I really want to start eating better and im trying to figure out my calories and stuff like that … what percentage of your calories come from fat/carb/prot … i know the standard is 30% fat, 10% protein and 60% carbs …but i dont think that is good for a triathlete trying to keep body fat down. thanks!
Firts, great quote! I seem to have the “checkered” part down : ) Now I need to work on the “great” part.
Your question has a multifaceted answer - it depends on many factors. In general, we need to consider basal needs and workout refueling seperately, because these two needs require very different mixtures of macro nutrients (cho, fat, pro).
In general, a mixture of approximately 40/30/30 will work well for filling your basal needs - breakfast, lunch, and dinner when you haven’t worked out recently prior to the meal. I would reduce fat to about 20% if you are trying to reduce bodyfat.
Refueling following a workout will be about 20% protein and 80% carbohydrate.
Because these needs are so different, yopur percentages will be very different on a rest day compared to the day you do a 5 hour brick.
Also important is when you consume concentrated carbohydrate (pasta, bread, rice, cereal, sugar, corn, potatoes). After workouts, these are perfect foods … the carbohydrate will be delivered to the muscles quickly. Other times, these very same foods are junk foods. The sugar enters your bloodstream quickly and is likely to gbe stored as fat. At your regular meals - not soon after workouts - avoid these foods and get your carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables.
An athlete’s diest should be primarily composed of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables, with concentrated and processed carbohydrates coming in large doses soon after workouts. Fruits and vegetables are particularly important because they tend to reduce body acidity, while other foods and all of our workouts, tend to increase acidity. Joe Friel and Loren Cordain’s book, The Paleo Diet for Athletes, is due out this fall.
I hope this helps, Ken
Yeah, what he said!! Excellent response.
Check out coachgordo.com
He has some very interesting articles and thoughts on nutrition. Similar principles to what the previous poster was talking about with more detail. I have been following the Gordo diet, and have gone from 175 to 159 in 8 weeks. I did not have a lot of fat to lose, but it seemed to get the excess fat out of my bulky upper body, and really get me lean & ripped (upper & lower).
Yes, Gordo’s stuff on nutrition is not bad and very straightforward. Take a look.
You should train your body into the shape and weight it needs to be for your sport not diet it into a weight and shape that might not be optimal.
All diets involve some form of calorific starvation which will hamper your training. You should never be in calorific starvation if you’re training hard, you should always fuel the fire.
Train hard eat well and build the muscles you need. Hard training burns lots of calories and as you do so the fat will be the first to go and then over time you’ll lose bulk musculature that is not used for your sport. If you combine hard work with lots of food you’ll fire up your metabolism and burn calories in your sleep.
Eat natural healthy foods, whole grain bread rice and pasta. Good quality meats and fish. Stay away from overly processed foods. Occasional trips to the drive thru at Burger King are not bad, just not all the time.
If you starve yourself of calories for a quick fix you’ll starve the muscles you use as well as the ones you don’t…not good for overall performance.
(if the fire is hot enough it will burn Big Macs)
Who said anything about starving themselves or restricting calories?
Typically an athlete that is highly active, let’s say for our sake ~ 90min – 120min of training/day will need from 60-70% of their diet to come from carbs (CHO) this can also be considered to be ~ 7-10g CHO/kg of body weight, so you can already see that a diet that is 40/30/30 may indeed fulfill the non athletic type it will come no where near the needs of your training. You consider that your body’s preferred energy source is glucose, stored in the body as glycogen, taken in through your diet as CHO now if you begin to limit the amount of CHO you take in you limit the amount of immediate energy you have within the body. You can store roughly 1500 calories of glycogen in the muscle and liver. Why is this important? Well if you restrict the amount of CHO you take in you risk having chronically low stored glycogen this not only means you will be unable to workout effectively at anything above about 70% of your VO2 max (or an RER of >0.7 when in a lab) you are also much more susceptible to illness, especially upper respiratory tract infections (URTI’s). Many people accept the fallacy that on long slow workouts all you are burning is Fat, this is true to an extent but the metabolic process for converting Fat to energy requires CHO, so you can see that even on long easy workouts your body must use some degree of CHO to derive it’s energy, indeed the body has ways to get around this but it is not very efficient, also your brain runs off of only glucose so when your glycogen is running low the brain hordes it all so this it may function, this often leads to an increased perceived exertion for the same given workload as well as a drop in motivation and mood swings (ever see a child get cranky b/c they were hungry?).
So with all of this said I think you would be well served by looking at you diet (or having someone do it for you) and determining what type of calories are you taking in and what indeed is the ration of Fat/Protein/CHO? You may also be able to identify trends in your diet that you could do better with such as how much sugar is in that coffee drink or how healthy are you snacks, making small changes can lead to big results. Also remember that during the competitive season you do not want to engage in substantial weight loss as this will indeed affect your ability to train and race.
The comment about concentrated CHO’s is a reference to the glycemic index (GI) or gylcemic load of a food. Food that are simple CHO’s (High GI’s) tend to raise blood sugar faster than those that have a low GI such as complex CHO’s. So you want to be aware of when you are taking in high an low GI foods, high GI foods will give you energy quicker but cause a spike in blood sugar low GI foods take longer to be broken down but cause you to have a more sustained energy level, it’s often best to mix your CHO intake based on the demands of the race or workout. It is not the CHO that is converted to fat it is the excess calories that are ingested that are stored as fat. Ideally you’ll want 1.5g of CHO/Kg of body weight within the first 45min of the end of your workout. As for not needing to eat as much on recovery days, be cautious about this b/c the caloric deficient that is often developed on a really long or hard training day can be more than you can replace during that workout or that day and again you do not want to jeopardize your glycogen stores for subsequent training sessions and your health.
I think what you need to keep in mind is that your CHO intake is crucial to your training and performance and if you jeopardize that you jeopardize your season, CHO is not the sole culprit of body fat so make sure you are looking at it from all directions. For the athlete decreasing CHO intake is not as effective as popular culture would like you to believe and remember that during your workout is not the time to count your calories, most people should try to stick with an intake of 30-60 grams/hr of CHO as well as ~500-1000ml (16-32oz) of fluid per hour, though everyone is different so be sure to try everything in training before racing.
Dont worry im not trying to go on some crazy diet … that is why i said i wanted to try to eat better. i have been overeating and not choosing healthy options and it is making me feel gross so i just want to start heading down the healthy path.
Man, I waited all day to answer that post because I didn’t want to be the first…
I agree with the comment about significant carbohydrate being burned even at easy paces. I have tested this in thousands of athletes using a metabolic analyzer. Generally well trained athletes burn between 50/50 and 60/40 fat to carbohydrate at aerobic threshold - which is a very easy pace. The “buring just fat” is a misnomer.
During and after exercise, high glycemic load foods are excellent. Athletes also need carbohydrate throughout the day, but lower glycemic load foods are better choices at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The only time we need the concentrated carbohydrates is after workouts. I’m not suggesting avoiding carbohydrate. Quite the opposite; I think we should ingest carbohydrates all the time. I just think that we need differnt sources of carbohydrate at different times, based on when our workouts fall. I believe that fruits and vegetables are better sources of carbohydrate except following workouts. The carbohydrate from these sources enters the bloodstream more slowly … and these foods cause our tissues to be more alkaline while processed carbohydrates make our already acidic bodies more acidic. Ken
thanks for all the info … i waited all day for someone to answer my post and at one point i had little faith that anyone would so i know how you feel 
Who said anything about starving themselves or restricting calories?
Most diets involve some form of calorific starvation.