Eating Before or After a Long Ride

Travis_M wrote:

Hi,

If you want to loose weight, is it better NOT to eat after a long ride (100km) or should I eat something?

I eat a couple of fruit bars and or banana during the ride, with plenty of water.

I'm in Beijing and getting hold of High 5 or anything like is like finding Rocking Horse doo dah

Regards,

you should eat! riding 100km at a time will shift weight. just eat a well balanced, low saturated fat diet on top of this and you'll be fine.

food is kinda important for such activities and recovery!

To do 100km you're going to need a vast amount of calories in your body. I'd hazard a guess as to say that you would need about 3-4000kcal after the ride just to walk the next day.

If you don't have enough energy onboard while excersising you will start to flag and therefore not perform at your most effecient, and burn less calories. Its a difficult line to tred, eat too much and you put on weight, eat too little and you won't gain the full benefit of the excercise, and it could become a very unpleasent slog, meaning your less likely to do it again.

A lot of the nutritional advice printed about cycling is aimed at people that are at the right weight and are trying to improve there cycling, but for those that are overweight you need to follow the guidelines with a little adjustment. Make sure you've eaten some good foods at least 2 hours before riding (eat too near the time of riding, and too much blood is being diverted to the stomach to absorb the sugar from the food you've eaten, this will make your tired and possibly feel sick), if you are riding more than 30 minutes then it's adviseable to take some easily digestable foods with you. These can be in the form of energy drinks, ceral bars, banana's ect. This will keep your energy levels topped up so that you can put the maximium effort into the cycling. Grazing on this food is better than one big meal during the ride, I personnally sip from a camelbak full of energy drink during my rides. This gives a constant but slow input of calories that mean my energy levels and therefore calories burnt dip very little even towards the end of my rides (Normally around 50Km)

Once you finish eat within 2 hours, include carbs and protien in one meal, this has been found to be the most effective time to eat and adds recovery and muscle growth. This will allow you to cycle again sooner than if you don't eat. If like me you don't finish the ride till late a night (sometimes 12.30am) then using a recovery drink is a good idea, this gets carbs and protien into the body quick, but means your not going to bed on a full stomach as liquids pass through the stomach and into the blood stream very quickly.

Loosing fat is all about eating less calories than your body needs, and around 500 less than that required to maintain your body weight per day is the normal recommended deficit, anymore than that and you risk loosing muscle at the same time which is counter productive as more muscle equals more calories burnt while at rest, but you need to take into consideration the extra calories a big cycle ride is taking from the body, and ideally up your calorie intake for that excercise so you are still at a calorie deficit per day.