Dear Dr. Lim,

I've been reading a lot of the nutritional guidelines and stories that you've posted online. Since riders have to consume so many calories and hydrate enough, I was wondering if there are points where riders just feel way too full to continue eating the calories they need. How do they know they are eating enough, or eating too much, that might pack on unwanted kilos? I'm a regular racer, and sometimes I just don't have the time or the stomach to eat all the calories I burn. I would sometimes go on for a few days with 700-1000 calorie deficits each day.

Thanks for your time, I appreciate it.

Aylwin

Aylwin,

The guys definitely get sick of eating. Today on the rest day, they were definitely sick of eating, which can be a big problem for the rest day as they can easily run a 1000 Kcal or more deficit on a day when they aren't doing much on the bike and are so metabolically efficient that they don't even notice a big deficit but run into one because they break their habit or normal routine of eating. So we were constantly on them today to eat - to the point where Christian finished dinner feeling, as he said, "pregnant," or as Juno might say, "for shizz up the spout."

The best way we have of monitoring their intake is to weigh them every day -- before breakfast, before the stage, and after the stage. In practice, however, we just push them until they feel bloated and ill -- like many of the geese we've seen around local farms in these parts. We feed them in the morning, before they race, when they race, after they race, after massage, before dinner, during dinner, after dinner and even when they wake up in the middle of the night to pee. It's seriously a chore for them and our staff.

While the guys watch calories during training, the demands are too high at the Tour to worry about it. If anything, if I can get a guy to finish the Tour a half kilo heavier, I think we'd be doing pretty well.

For you, I'd just recommend keeping track of your weight from a more global perspective. If you're maintaining weight from week to week, those highs and lows will all work themselves out. I think we often get too obsessed with our daily calories without realizing that losses or gains usually take a few days to manifest and that our energy expenditure runs on a continuum rather than in discrete day-to-day intervals.

In addition, we sometimes intentionally run deficits with the guys in their training to deplete glycogen stores as a way of stimulating some adaptations important to endurance and to also create a super-compensation effect when we begin to increase carbohydrate leading up to an event. In the end, the guys are simply asked to pay attention. They develop a feel for their individual caloric needs relative to the race load and their body weights. As long as you pay attention to it as well and don't obsess, I'm sure you'll be good to go.

Allen

Dr. Lim,

I have had this PowerTap question for a while. My PT counts calories (KJ's) while pedaling but not while freewheeling. My Polar counts Calories while pedaling and while freewheeling or sleeping or whatever.

When counting calories, do I add PT calories to my daily Base Metabolic Requirement, less the ride time, or do I just count it on top of my BMR?

Example: If I require 2000 Calories to sit around all day on Monday, but Tuesday I go for a ride and knock out another 2000 Calories in three hours, three hours of BMR are 250 Calories, so would I shoot for 4000 Calories or about 3750?

I know it's not a huge difference, but I was just wondering about how it is calculated, and if you factor this in for like a seven hour TdF stage.

Thanks,

Jeff
Denver, CO

Jeff,

You are correct that there are different components to your daily energy expenditure -- the energy used during exercise or physical activity and the energy used to support life when resting, or resting metabolic rate. With a PowerTap, the amount of energy used while riding is the easiest component to measure.

Let's say you do a 4 hour ride, and 3 of those hours you are pedaling and you burn 2000 Kjoules. The total calories burned on the ride would be very close to 2000 Kjoules multiplied by 1.10, or 2,200 Kcals for the 3 hours of riding. Theoretically, you would then add those 2,200 exercising Kcals back to 21 hours of your non-exercising or resting metabolic rate (24 - 3 hrs of ride time).

If you were doing absolutely nothing and just sitting around, an average resting metabolic rate would be about 0.017 x Body Weight in Kg. So if you weighed 60 Kg, your resting metabolic rate would be about 1 Kcal per minute or about 1440 Kcals in a 24-hour period of time. Thus, in a perfect world, the total Kcals needed in the example above would be 2000 Kcals from riding plus 1260 Kcals resting metabolism (21 hours = 1260 minutes x 1 Kcal per minute).

Unfortunately, in real life it's not this simple. It's not this simple because the resting metabolic rate can vary a great deal between people. It's affected by factors such as body fat percentage, fitness, the environment, age, gender, stress, the amount of physical activity itself, illness, and even the type, frequency, and amount of food we eat. So the simple formula I gave above is highly variable. More importantly, our metabolic rate is very different while awake and while sleeping. Calculating this out is a mess. While there are techniques to figure it all out, you'd probably need a laboratory and some water labeled with deuterium, which will cost more than your PowerTap.

So what to do? Well all things being equal, the biggest variable in all of this is the caloric cost of exercise, so getting that right is a big help. For all else, it's about learning what you need to eat on top of the exercise calories to either sustain a constant weight or to lose/gain weight (if that's your goal). The most important component here is simply body weight. Ultimately, if you gain weight over time that stays on, you're eating too many Kcals (there are 3500 Kcals in a pound of fat, so an excess of just 500 Kcals a day is equal to 1 lb of fat a week). Since we can't measure all of the non exercise calories, we are constantly measuring body weight in training and here at the Tour: once in the morning before breakfast, right before the stage, and immediately after the stage. Of course, we are also interested in fluid replacement and sweat loss and the day-to-day and pre/post stage fluctuations are an important indicator of this. That said, making sure our athletes maintain weight is critical to them also making sure they are eating enough here at the Tour.

For others this would also be a great way of making sure that too much food is not eaten. What we have found is that we can barely get our guys to eat enough. They get sick of it and most naturally lose weight no matter what we do. Christian, however, is really good with forcing food down his throat. Tonight after dinner he could barely move and complained about feeling pregnant. I told him, it was because he's going to be giving birth tomorrow in the Alps -- a sort of rebirth to cycling and all of its splendor. Hope this helps,

Allen

Allen,

A question on diet for endurance athletes. In Joe Friel's and Loren Cordian's work on Paleo Diets, they make a strong case against certain foods for causing an increase in blood acid levels, which leads to muscle decline in older people. As a nearly 40-year-old competitive cyclist, I've become more interested in this type of research but am completely confused. Having met you at a lecture a couple years ago, I know you're a straight shooter. They are saying no to Parmesan cheese and vinegar items, but these are things that you specifically put into your very good rice bars (which I love). For the non-pro, what do you think about in terms of diets for us normal folk endurance athletes? Do you see non-pro's eating too much spaghetti/pasta? Cheese? etc.

My basic question is "what's your 2 cents on diets for non-pro endurance athletes for a sustained period of time, not just a single week.

Thanks,
Samuel
P.S. way to go at Slipstream…

Samuel,

The first thing I'll say is that there is a major difference between eating for performance and eating for health and longevity. My orientation has always been about performance, so little things like Parma Reggiano, which is a very easily digestible form of protein, and Balsamic Vinegar, which has the possibility of increasing the rate of glycogen re-synthesis, are items that not only taste good but are staples in our diets.

That said, we have done things like eliminate most of the wheat out of our athlete's Tour diet, and the guys don't eat much dairy outside of some yogurt and parmesan cheese. Likewise, the guys also eat a lot of things that might make most people’s hearts blow up, like up to 6 eggs a day each. Freaky.

Anyway, my two cents on a diet for the non-pro endurance athlete is really simple. Eat mostly whole foods with a lot of color that you have to cook, and stay away from processed stuff that comes out of a package. If you're shopping for fresh foods from local markets, and you are spending time actually cooking, then you're way ahead of the curve.

A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, nuts, with a moderate amount of whole grain/high fiber foods is ultimately what I'd recommend. Use common sense; listen to your body, and everything in moderation. Finally, realize that there is a big cultural component to food. Just because something is nutritious or theoretically good for you doesn't mean it's nourishing to you or your soul.

Allen