pepperbelly

I called my cardiologist. He said to not worry about it. It's expected and normal as long as it comes back up, which it does.
Thanks guys!

Iride01 

If you are trying to stay low carb, then if you are doing rides that hit the upper zones quite a bit, then you'll deplete your glycogen stores if your pace outruns your bodies ability to burn fat for energy. If you did, then that may be why. Try a slower pace for your next rides if you insist on being low carb. As your body gets use to it you'll get better.

Though anytime I'm dragging after a ride or after working in the yard, I find that I probably didn't hydrate well enough. For every hour I ride, I usually need 24 fl oz of water. More on hot days. I consume carbohydrate while I ride. It'll all be used up by my body by the time I finish.

pepperbelly

Slower pace? I’m 65, overweight and out of shape. Basically I’m a sloth!😄
I am going to add carbs an hour or so before riding but I want to do good carbs. I have had several people mention oatmeal.

Carbonfiberboy 

In my experience, eating carbs before a ride isn't the best idea. And for an aerobic activity like cycling there are no bad carbs on the bike unless they're the carbs you didn't eat. The very worst thing is eating carbs about an hour before riding, because then you're starting a ride right during the low blood sugar time which follows eating carbs. For long rides, like 40 miles and up, I bring a special drink I call "food" composed of maltodextrin and a little whey protein mixed to give at least 900 calories/bottle which will last me about 3 hours of hard riding.

So what I do is eat nothing before a ride. Instead for short rides, I bring a bottle containing fast carbs and drink from it if and when I feel the need. Many times on a short ride of only an hour or so, I put the bottle back in the fridge untouched. I like stuff that comes as a powder. For the last couple of years, I've been using SIS Electrolyte Powder but there are many similar excellent products. This routine allows one to ingest the smallest number of calories necessary for the ride. Never use anything sold as an energy drink.

Eating low carb can be effective for losing weight. You can tell if it's working by weighing yourself. What often happens though is that folks become accustomed to that diet and over time, say a year or so, wind up adding more calories at which point weight loss stops.

pepperbelly

I went from 305 to 227 last year from the first of February to the first of September by trying to keep my carb intake to under 20 per day. My weight loss flattened off and I actually gained some back to 233. I didn’t ride regularly though.
Now that I am riding as often as possible I am sometimes feeling a lack of energy at under 20 or 30 carbs per day.
Someone here mentioned oatmeal as a healthy carb. I will try and see if eating a bowl before riding helps. If so when I start riding longer/farther I will take carbs with me. I am just really tired of being fat.

Carbonfiberboy 

Good for you on that weight loss. Leveling off is quite usual as I mentioned. So the next thing is to normalize your diet, i.e. go to a mostly plant-based Mediterranean-style diet. That'll better support your riding and be healthier and you can still control your weight just by eating portions sizes that will still cause slow weight loss.

Your lack of energy is due to a lack of glycogen, which is basically carbohydrates stored in your muscles and liver. You're eating so few carbs that your tiny glycogen stores get burned quickly and then you feel weak. So you have to eat the carbs necessary to form and store glycogen. If one's glycogen stores are full, one can do a brisk ride of about 3 hours and eat nothing before or during, just burning that glycogen. A low carb diet is high in fat and protein. Fat is 5000 calories/pound. Carbs are 2000 calories/pound. So cutting way down on fat will allow you to eat carbs while still losing weight, again partly because you'll be able to do longer rides.

In any case, eating a bowl of oatmeal before a ride isn't be best strategy. You want to just eat more carbs in each meal, which will increase your glycogen stores. Then you really won't have to eat before, during or after riding, just eat normal meals and ride say 30 miles every other day.

pepperbelly

I’m not doing keto. I am not comfortable eating the amount of fat keto calls for.
I usually just eat a protein bar and a tomato sandwich in the morning- I like tomatoes, a cobb salad for lunch without bacon but with grilled chicken and a boiled egg and a quarter of an avocado. Salad and Go is really good. I eat a light supper, usually some kind of chicken.
I will look into plant based diets but I also like BBQ and steak and will never turn vegan or vegetarian.
I use Sola keto bread to keep carbs down.
Heck I have basically given up beer- Mich Ultra.

I saw a pic of a meal someone was eating for healthy carbs while exercising and losing weight. It looked like baked beans on slices of bread.

Carbonfiberboy 

That all sounds good. We eat beans, home made whole wheat bread, salads, whole wheat pasta, a little cereal, fish, all sorts of stuff like that. Yes, slow carbs. Just try to work some small amount of slow carbs into your meals, just enough to put some glycogen into your muscles. Lots of vegetables contain carbs. It is said that half your plate should be vegetables, 1/4 carbs, 1/4 protein. That's way too structured for reality, but that's the general idea.

SpedFast

I have baked beans over toast at least once a week. About 10 slices of toast and an entire 28oz can of beans. Love it. But then I literally have to eat lots of peanut butter to keep my weight up. Maybe I ride too much?

pepperbelly

That sounds like bbq with potato salad, beans, slaw, onions and jalapeños.

Carbonfiberboy 

Totally. You could try having cooked cereal for breakfast, not too much. We usually use 1/4c dry cereal per serving. It is said that "fat burns in a carbohydrate flame". When we ride, we can burn both fat and carbs - if we have any glycogen on board. The glycogen gives us the energy to ride longer, and in the process, burn more fat.

One of my little sayings is that our bodies are simply trainable chemical factories. When we train in any manner, we change what our body chemistry does, hopefully in a direction which allows said training to produce better results over time. That's really all that's going on. Thus we can train our bodies to burn more fat by going keto, but at the cost of reducing our ability to burn carbs. We have to train to burn carbs just like we have to train to burn fat. These sorts of chemical process changes require consistent stimulation over time. IOW it takes a while for anything noticeable to happen. We attempt to establish some sort of rational training plan and then have patience.

Of course there also has to be some sort of accountability. Hence my sig. We check our results and see if we have to modify our plan.

t2p

RMOT

we stopped at a trail side brewery / restaurant after a recent bike ride - Mountain State Brewery in Morgantown WV

great beer and one of the best pork sandwiches I’ve had … they slow cook meats in the wood fired oven (pictured above)

and the prices were reasonable (almost stunning !)

pepperbelly

Looks good, but for a fat boy like me the bread is bad.

Iride01 

Slower pace meaning a pace that keeps your average HR during the ride in Zone 3 or lower. If you are in a group and trying to keep up with a bunch of Sepp Kuss wanna be's, then you are doomed no matter what you do or don't consume. Or even if you are solo and are that Sep Kuss wanna be.

A serving of oatmeal is only going to be 27 grams of carbohydrate. So only 108 Calories. So that won't really add much to a 60 minute or more ride. Also if your glycogen has been repleted during the time prior to that bowl of oatmeal, then it's likely going to just do all the bad things that carb's do for the body.

I have never been a fan of the idea of carb loading prior to a ride. Carb's are very easily converted to glycogen in the body and if glycogen is not needed, then carb's probably start getting changed to fatty acids for storage as fat. And we all have too much of that.

Since most of us will have carbohydrates in our diet in sufficient amounts the glycogen lost during the ride will be replaced before the next ride. Unless all the rides are very high effort and very frequent. Or a person is on a extreme low carb diet and might need to consider adding enough carbs to their diet to replace the glycogen lost during the previous rides. And IMO, the better is to start loading those carbs in after the ride, not just a hour or so prior to the next ride.

Personally, no matter what diet fad one uses, I think most will benefit from just consuming supplemental carbohydrates during the ride. And eat or drink them every 10 to 15 minutes in a small quantity that's easy on the stomach. For most rides you start expending glycogen anytime you get in the higher zones, especially if you exceed your lactate threshold and are anaerobic where only muscle glycogen can be processed fast enough to sustain you till it runs out. Carbs consumed while riding are able to be absorbed by the gut into the blood stream to be converted fairly fast to glycogen to replace what's lost. IMO and AFAIK.

And to me it would seem that replacing consuming the carbs while on the bike will mean that they'll be used for energy instead of stored. Once converted to fatty acids and fat, they'll be harder to get rid of. It's also unlikely you'll consume more carbohydrates while riding than is used for energy. If you do, you'll likely feel bloated or queasy while you ride and that'll slow you down.

t2p

I believe the jalapeño peppers will cancel out all the bad - but don’t trust this advice because I have not lodged at a Holiday Inn

but regardless - not to worry - arrow is pointing up

you are riding - dialing in your bike / fit - and therefore should get in more rides and more miles … soon you could be the lean mean pepper belly fighting machine

pepperbelly

I think I understand. Would taking a bottle of gatorade on my ride help?
I do a very low carb diet, and it has worked until recently.
When I ride I am alone, not in a group. I try to maintain speed as best I can. Depending on wind and climbs I normally average 14-15mph. My heart rate is around 135 to maybe 158 max according to my Apple watch. I am guessing I stay in Zone 2 but I have never figured that out.

Iride01 

Sure, Gatorade works. But!... It's too high in sodium for the average person doing the average riding. IMO. So if you are trying to cut back on sodium in your diet, be aware of that.

I only have half that amount in my hydration mix. And only on the hottest of days, 95 to >100°F. For most cycling I'm probably about a quarter to a third of that amount.

140 Calories is a good starting point for a hours ride. However, even as dilute as Gatorade might taste when not working out, when you get on the bike, it might taste sickly sweet. Other types of sugars aren't sweet. I now use maltodextrin as the base for my mix. I have to add some table sugar to take the dry taste out of it. If Gatorade is all you got, then go for it. If the taste while on the bike is still too sweet or it bothers your stomach, then dilute it.

If you were to consume Calories like the pro's do, then you might have 400 Calories in that bottle. But that takes a lot of getting use to to keep your stomach from rebelling on you. 180 to 220 Calories or a tad higher/hour is probably more realistic once you get used to them. But even if you were to stomach the Calories of a pro cyclist, you should note that it's still below the amount of Calories you should have expended during the ride. So you do get the Calorie deficit benefit.

I use to use Vitamin Water years ago. It has 0 sodium, you can add a pinch of salt if you need it. It does have other electrolytes as does Gatorade. Sodium is supposed to be the most needed for replacing what's lost through sweat. But different people lose differing amounts of salt in their sweat. Your correct amount will have to be determined by you. And depending on how hard and long you ride, you may not need any.

Fruit juice was what I used prior to going to Hammer Nutrition's HEED and then to my own mix. I use to do about 40/60 or 60/40 water/juice depending on how much effort the ride was to be.

pepperbelly

My sodium level is good. I don’t have that to worry about. I drink a lot if water and could probably use some electrolytes.
I will try it tomorrow. The wind is up today and my glutes are sore so I am resting today.

terrymorse 

Arguably, the best way to train our bodies to burn more fat is endurance exercise.

"Compared with untrained persons exercising at the same absolute intensity, persons who have undergone endurance training have greater fat oxidation during exercise without increased lipolysis." -- Horowitz & Klein, Lipid metabolism during endurance exercise, 2000

MoAlpha

Carbs ingested during exercise are metabolized in the liver to glucose and used for energy in end organs, mainly muscle and brain. Glycogen consumption is suppressed if you eat enough, but glycogen is not repleted to any significant degree.

Iride01 

Yes, I'm sort of leaving out the details of what gets it from the gut to the muscles and in what form. I also agree that during exercise that carbohydrates won't be able to allow the body to produce enough glycogen fast enough to fully replete the lost glycogen.

Since you brought the liver into the picture that I was leaving out, this is where carbohydrates that aren't needed for glycogen will be turned into fatty acids. IIRC. In this case If I Read Correctly!

MoAlpha

yrc!