I’d quite happily skip over the whole diet thing. I am a resistor when it comes to eating healthily, but that has to stop. Getting the diet right when I’m off the bike is more than half of my training. Every person is starting from a different place with respect to food, but for me I want three things: To drop a bit of weight quickly To understand what to eat on a daily basis And to know what to eat before, during and after a complex multi-day ride. That is, foods to fuel up on, before a multi-day ride. Foods to eat during the ride and foods to eat to help with recovery each afternoon.
Dropping weight quickly is not that hard for blokes. Keeping it off is hard. Being almost completely sedentary, simply moving more will have enormous benefits almost immediately. Exercise will boost my metabolism which will burn extra calories. Then it’s a matter of monitoring my calorie intake while maintaining a balanced diet. If you are cutting calories I’d recommend two things immediately;
- Speak to a health professional to make sure this is right for you
- Take a good quality multi-vitamin tablet to make sure you cover any requirements that you might be missing.
Let’s get something straight upfront. I’m not going to be using expressions like “my struggles with food” as I don’t struggle with food; I love food, I just eat too much. Nor am I going to be counting calories. The changes I need to make are much simpler than that.
I will embrace healthy eating or “Healthy Enough” eating
For many people, diets, foods and counting calories can act as deep psychological triggers. If that happens to be you, maybe avoid this episode and I’ll see you in another video.