approach is easy quick and cheap and what the best cyclists in the world do. There is an excellent series from Sky here with lots of great advice and ideas. Just eat like this and you will be fit, healthy and in control of your weight.
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2c6CH5nJ_4

Also:
- Don't eat any extra food for workouts of 2 hours or less. You don't need it, the body has ample resources to fuel these.
- Avoid all supplements including those that claim to aid "exercise" or "recovery". Fact is that no-one posting here trains long enough or hard enough to need these. For long 2+ hour rides bananas, sandwiches whatever are fine
- If aiming to lose weight keep a food diary and check that you really are eating less calories than you are expending. It's very easy to be fooled by this, especially if your day job means you sit around for large parts of the day, even more so if you don't follow advice above and buy prepared foods. Use this information to establish an eating pattern that results in a small calorie deficit each day when you need to lose weight and a balanced regime when you are maintaining it.
- Don't kid yourself there is a magic diet out there that will allow you to lose weight over the long term without requiring you to show any self control/discipline.
- Dieting doesn't mean you have to suffer. The above will allow you to be in control of your diet/weight. One benefit of this you can allow yourself treats. Myself I like to drink beer and do so. I just factor in the calories in a pint and do a bit longer workout to pay for these.

ric/rstsport

bahzob wrote:

Also:
- Don't eat any extra food for workouts of 2 hours or less. You don't need it, the body has ample resources to fuel these.

Untrue: there is evidence to show that eating carbohydrates during exercise of less than 2 hours allows you to ride at a higher power output, even when your body is not short on muscle and liver glycogen. This allows you to train harder and thus become fitter, which in turn allows you to expend greater amounts of energy as you're now riding at a higher power output.

I am not suggesting that people go out and consume gels left, right and centre. there are many ways to consume CHO

On the other hand, it *may* be of benefit to consume energy type products during races for many of the people here.

- Avoid all supplements including those that claim to aid "exercise" or "recovery". Fact is that no-one posting here trains long enough or hard enough to need these. For long 2+ hour rides bananas, sandwiches whatever are fine

again untrue: there are some supplements which aid exercise which allow you to generate more power output (i.e., you'll become fitter and expend more energy) and some of these contain minimal amounts of energy. For e.g. caffeine, sodium phosphate. Beetroot juice - but that will have some calories to it

Ric

team47b

As Ric says eating carbs during rides under 2 hours is necessary.

Glycogen in the liver is broken down by a hormone called glucagon which breaks down the glycogen into glucose, this hormone is dependent on your blood sugar level being high enough to do this, so eating carbs during rides under 2 hours maintains blood sugar levels which allows liver glycogen to be broken down and used as energy, without the right level of blood glucose it becomes impossible to use the stored glycogen.

ric/rstsport

and to add, it won't be necessary to eat on every ride of 2 hours or less, but to carte blanche say you don't need to eat is incorrect.

bahzob

Ric/RSTSport wrote:

and to add, it won't be necessary to eat on every ride of 2 hours or less, but to carte blanche say you don't need to eat is incorrect.

OK maybe I could have been a bit more precise but check out the OP. This is a thread about weight loss. Your advice is more appropriate for those who have control of their weight and want to maximise performance. A fundamental mistake imo is to try and do both at the same time, while this can be done it's difficult and it's more likely that you will fail at both. I would advise getting control of weight first then working on building performance from a weight you are comfortable with and can maintain. This is especially true at this time of year.

In this context of this topic the best and simplest advice is not to eat for training rides of less than 2 hours. I deliberately stated this in black and white terms given the volume of misinformation evidenced so often in forums like this which stems in a large part from the junk marketing of companies who want to sell you their products + pros who should know better endorsing them for the sake of a quick buck. If you read and believed these you would be eating their pre-workout drinks/food, taking more during a workout and then one of their "recovery" products. All for a 60 minute session with 30 minutes of actual work.

If you eat a sensible diet then you will have enough glycogen and food in the process of being digested to comfortably fuel a workout of less than 2 hours, especially since for most a large part of this will be low-intensity.

So if you want to lose weight best advice is keep things simple, and "carte blanche" avoid extras until you have regained control over your weight. Then, by all means, try introducing some new things to see if they help in terms of improving intensity over time. If you follow my advice you will have established a good baseline to see if they have any real effect. If you just blindly take them in the hope they will make you better then chances are they won't plus will screw up your attempts to control your weight.

Same goes for your comments about longer rides and supplements.

typekitty

bahzob wrote:

- If aiming to lose weight keep a food diary and check that you really are eating less calories than you are expending. It's very easy to be fooled by this, especially if your day job means you sit around for large parts of the day, even more so if you don't follow advice above and buy prepared foods. Use this information to establish an eating pattern that results in a small calorie deficit each day when you need to lose weight and a balanced regime when you are maintaining it.

+1. There are many free, online apps and websites that let you track your food and exercise. They are so useful. After a few days you'll be in the habit of writing everything down and it's quite an eye opener. Would say don't skimp on any detail – record everything, no matter how minor you think it is.

bahzob wrote:

Don't kid yourself there is a magic diet out there that will allow you to lose weight over the long term without requiring you to show any self control/discipline

This. It isn't easy but you will get better at the discipline side of things. I'm a firm believe that you can't out-exercise a bad diet.

Well done bahzob with the weight loss, rather inspiring. All the best for 2014.

pbriggsmbr

Many thanks for all the advice, some great ideas. I think I may be a bit off the boil at moment, which is making dieting hard.
Will take all the advice into account.