The Time-Crunched Cyclist, 3rd Edition by Chris Carmichael & Jim Rutberg

Author:Chris Carmichael & Jim Rutberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: VeloPress

The bigger problem with caloric overcompensation is that it happens throughout the day, every day, for a lot of people. You eat a bigger breakfast in anticipation of the workout you’re going to do. You look at snacks and meals before training as “fueling up” and so you take a bit more than you might otherwise need. After training sessions, you overestimate the calorie and carbohydrate needs for replenishment, as explained above. You take bigger portions or expect to eat bigger portions, and because we eat what’s in front of us and finish what we take, you eat it all. And many athletes reward themselves with sweets or alcohol when they do the math in their heads and figure they exercised enough to earn the extra calories. The key to changing this behavior isn’t necessarily counting calories but changing the way we eat and using different cues to govern the amount we eat.

Counting Calories Doesn’t Work

In the real world, counting calories is not an effective way for people to manage their nutrition long term. I do believe that having a sense of your daily calorie needs and tracking your caloric intake can be useful in the short term to help you formulate a better sense of the relationship between portions and calories. Doing so can also give you a better sense of the overall energy content and macronutrient composition of your diet. But the reality is that very few people will consistently enter information into food logs.

I’ve tried many different methods using all levels of technology, but even with mobile phone apps that scan bar codes and feature a database of nearly limitless food choices, people rarely stick with counting calories very long. Ironically, keeping track is easiest for people who eat highly processed foods because the packages they come in have bar codes. The people for whom counting calories is most tedious and time-consuming are people eating a wide variety of whole foods. These items don’t generally have bar codes, and the amounts used are not in neat little packages. So we estimate, poorly. Did you add third of a cup of broccoli or a half? Maybe it was a quarter?

The bigger question is: Do I really want you to spend the time and effort to get all those calorie counts correct, or do I care more that you’re eating a meal comprised of a wide variety of whole-food ingredients? I want you to do the latter, and use behavior cues to govern the amount you eat rather than resorting to a calorie counter. This learning process is similar to what we do when athletes train with heart rate or a power meter. Initially you spend a lot of time focusing on the numbers, but gradually you learn how to gauge intensity by feedback cues rather than by the number on a display.

Cyclists working with power meters can use the kilojoule information from their workouts to obtain a more precise view of how training affects their total daily caloric expenditure.

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