My experience with nutritional science is it's pretty much a garbage science, backed by special interest groups, lobbying governments for subsidies to specific agricultural sectors that push out "scientific research" to sell more what they are pushing. You can find any amount of studies arguing the validity of anything...High Carb, Low Fat. High Fat, Low Carb, Vegetarian, Vegan. Eat 6 times a day....Eat 1 time a day. The science is shaky at best. Then, wait 10 years and it's a whole other fad or interest group that takes the lead...fat was bad in the 80s and sugar was good. Now...not so much.

Me: I track my food, exercise, how I feel, how I perform, and watch the scale. Which is already 99% more than your average person does.

He's mostly right. If you wear a smart watch, you can get a rough idea of caloric expenditure. With that, you can eat more or less with a little basic calorie tracking. Don't get obsessive with it though.

It's funny with all these apps and other gimmicks out there that we have largely ignored our most primal hormones/emotions when it comes to food. Try eating intuitively by listening to your body.

Do you feel hungry after a long day of training? Are starving upon waking up? Were you woken in the middle of the night due to hunger? Do you crash often during long workouts? All common signs of undereating, which is prevalent among endurance athletes.

Also very common among people who try to get cute with their diets.

I'll coach you. Send me a PM.

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If you listen, you're body will tell you what it needs, a nutrition coach isn't going to know what you body is telling YOU. It's pretty simple but seems some nutritionists just want to complicate it with all this macro bullshit so that they have jobs.

I'd also recommend throwing out your scale if you own one.

Nutrition coaching for endurance athletes basically requires enough fuel to get you through long sessions and races, knowing your body well, and also how to race/train in the heat is important.

I think once you begin to know your body, it becomes easier. Also, lots of junk for normal people could be a caloric goldmine for endurance athletes.

I’ve had some nutrition experts in my life that I have paid and it was definitely a learning experience. You have to know the basics and also it’s good to just have a base layer of a plant based diet with lots of dark green leafy vegetables and fruits and other veggies. Being a healthy endurance athlete over the long term just requires a lot of healthy foods to ensure that from a cellular level, you’re good.

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https://www.strava.com/...tes/zachary_mckinney

I'm perhaps a bit biased, as a triathlete, registered dietitian, and nutrition PhD student...

I'll disagree strongly with a previous post that implied all nutrition science is bunk. While general nutrition guidelines are based on observational studies and often fail to show causation (because there are many reasons we cannot assign people to food A and food B then see who dies of cancer), sports nutrition is an area where we can design nice randomized, placebo-controlled trials because we are looking at simple performance outcomes.

It is still extremely personalized in practice though, and this is one reason it seems that there is such a variety of advice out there. That and, when it comes to nutrition, there are just so many people willing to claim expertise they don't have.


So, it takes some effort to find the qualified people working in nutrition who have the endurance knowledge you're looking for, but we are out there. It is completely normal practice for sports dietitians to periodize intake for training cycles and then throughout a training week, like you describe. Happy to help with general questions here or message me for anything more specific!

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http://www.extramilenutrition.com

Cycle smart has Emily Werner as a coach and she’s a nutritionist (Her husband Kerry is one of the top US cyclocross racers). Might be worth reaching out.

https://renaissanceperiodization.com/...nce-macro-calculator

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"The person on top of the mountain didn't fall there." - unkown

also rule 5

Look for a registered dietician who is also an endurance athlete. That's a good place to start. The title of nutritionist is unregulated, so there are many different certifications that you can take to earn that title, many of which are as simple as a weekend course... Those who are dieticians, but without the sport background are going to struggle to understand some of the lunacy associated with our sports. Case and point, as a university student racing varsity track/XC I was in a nutrition class as part of my degree (kinesiology) and was pulled aside by the prof and accused of fabricating my data for a nutritional analysis assignment (he couldn't fathom how I was consuming 6400 calories a day and losing weight). I joined him in his office, and explained to him exactly what I ate, when and why, and added the additional info that the week in question where we had to log our intake was an 105mile running week, plus some cycling miles commuting to school, and to and from practice... (He questioned the 7 cups of cornflakes i logged before bed, that I consumed because I was so energy depleted from an evening track session, that despite a large dinner, I literally couldn't sleep because my body needed the energy to ensure that I kept breathing throughout the night, and so I could survive a 6am pool running session the next morning before breakfast). Once we had that conversation, he stopped questioning what I would submit, and was more curious, and would touch base with me more regularly to try to comprehend how one fueled themselves for endurance sport....

I've worked with a few folks on the nutrition side in the past, some were fantastic, some didn't know their arsehole from their ear-hole when it came to fueling for training/racing... Generally the ones where I had more success were endurance athletes themselves. And be clear what you want from them, for me, it's principles and guidance, not specific meal plans (telling me what to eat, when, and how precisely to prepare it sucks all the joy out of food and cooking, and guarantees that I won't follow their recommendations). Beware of any one of these "coaches" that is pushing tons of supplements on you (especially if they happen to sell them too...). There is a time and place for supplements (to fill in gaps in your diet, address specific deficiencies, for fuel on the go, where alternatively you would make poor dietary choices, or for specific needs like fuel during activity and recovery), but the first priority should always to get as much as possible that you need from the foods you consume... If they start with supplements, rather than the food you consume, it's typically a sign to look elsewhere...

 

I had the same problem while following the nutrition plan. Due to my busy lifestyle, I get a short amount of time for exercise, but some days there was a nice amount of time dedicated to exercise. For preparing myself for such a lifestyle, I was looking for a nutrition plan to meet my needs. Creating a customized nutrition plan helped me a lot in staying fit and healthy with such kind of lifestyle. There are also health foods added to my nutrition plan to ensure that I'm taking all the necessary nutrients for my body. During quarantine, I ordered these foods from https://sportsinside.co.uk/ without any trade-off in quality and safety.

My experience with nutritional science is it's pretty much a garbage science


Yup.

I'm a big fan of Michael Pollan's ideas on eating and food, which is essentially eat a good well rounded diet, with limited meat and a good array and assortment of whole foods, vegetables and fruit. Done!

Steer TOTALLY away from all these fad diets, supplements and "hacks". Yes - a small percentage of people may have some issues, or deficiencies - but so many make it out like this is a problem for EVERYONE!

Their are people who specialize in Sports Nutrition - but the ones that I know personally, who work with some of Canada's National Sports Teams, are really all about the first paragraph above!

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

You need to get a better coach who is better versed in the body of nutritional literature and is also knowledgeable of endurance performance. They are ABSOLUTELY few and far between. And virtually everyone has something to sell you.

If they sell supplements of any kind, they'll have a hard time being unbiased.

Look for a coach who values ethics, data, and truth, over their bottom line. They won't be the ones guarding their client list and twisting your arm to stay among their paying customers.

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

In my brief experience reading what ericMPro has written on ST, he might be a good option.

That's high praise coming from me in nutrition coaching ;)

I also coach folks in nutrition full-time. Feel free to reach out.

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

Love it.

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

Couldn't agree more.

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

You're right, your Sunday diet should look very little like your Monday diet. The daily carb/calorie approach where all days are the same is absolutely laughable and will set you up for failure.

You might benefit 1000-1300 grams of carbs on Sunday mostly from easy-to-digest sources, and only 150-300 grams of carbs on Monday, mostly from more fiber-rich and nutrient dense sources. Most importantly though, the AMOUNTS should vary dramatically, based precisely on your training.

Protein and fat needs won't change nearly as much, if at all. Daily protein intake should be based on your body mass or lean body mass. Fat intake doesn't need to increase simply because you burn more fat due to long training sessions. You've got plenty of fat in your body to supply that.

Carb intake should be wildly variant in direct proportion to the variance in the work done in training, daily.

My calculator and book would be hugely informative if you decide to go without a nutrition coach. If this post gets flagged as an ad, I'm happy to repost without mention of these things but thought they might be justified here since they're designed to actually teach folks how to coach themselves in nutrition, from a quantitative standpoint, rather than the bogus "general healthy recommendations" I see lobbed around.

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub