Eat when you are hungry.
+1000. Don’t over-think it. 
This is also very good advice.
Not correct. rubs hands together eagerly I hope you’re about to provide compelling evidence for such a boldly oppositional claim with no situational dependencies. Mostly kidding, and I think understand your objection to such generic qualitative advice. And we probably agree more than we disagree.
And for the record, since you are one person, +1 is all you get. 
Agree. -999 from Eric. +1 from me, so… 2.
This advice is as bad as "only drink when you are thirsty"I disagree. Drink when thirsty does sometimes result in dehydration. Dehydration can result in catastrophically bad performance outcomes and serious GI distress. “Eat when hungry” virtually never, outside of disordered (restrictive) eating patterns, results in chronic under-consumption of kcal or nutrient deficiencies, in isolation, or really even contributes to them, in first world countries. Nor does it contribute to reduce chronic glycogen storage in a way that impacts performance meaningfully. Mostly because most people will eat or drink carbs naturally, post-workout because they feel like it.
- by that time you are, by definition, dehydrated.Maybe. Maybe not. Could be hyponatremic.
Drink when thirsty is also totally acceptable and healthy, and performance-promoting advice for people under 60 years of age, outside of training. The times it sometimes falls short are during training, especially hot training, or before very hot / high sweat rate training sessions or racing. Outside of those scenarios, drinking when thirsty is great.
Short workouts (let’s say up to 1/2 hour to 45 minutes) don’t matter so muchIt’s a continuum. Just clarifying. There’s no cutoff for duration that merits paying attention or not paying attention to post-workout carb intake.
, but longer/more intense workouts do. For anything after say 90 minutes, you are missing a golden opportunity to resupply How long is that window? What evidence do you have? Do you have any compelling evidence that nutrient timing affects body composition in the long run? By what margin when nutrients
FWIW: We probably mostly agree here, in sentiment, that post-workout nutrition is a good opportunity to fuel up for future training sessions, but I’m just playing devils advocate because “Not correct” triggered me. For fun, here’s a diet plan I wrote for someone today, so that you can see we mostly agree, I think.
Type 2e: ~3-hr Ride Training After One Meal Meal: Time: Protein Amount: Veggie Amount: Healthy Fat Amount: Healthy Carb Amount: Workout Carb Amount: Meal 1 ~2 hours before training 25g of protein from lean sources 0-2 cups veggies 15g fat from healthy sources 100g carbs from healthy sources Meal 2 During training 240g workout carbs Meal 3 Immediately after training 25g of protein from lean sources 0-2 cups veggies 100g carbs from healthy sources Meal 4 ~2-3 hours after previous meal 25g of protein from lean sources 1-2 cups veggies 15g fat from healthy sources 80g carbs from healthy sources Meal 5 3-4 hours after last meal 25g of protein from lean sources 1-2 cups veggies 15g fat from healthy sources 60g carbs from healthy sources Meal 6 Bedtime 30g casein protein in water 15g fat from healthy sources 40g carbs from healthy sources
by means of a recovery drink. This is unnecessary unless doing a multiple session training day. And counterproductive in the case of anyone looking to achieve reasonable satiety, daily.
Carbohydrates are the primary goal and the type isn’t critical. Protein is a bonus. Say 10-20 grams protein (whey is absorbed fastest), 30-60 grams carbohydrate.If you’re in a situation where timing of post-workout meal matters at all, then 30-60g carbs is probably laughably short of what is needed. If the need for replenishment timing is critical, the amounts should almost always exceed 80-100g carbs, otherwise, it’s very unlikely that meal timing above and beyond what is driven by hunger plays a major role in body composition alteration or performance, or anything at all.
You can actually increase your body’s capacity to store muscle glycogen by replenishing in this window shortly after your workout.Maybe. I used to preach this point harder. I don’t think the evidence in chronic studies bears large juicy fruit, any more than eating with timing to meat satiety.
This is the time your body is most receptive to replenishment.Yep. But that doesn’t mean there are long-term benefits of consuming rapidly absorbed protein or carbs here. (I preached that for years, FYI).
This is what more people should think of as “carb-loading” Yes, people should pay attention to having carbs post-workout. Call it loading if you like.
(not the old school stuff-your-face-with-pasta-the-night-before-your-race strategy that has far more potential to blow up your race than to help).Debatable.
Glycogen synthesis is most active for about and hour after exercise and diminishes after. You don’t have to gulp immediately after you step off the bike, but “the sooner the better” is easy to keep in mind.Mostly true. It starts diminishing almost immediately post-workout though. So the sooner the better really is true from a mechanistic perspective. But missing that post-workout window because of lack of hunger is minimally damaging, if at all, and you’d have a hard time proving otherwise using long-term training studies and not mechanistic or cross-sectional research study designs. Of course, there isn’t really meaningful harm in eating after training and plenty of dopamine from doing so in my case, so go for it! (especially from emotionally feeling like I’m doing all I can to fuel and recover from my training, even though I do nothing else optimally!).
But, I’d wager there are a LOT of folks struggling with body composition and weight loss issues who have taken to heart the “must eat X amount post-workout” too much, and end up overfeeding, to the point of not managing round the clock satiety well. I have read cases of that on this forum, in my email inbox and on the TrainerRoad forum.
There really is wisdom in the advice given by Jim, in this case. Sure, we can get wayyyyy down in the calculation-based weeds on the topic (that’s literally what my youtube channel is!) but missing the forest for the trees is unbelievably common among folks asking the “how much should I eat” question. Way too much focus on the little things and not enough focus on eating a reasonably high nutritious carb diet, consuming healthy fats, plenty of veggies, listening to hunger signals, reducing very high-palatability foods to manage satiety, eating reasonable amounts of lean protein regularly, etc etc.
“How much should I eat DURING training” is a whole 'nother ballgame, and I’d posit that focusing on the trees first may be more important for during training, specifically. Messing up the details can be catastrophic for performance and comfort. That’s not so much the case with daily nutritional optimization for training adaptations and health.
Regarding daily kcal intake and macro breakdown, and post-workout intakes, focus forest first (satiety, weight maintenance, limit animal fats, seek MUFA’s, eat colorful carbs and veggies regularly, then maybe a little tree hugging. (where “tree hugging” = macro counting meal by meal and paying attention to nutrient timing). Forest first though!