Originally Posted by elcruxio

As I mentioned before, if you are in the process of riding or having a small break from riding, you will not experience almost any insuling reactions no matter what you eat. You could pour down pure glucose and it would not make a difference in your blood glucose or insulin levels. The body does not allow for insulin spikes while exercising because those can actually kill you. We would have not made it long as a species if insuling spikes during movement were a thing. Insulin production is severely reduced during exercise and it does not boost up until after you've stopped.
And one of the reasons why you can't make sugar spikes while exercising is the overall absorbtion capacity of the body. You can only absorb so much per hour and depending on effort levels it may or may not be enough to replace the glucose used by moving the body. Usually it isn't enough, so you see, there actually isn't a point for more insulin as the glucose that gets in your bloodstream isn't going to storage, it's going straight to use.

Also, you seem to think that complex carbs are stored that way. Only monosaccharides get through the intestine wall, ie. glucose. Glucose is the sole carb type the body uses, other carbs are unusable and need to be converted to glucose. So as an end result the body does not care about what the carbohydrates coming in are. It just converts everything to glucose. The difference in simple/complex carbs is that with complex the body needs to use more energy and time to break it down to glucose, but it still goes to the bloodstream as glucose.

I don't get this whole REAL FOOD thing. I mean it's probably good that you eat something, and it's actually pretty difficult to stuff all of the required protein down after the riding stops so eating a regular breakfast, lunch, dinner is always a good idea, but if the goal with mid ride snacks is to get glucose in, it doesn't matter one lick what it is. If it's REAL FOOD it just means it'll absorb slower. Depending on the protein/fat content it might absorb really slowly which isn't near optimal when trying to get carbs in. Gels are best at getting in the carbs, but I'll rather stick to donuts/other baked goods as they actually do have a pretty good nutritional profile for touring mid ride snack. Lotsa carbs, some protein and good amounts of fat to keep calorie intake up.

Originally Posted by lurch0038

Good info! so from what I understand, if you have already crashed or bonked out the fastest way to recover is to eat those power gels where the body does not need to break down food. However, if properly fueled up and you maintain your energy level you should never bonk out. Now the thing I need to do is schedule eating breaks even though I may not need it at that moment.

Originally Posted by chasm54

Listen, you're touring, not doing a 24 hour time trial. You aren't going to be riding so hard that you'll bonk without notice. Make sure you have something with you that you can snack on when you feel the need. Eat when you're hungry. Don't overthink it. That's it.

Originally Posted by lurch0038

True...I need to relax with this but when I crashed it was scary and I did not realize what was going on. That has never happened to me before and I was concerned that I was suffering from heat stroke or something worse. After the fact I learned that I just ran out of energy. Now I have information I can prevent and or recover when it happens the next time.

Originally Posted by lurch0038

Good info! so from what I understand, if you have already crashed or bonked out the fastest way to recover is to eat those power gels where the body does not need to break down food. However, if properly fueled up and you maintain your energy level you should never bonk out. Now the thing I need to do is schedule eating breaks even though I may not need it at that moment.