Originally Posted by
kings run east
+1
And then there's keto. Once I changed what kind of calories I was consuming and ate much more of them, I lost 25 lbs in a year that I had been trying to lose for two decades.
Originally Posted by
kings run east
Here's a link to a podcast Geoff Fryer did for the moto-enduro podcast Seat Time. Geoff is talking about the overlap between moto-enduro and mtb-enduro in terms of nutrition, but he was on the second place team sprint squad in the US Nats in 2013 so he knows track cycling (and sprints) as well. A lot of what it boils down to is high sugar intake on game days and experimentation before competition days to find what works for you, but it's worth listening to.
Enduro Nutrition with Geoffrey Fryer
So obviously keto worked for you. Were you on a keto diet during a competition phase? And further from that, with that keto experience, what is your take on fuelling with sugars?
My own personal experience with HIGHLY successful dieting was with the 5/2 diet in 2014 and then HFLC last year.
The 5/2 diet achieved me a weight loss of 10kg in 10 weeks. My mother was really concerned because I was dropping weight so fast. She was worried there might be something drastically wrong with me after losing my father 7 years prior to cancer. The problem with that diet was it impacted performance for the diet day and the day following. While it's a good way to lose fat, it is not a good diet for someone working on performance. It was definitely not a long term diet for me, although many are successful and happy with it in the long term. But some big positives did come out of it. I was truly surprised at the performance that was possible when restricting calories so drastically (500cal on diet days) and it was a great education in picking and choosing how to consume your calories to provide maximum benefit.
HFLC achieved me a loss of 17kg in 10 weeks. A much more drastic weight loss, but performance didn't suffer at all, in fact I did get stronger and faster while on the diet. I wasn't specifically keto or paleo, although I'm pretty sure I would have tipped over into ketosis as my carb intake was really low at about 30g/day. The best thing to come out of HFLC was eliminating the sugar ups and downs. Becoming fat adapted made for a much more consistent performance level rather than the ups and downs of sugar/carb fueling. Also, due to the super low carb intake, I would drink a small can of red bull about 20min before my F200 and it was like throwing on a supercharger as the sugar would really hit hard!