The Cycling Aesthete

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• Regarding the Paleo Diet, I don't put too much faith in any "named" diet, even the "Paleo Diet for Athletes." Take the Paleo Diet, add enough complex carbs to support an endurance athlete, and then you just have a regular healthy diet that you would be eating anyway.

  Yes, primitive man was mainly a hunter and ate small amounts of carbohydrates, generally in the form of vegetables, and tons of protein. They were in a constant state of what we call "Ketogenesis." Without delving too far into the specifics, your body produces ketones as a result of breaking down fatty acids for energy, ie: You're in a fat burning state.

  The longer you remain in that sort of state, the more efficient your body becomes at converting fat into energy. The problem for endurance athletes [with this diet] participating in activity for more than an hour or so is that you quickly deplete your body of whatever glycogen it may have stored, and then you're running off of fat energy.

  That's where you experience the bonk: You have no gas [glycogen] left in the tank so you use fat by necessity. Great if you want to lose weight and get shredded, but absolute shit if you're trying to get good hard miles in or win a race. No matter how acclimated your body is to being ketogenic, you simply will not be able to convert fat to energy as fast as you can use carbohydrate energy.

  Also take into account that even though primitive man, thousands upons thousands of years ago, is technically the same species as us, that doesn't mean that evolution by Natural Selection hasn't taken place with us. Their physiologies were specifically adapted to the demands of their time period, which included being ketogenic. Our metabolisms are not the same as their's.

  Simply Put, even if you acclimate to the Paleo Diet for several weeks, your performance simply will not be as high when compared to how you would perform if you had an adequate intake of carbs.

  Now, that's not to say that "bonk training" or the Paleo Diet is absolutely useless. The same way we train our muscles to push big gears, we can train our metabolisms. If you want to learn how to ride when you're bonking, then this is the best way to do it. You basically teach your body how to work better in ketogenesis, so that when you DO bonk, your body knows how to deal with it.

  Also, if you have a body fat % higher than 16% or so, it's a good way to lose some excess weight relatively quickly. However, like I said, you need adequate carb intake if you want to perform at your best, because that is the easiest for your body to access and use.

  This is the part where I wait for all the Paleo people on the interweb to come cut me down because I don't know what I'm talking about.

  Seriously, those Paleo-fanatics are insane. A lot of them are Cross-Fitters. Go figure.

  "I can do 100 pullups and a bajillion pushups while doing backflips all with a kettlebell hanging from my testicles."

  That's great, but I need the energy to win a bike race that lasts 5 hours, and sorry, but fat energy doesn't cut it.

  Take that as you will.

  Bite me, hairy cross-fitters.

• @Omar
  What's a "Cross Fitter"?

• @Omar
  Don't answer my question - have just found the answer. Oh dear.

• @Omar Yeah, I'm certainly not advocating a ketogenic diet. Nor am I a dogmatist or have any "answers" on this topic. Dean Karnazes, an ultramarathon runner, is an example of someone who has used a "zone" type diet, which is a moderate carb diet - not low enough to put one in ketosis. What all these diets have in common is that they think about food in terms of its hormonal effects, which I think is fascinating, and gets lost in the whole "gotta replace your muscle glycogen so you don't bonk" thinking, which keeps us guzzling sugar water and energy gels all ride long. Certainly modulating insulin seems crucial. It's known that the surest way to ruin growth hormone release from intense exercise is to spike insulin, and yet we're all told that we must spike insulin during this "window of opportunity" after exercise to replace muscle glycogen. I read somewhere, that old-time hardmen cyclists used to think it was BAD to eat after a long ride! Given that both intense exercise and fasting elevate GH and - due to keeping insulin low, also alter prostaglandin production in unique ways, it's interesting to think that there might be a little more going on than just replacing muscle glycogen....again, missing the forest for the trees.

  It's possible that our sport, where we can push anaerobic thresholds for so long, has some unique requirements. However, the original hardmen of our sport, who were, as already pointed out, most likely miners, farmers, and tough men doing tough work when they weren't riding tough roads on heavy bikes -- I wonder about what kind of diets sustained that work and those kind of rides?? So, this is all just food for thought. I also suspect that Greg LeMan and Jan's famous weight gain issues in the off season, were not due to being undisciplined pigs, but most likely their own exagerated insulin response to carbohydrate that was no longer kept in check by hardcore riding.

• Well, this is a topic I can say a fair amount about, professionally.

  Omar is right, ketosis is not a good state for the athlete to remain in, nor do we have to remain in. We are not primative any longer, we can pack gels and we can refuel ourselves adequately, so we should unless the purpose is to lose lbs and there is a time and a place for it. I do it each spring as I lose my 10 lb winter gain. But there comes a point you bonk.

  We have and always will burn energy in sequence, preferentially carbs of any sort, fat then protien (muscle). Thats it, period. Now, everyone has flipped this around every way, but the fact remains that this is what it is and we cannot change the human machine. Therefore, for the cyclist, its always best to eat within 1 hr of a long effort, which is nearly any ride for any rider. Eat 1/3 protien, 2/3 carb and whatever fat doesn't really matter. The carbs replenish stores as your body immediatly will after exercise, preferentially. After this, its not quite as good, but better than nothing.

  During exercise, I am an advocate of eating whatever sounds good, you must like it, and its usually carbs during exercise that naturally appeals to us. Eat every 1-2 hrs depending on effort and duration and conditioning. Everyone is different and there isn't a one size fits all approach. That is where knowing yourself or asking someone professionally that does know you well also.

  The Paleo diet simply reflects to me a personality. Someone who is a primative mindset, and that is fine. Good, knock yourself out. Its not for me, and the high protien sources are good, but carbs are better in portion after exercise, every single time. The science is solid and can be demonstrated to that extent. No doubt, a higher protien source is going to make one leaner to a point, but after one gets toned, it will cost endurance performance.

  Same for any ketogenic diet. They are not optimal for endurance, but as Omar says, may have a point for a time to encourage wt loss and tone.

  Done it for 20 years in cycling, and professionally.

  And there will forever be supplements and man made high dollar diets that will be sold for profit, like snake-oil. Don't buy it, use some common sense and eat prudently.

• @Soleur,
  I think it's funny that you've been cycling as long as I've been alive.

• Funny for you:-)

  I actually love it. My son is in the navy, my daughter is 15 and with an empty nest soon approaching also means much of my obligations go out the window, except full implementation of Rule #5.

  It is great, being older because it is something I have looked forward to.

  back on topic now...

• I wonder too if there's a lot to be said about mindset. Back in the day, people lived Rule 5. They didn't get on a bike to practice it, they got on the bike to escape from it. Farm labor, factory work, war, economic depression, all of it. Certainly we all know/knew elders from that era. Many of them had a much higher threshold for suffering than the generations they spawned and virtually all of them lived a much harder existance.

• @Marko,
  You're right. A lot of them rode the bike to escape the goings on of the day. In fact, most of the guys who volunteered for Le Tour before it became a professional sporting event did it because it was better to ride a bike through mountains than to be in the mines or the factory.

  As for their diet: It probably consisted of Bread, cheese, and wine. Maybe some meat, but definitely wine. And lots of it.

• @Souleur, @Marko, @Omar, @KitCarson
  What an interesting conversation, guys. I'm going to print this and study it! Nutrition pop quiz coming!

  I've spent my athletic life eating sensibly like Souleur suggests, but I like the idea of using different dietary tactics for specific goals, like losing weight. Also the all-over lean muscle mass promoting a healthy metabolism is a novel thought. All really interesting things I've never thought about in this light. Great stuff. Keep it coming!

  On the other points, our lives really are very easy compared to even one generation before us. I can't remember what movie it is, but there's a line that has always stuck in my head where this guy is disgusted with the incompetence around him, and says something to the effect of, "Used to be, you had to fight to get to the top of the ladder; you had to be better than the guy behind you otherwise he would climb past. Nowadays, everyone is so incompetent, everyone just waits for the guy in front of them to fall off and that makes them the next guy in line." There's a truth to that. We seem to accept softness and incompetence more than previous generations.

  To Marko's point, the bike was an escape for these guys, but it's an escape for us, too. I sit in an office all day long. I go to meetings. I file TPS reports. I work hard every day, but it's not the same as what these guys did. I also live in the city, so yard work exists, but it's pretty limited. Mowing the lawn amounts to little more than setting the mower down and picking it up again. If I want to get out and be outside, it's "exercise" for this lad. On the bike, on skis, on foot.

  Like Souleur, I'm a life-long cyclist and that's what it's really about: finding a way to have the bicycle be a part of your life - for all your life. The bike provides the most amazing escape of all because of the combination of how hard it is with the ability to travel great distances and actually make a trip out of it. At the end of a long ride, like what Guy did, you can take out a globe and see the ride you did, it's on that scale. The lessons you learn from those types of efforts, the discipline it requires, the ability to push yourself to do something your body is telling you to stop; all these things transfer back into your life and make you a better person.

  It's amazing, we're all very lucky.