Lewis and Clark ate 9 pounds of meat a day, and hardly any anything else. Eskimos eat muscle and fat only. There are historical precendents for it, even in high-active people (can't bring myself to write "peoples")
I've thought/obsessed over/read about this a lot in the last year and a half, and armed with the confidence that comes with an A.A. degree (general studies), I can tell you how it seems to work. I am not declaring this as an authoritative answer, but I believe it completely based on what I've read and my own experience and experiments. 1. If you have five pounds of fat, that's 17,500 calories of fuel. An hour of hard, dreadful riding burns about 750 calories, depending on your own physiology. A groovy medium-effort ride may burn 400 calories an hour. Hey, if it's flattish and you're enjoying it, maybe 300 calories. You have tons of fuel for days of riding without eating.....as long as you fuel your rides with your fat. You still have to drink, and may need to replenish some calcium and potassium and salt, but you can do that in low-to-no carb ways. 2. You can think of your exercising (riding) as having three zones, depending on effort level as determined by heart rate. The numbers you're about to read are approximate for most people, and at least make the point. Here goes: • below 70 percent of max heart rate, your muscles can easily get all the oxygen they need from body fat. BUT if you have high insulin levels in your blood (from power bars, gatorade, bananas, and yes, even the sainted medjool date), then your body stops burning fat right NOW, and will burn the glucose instead. You cannot access your body fat as fuel when your blood is swimming with insulin. Insulin is a metabolic hormone that dictates fuel usage. Practically, this means you can ride happily and comfortably without even eating. I can and often have ridden 4-hours without food, even at a decent effort. I drink. • in the training zone, btw about 70 and high 80s percent of maxheartrate, you will still burn fat in the absence of blood insulin, BUT...you'll lose efficiency, because carbs are better at supplying your muscles with the high levels of oxygen that harder efforts demand. If you race, you need the carbs. Or, if you plan to ride a fast brevet, eat the dates. If you're a Walter Mitty type even on solo rides or disorganized rides with friends, then for all intents and purposes you are a racer, and will benefit from carbs. There is good and bad. Good is: You can eat the goopy tasty carbs without the glucose-insulin spike, because you burn them up. Bad is: You're burning up your chow, not your fat. There's no way around this. If you want to go low-carb for 90 percent of the time, but can't stand the idea of never again eating your favorite high-carb treats, eat them before and during a longish hardish ride. • most people are anaerobic above 90 percent of MHR. You can't ride that hard for more than about 40 seconds, and even repeated intervals don't depend on dietary chow. You will be slightly more efficient (faster) with high glucose levels (and insulin) than with low-glucose (from carbless eats), but intervals are a sometime-thing, and the whole point is to supertax and supercharge your muscles, makem stronger by tearing them down so they rebuild better...and train them to become more insulin-sensitive (which helps keep you lean because when your muscles are insulin-sensitive, you don't shoot out as much insulin in response to carbs, and less insulin means less fat creation and storage). Also, exercising anaerobically on what amounts to an empty stomach (don't eat, keep insulin low), your body responds by releasing more growth hormone...which helps insulin sensitivity. Body builders and pro athletes take GH to get lean...and it works by helping them build muscle, and lean mass/muscle contributes to insulin sensitivity. This IS how it works, but then you look at skinny pros chomping down carbs and touting them, and you get the message that carbs are good. They're not believable spokesmodels for that kind of eating (or that kind of riding). They can eat that way and ride that way and for the most part stay lean because of genetics. Their sport (racing) selects for certain body types and inherited physiologies, the same way that basketball selects for tallies, and gymnastics for shorties. You wouldn't start to shoot hoops because you wanted to grow a few inches, but bike riders all the time copy racers because they're told they'll look the same way (or close) if they eat and ride that way. The best low-carb electrolyte replacement drinks are tomato juice and coconut milk (Big Moo has made it illegal to call any whitish guzzlable liquid "milk" unless it came from an udder, but when I grew up it was "coconut MILK", and I'm sticking with that. Both have phenomenal potassium-to-carb ratios. The tomatoe juice is generally high in salt, too. You could add salt to cocomilk. Salt and potassium are by far the most important electrolytes (of about 7) that you need to replace. So the low-carb cycler rides below 70 percent and fuels rides with fat; or gives up efficiency on harder clubby rides; and sprints now and then on an empty stomach, because big deal anyway for the short bursts, and may as well shoot out some growth hormone, which you can't do with insulin-from-carbs in your blood. (Something like that.) Grant "Scientistic, not Scientifc" Petersen, A.A. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
