You are reading a single comment by @DFP and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@DFP
No, but sensible consumption of carbs is not a bad idea. If you much on bread/rice/pasta etc throughout the day when you are sitting about and not very active, your body will store this as fat. In the long term it also makes you less sensitive to insulin which is route into type II diabetes.
It is better to reward yourself with carbs only after strenous physical activity. Activities which reallly challenge your muscular strength will prime your body to deliver nutrients into the muscles for repair and fortification. Activities that test your endurance like long slow days out running/cycling or a short intense spinning class/swim session, will deplete your bodies carb stores (which can last for a week if you are sedentary) so you can 'refill' your carb stores afterwards, without it gettig stored as fat. f you are somebody that sometimes drinks sugary drinks or eats a lot of fruit, these in particular would be best post-exercise. It does not matter if this is at bedtime even.
If you manage to run your body completely empty of carbs, which is a bit of an ordeal to get used to and takes a few days. Your body will enter what is known as a 'ketogenic' state. Where you will start to use fat stores for energy. This has the potential to really eat away all your fat stores and make you very thin, but can be very testing on your mood, hormones etc. If you push yourself too hard into this distressed state, your body can release a lot of cortisol which will start to cause muscle breakdown and encourage your body to create fat stores again of whatever it can. So you have to keep an eye on things, best not to jump into for long periods to begin with.
A popular way of managing long periods of "ketogenesis" is to spend 5 days with no carbs, then carb up at the weekend. This method is used a lot by bodybuilders under the name 'anabolic diet'. Which is not too different from the atkins diet. Both require upto 2 weeks for the starting period with no carbs at all.
You can get 'ketosis test strips' on ebay to check when your body has entered this state. If you find that you can have X amount of carbs in a day and still remain in ketosis, then you can roll with that.
My 3 weeks of post training carb timing, and NO calorie restriction. Gave me a 5kg fat loss. But it was a pain in the arse. I ate copious amounts of carbs every evening after training but only fat+protein+non starchy vegetables in morning.