LCHF - Low Carb High Fat Diet Ver 2

[jcza]

Probably hugely inappropriate post to put here, but you guys and gals feel like my Hub family. I was told towards the latter end of May that I would be retrenched at the beginning of June due to some aggressive restructuring of the company (in certain areas). So I find myself at the wrong side of 50 looking for something new to put bread on the table and that has been absorbing all of my energy - hence my absence on this thread. I do check in from time to time, but have not had enough time and mental resources to contribute. I know every dark cloud has a silver lining, so I just need to get out of the cloud in order to see that. Early days, lots of conversations with many people but nothing concrete in terms of an offer yet. I will keep eating loads of fat, as I find that this gives me an edge in interviews (I am actually serious here). Keep going, in the words of Arnie : "I will be back".

 

Hoping another door will open soon htone.

[P.A.K.]

Probably hugely inappropriate post to put here, but you guys and gals feel like my Hub family. I was told towards the latter end of May that I would be retrenched at the beginning of June due to some aggressive restructuring of the company (in certain areas). So I find myself at the wrong side of 50 looking for something new to put bread on the table and that has been absorbing all of my energy - hence my absence on this thread. I do check in from time to time, but have not had enough time and mental resources to contribute. I know every dark cloud has a silver lining, so I just need to get out of the cloud in order to see that. Early days, lots of conversations with many people but nothing concrete in terms of an offer yet. I will keep eating loads of fat, as I find that this gives me an edge in interviews (I am actually serious here). Keep going, in the words of Arnie : "I will be back".

 

All the best. If things don't work out, you can always become a dietician

Just kidding, things will work out

[tombeej]

All the best htone. I know exactly what you're going through - happened to me last year.

As you say, there is a silver lining somewhere.

[tombeej]

Helmytrap,

 

I’ve been doing this for nearly 18 months now and so have a little bit of experience about all this. Only thing is I don’t have racing experience on LCHF (my last bike race was XCO Nationals in ’99). Anyway, here’s my long novel – hope you get something out of it (apologies if I’ve repeated what others have already said)…

 

The more committed/strict you are in the beginning, the quicker the adaptation process takes.

 

That said, the choice you make depends on whether you are prepared to stop racing for a few months during this transition or not:

 

-- If you want to keep racing through the transition period, use the regular carb-based fuel you’ve been successful with in the past. Mid-week rides: water only. Long weekend rides and racing: you don’t change your old ways. Just slowly wean yourself off carbs for fuel as the months go by. Less important and shorter races, maybe go water only.

 

-- If you are prepared to stop racing, then go strict LCHF for at least the first couple of months. Your performance will suffer during this time. It might even take as long as 6 months to get back to your old speedy self.

 

The move to LCHF has the following effects on your riding:

· You feel you can literally go forever at a certain pace (mid tempo, no high intensity bursts) without needing to refuel. You become almost unbonkable. After a time you start to find that you can head out the door on a 4-5hr ride with no fuel at all (only water) and it will be a totally normal thing to do.

· But: in this transition period any hill climbs or high intensity stuff, you’ll feel like there’s no power in your legs. Your body still wants to pull from your glycogen stores for fuel and hasn't yet learnt how to ‘switch on’ its fat tapping powers. If you continue to stick with not supplying it with carbs for fuel, the body (and most importantly your brain, where your perceptions of pain really reside – read up about Noakes’ ‘governor theory’) gradually starts to learn that this is in fact not the end of the world, that you’re not going to keel over, and “hey lookie here, what’s all this endless supply of fuel I’m already carrying on board so freely available – awesome, let’s use that!”. If you are not expecting that initial loss of power it can be very disheartening, and it’s where most people give up their LCHF experiment. But if you know it’s coming and accept that this is very normal and you’ll get through to the other side in a couple of months, then you just ride through it.

 

It’s not that you won’t want to ride. You’ll still have more than enough energy in the day to be enthusiastic about getting on the bike. Lots of energy, just a lack of muscle power.

 

This does change over time. Your power does come back, but in my experience it’s important to add focused power work in the gym and on the IDT. So I was very interested to read about David Zabriskie’s training program from jcza’s post. It’s exactly where I’ve ended up. This winter I’ve been almost exclusively in the gym and on the IDT, maybe only 1 or 2 longish bike rides a week. As spring nears, I’m going to move from power work to speed work.

 

Food:

-- Lots of fatty pork. Choose the really fatty cuts, cook them in a large corningware pot in the oven for a few hours (or in a potjie). If you chuck in some low carb vegies and let them in the liquid fat, when it all cools you have an amazing high fat dinner, and to take to work the next day.

-- Really fatty biltong for general snacking. Also macadamia nuts, almonds, walnuts. Biltong is getting expensive, so I'm making up a homemade biltong box. Should be finished this weekend.

-- Chicken with all the skin on. Try and steal the skin off everyone else's plate too .

-- Lots of bacon and eggs, swimming in kerry gold butter.

-- In fact, lots of butter on just about everything.

-- Cut out dairy, but cream and butter still good.

-- Generous helpings of avo oil/olive oil on salads. Actually pretty much on everything - vegies too. Olive oil is bad for cooking with. Avo oil is brilliant for cooking with (and tastes much better IMHO). I love the stuff.

-- Homemade macadamia nut butter and coconut oil.

-- Lots of coconut oil – esp. in htone fat shake.

-- Lots of avo.

-- Lots of fatty fish: mackerel, sardines, pilchards, tuna, salmon, etc.

-- Pudding: mascarpone warmed up in the microwave with a touch of honey. YUM.

Edited June 25, 2013 by tombeej

[Jaco-fiets]

How do you guys feel about only consuming carbs around your training? Say you have your gym workout in morning for about 45min and then do a 90min session on the bike in the pm and consume 50g of carbs around each of those activities while consuming high protein and fat for rest of the day. Will your body still use fat as major energy source? 100g of carbs will hardly be enough to replenish lost glycogen so theoretically your body will be in deficit so it would have to turn to perhaps fat as source of fuel?

[Sniffie]

Probably hugely inappropriate post to put here, but you guys and gals feel like my Hub family. I was told towards the latter end of May that I would be retrenched at the beginning of June due to some aggressive restructuring of the company (in certain areas). So I find myself at the wrong side of 50 looking for something new to put bread on the table and that has been absorbing all of my energy - hence my absence on this thread. I do check in from time to time, but have not had enough time and mental resources to contribute. I know every dark cloud has a silver lining, so I just need to get out of the cloud in order to see that. Early days, lots of conversations with many people but nothing concrete in terms of an offer yet. I will keep eating loads of fat, as I find that this gives me an edge in interviews (I am actually serious here). Keep going, in the words of Arnie : "I will be back".

Kan jy 'n trekker ry? Deesdae se trekkers het GPS auto track, windows rekenaar, climate control, bluetooth, stereo en yskas. So werksomstandighede is nie te sleg nie!

 

Alle sterkte, ons dink aan jou!

[Jaco-fiets]

Probably hugely inappropriate post to put here, but you guys and gals feel like my Hub family. I was told towards the latter end of May that I would be retrenched at the beginning of June due to some aggressive restructuring of the company (in certain areas). So I find myself at the wrong side of 50 looking for something new to put bread on the table and that has been absorbing all of my energy - hence my absence on this thread. I do check in from time to time, but have not had enough time and mental resources to contribute. I know every dark cloud has a silver lining, so I just need to get out of the cloud in order to see that. Early days, lots of conversations with many people but nothing concrete in terms of an offer yet. I will keep eating loads of fat, as I find that this gives me an edge in interviews (I am actually serious here). Keep going, in the words of Arnie : "I will be back".

 

All the best! Mentally I don't know if I would be able to cope of something like that happened to me. You seem like a positive guy so I am sure everything will work out just fine

[davetapson]

Helmytrap,

 

I’ve been doing this for nearly 18 months now and so have a little bit of experience about all this. Only thing is I don’t have racing experience on LCHF (my last bike race was XCO Nationals in ’99). Anyway, here’s my long novel – hope you get something out of it (apologies if I’ve repeated what others have already said)…

 

The more committed/strict you are in the beginning, the quicker the adaptation process takes.

 

That said, the choice you make depends on whether you are prepared to stop racing for a few months during this transition or not:

 

-- If you want to keep racing through the transition period, use the regular carb-based fuel you’ve been successful with in the past. Mid-week rides: water only. Long weekend rides and racing: you don’t change your old ways. Just slowly wean yourself off carbs for fuel as the months go by. Less important and shorter races, maybe go water only.

 

-- If you are prepared to stop racing, then go strict LCHF for at least the first couple of months. Your performance will suffer during this time. It might even take as long as 6 months to get back to your old speedy self.

 

The move to LCHF has the following effects on your riding:

· You feel you can literally go forever at a certain pace (mid tempo, no high intensity bursts) without needing to refuel. You become almost unbonkable. After a time you start to find that you can head out the door on a 4-5hr ride with no fuel at all (only water) and it will be a totally normal thing to do.

· But: in this transition period any hill climbs or high intensity stuff, you’ll feel like there’s no power in your legs. Your body still wants to pull from your glycogen stores for fuel and hasn't yet learnt how to ‘switch on’ its fat tapping powers. If you continue to stick with not supplying it with carbs for fuel, the body (and most importantly your brain, where your perceptions of pain really reside – read up about Noakes’ ‘governor theory’) gradually starts to learn that this is in fact not the end of the world, that you’re not going to keel over, and “hey lookie here, what’s all this endless supply of fuel I’m already carrying on board so freely available – awesome, let’s use that!”. If you are not expecting that initial loss of power it can be very disheartening, and it’s where most people give up their LCHF experiment. But if you know it’s coming and accept that this is very normal and you’ll get through to the other side in a couple of months, then you just ride through it.

 

It’s not that you won’t want to ride. You’ll still have more than enough energy in the day to be enthusiastic about getting on the bike. Lots of energy, just a lack of muscle power.

 

This does change over time. Your power does come back, but in my experience it’s important to add focused power work in the gym and on the IDT. So I was very interested to read about David Zabriskie’s training program from jcza’s post. It’s exactly where I’ve ended up. This winter I’ve been almost exclusively in the gym and on the IDT, maybe only 1 or 2 longish bike rides a week. As spring nears, I’m going to move from power work to speed work.

 

Food:

-- Lots of fatty pork. Choose the really fatty cuts, cook them in a large corningware pot in the oven for a few hours (or in a potjie). If you chuck in some low carb vegies and let them in the liquid fat, when it all cools you have an amazing high fat dinner, and to take to work the next day.

-- Really fatty biltong for general snacking. Also macadamia nuts, almonds, walnuts. Biltong is getting expensive, so I'm making up a homemade biltong box. Should be finished this weekend.

-- Chicken with all the skin on. Try and steal the skin off everyone else's plate too .

-- Lots of bacon and eggs, swimming in kerry gold butter.

-- In fact, lots of butter on just about everything.

-- Cut out dairy, but cream and butter still good.

-- Generous helpings of avo oil/olive oil on salads. Actually pretty much on everything - vegies too. Olive oil is bad for cooking with. Avo oil is brilliant for cooking with (and tastes much better IMHO). I love the stuff.

-- Homemade macadamia nut butter and coconut oil.

-- Lots of coconut oil – esp. in htone fat shake.

-- Lots of avo.

-- Lots of fatty fish: mackerel, sardines, pilchards, tuna, salmon, etc.

-- Pudding: mascarpone warmed up in the microwave with a touch of honey. YUM.

 

+1. Exactly what he said.

[davetapson]

Probably hugely inappropriate post to put here, but you guys and gals feel like my Hub family. I was told towards the latter end of May that I would be retrenched at the beginning of June due to some aggressive restructuring of the company (in certain areas). So I find myself at the wrong side of 50 looking for something new to put bread on the table and that has been absorbing all of my energy - hence my absence on this thread. I do check in from time to time, but have not had enough time and mental resources to contribute. I know every dark cloud has a silver lining, so I just need to get out of the cloud in order to see that. Early days, lots of conversations with many people but nothing concrete in terms of an offer yet. I will keep eating loads of fat, as I find that this gives me an edge in interviews (I am actually serious here). Keep going, in the words of Arnie : "I will be back".

 

Good luck HT.

 

I think you came from an IT background? Any chance with contracting? It's what I do to counter the old pale male syndrome?

[davetapson]

How do you guys feel about only consuming carbs around your training? Say you have your gym workout in morning for about 45min and then do a 90min session on the bike in the pm and consume 50g of carbs around each of those activities while consuming high protein and fat for rest of the day. Will your body still use fat as major energy source? 100g of carbs will hardly be enough to replenish lost glycogen so theoretically your body will be in deficit so it would have to turn to perhaps fat as source of fuel?

 

My understanding is that under conditions of exercise the biochemical pathways change in regards to glucose use. It has something to do with the glutame4 pathway(?) but i've never found an explanation of what happens that I can understand.

 

So using glucose as you start exercise to half an hour to an hour afterwards won't cause the insulin spike etc (and this is what Joe Friel suggests in his book).

 

However, it will probably reduce the rate at which you adapt, as you are not forcing your liver to up the rate at which it produces glucose while exercising (gluconeogenesis).

 

But you should still be able to make the fat burning adaptations, as long as you only do the carb'ing at or after the start of exercise and stop it pretty immediately afterwards. And it would take longer than if you didn't carb during training.

[Jaco-fiets]

My understanding is that under conditions of exercise the biochemical pathways change in regards to glucose use. It has something to do with the glutame4 pathway(?) but i've never found an explanation of what happens that I can understand.

 

So using glucose as you start exercise to half an hour to an hour afterwards won't cause the insulin spike etc (and this is what Joe Friel suggests in his book).

 

However, it will probably reduce the rate at which you adapt, as you are not forcing your liver to up the rate at which it produces glucose while exercising (gluconeogenesis).

 

But you should still be able to make the fat burning adaptations, as long as you only do the carb'ing at or after the start of exercise and stop it pretty immediately afterwards. And it would take longer than if you didn't carb during training.

 

Thanks for reply! What you said is my logic behind currently doing it. If I look at Zibriski's total carb intake it also seems to be structured in such a style if I am not mistaken

[tombeej]

Two things I'm looking forward to:

 

1. The release of Prof. Noakes new LCHF diet book - I heard it's in the making, but don't know if it's imminent.

 

2. The results of the study Noakes et al are doing on LCHF cyclists at the Sports Science Institute of SA (CT). That might be some time coming though.

[Helpmytrap]

Thanks for the replies, I'll see if I can find htone's fat shake (I do remember reading about it a while back.)

 

More info:

About a year ago (since Tim Noake's was on Carte Blanche) I started upping my fat intake and lowered my carb intake, which did wonders for my physique. Then at the start of this year I cut out the majority of starch from my meals (nearly going Paleo) and eating majority veg, fat and protein. I must admit that it was actually working for me. Although still high, my carb intake was never more than 150g a day. Things went a bit awry a few weeks prior to Sani this year where I upped my carb intake for whatever reason and I have unfortunately maintained that since then.

 

So where I'm sitting at now, after about 2 months on a higher carb than fat diet I've noticed that my legs are "moody" on the bike, I don't recover enough to have a good training week, let alone 3 in a 4 week cycle. And I haven't had a ride in ages where I feel fresh and "frisky." Oh, I also run 4km with the neighbours dog 3-5 times a week for extra cash and cross training.

 

After being on the paleo part of my diet this year, my weight was down to 58kg. But to be on the safe side I upped my calorie intake until I stabilised at 61kg, 5% body fat @ 1.73m. I'm now at 61.5kg.

I realise now that everything worked out quite well for me with paleo but I'd really like to go cold turkey on carbs completely. I might be 21 years old but if I am able to pull this off, I could really have an awesome race career in the years to come. I thought I might as well be strict LCHF because that is where I would like to be in the end so why drag the process out. PLUS my grandfather on the one side of the family and grandmother on the other were/are (respectively) both type 2 diabetics.

 

I think I might just take that "off" season now, I'll still race but obviously not at the same level. As you can see in my signature below I've done quite a bit of riding with 90% being MTB this year. Maybe taking it easy for a few months will do me a whole lot of good.

 

On training days, my pre ride meals "were" FutureLife, so that's where about 40% of my daily carbs came from, the rest was milk, double cream greek yoghurt, recovery drink and veg. And I always eat either salad or mixed veg for lunch with lots of olive oil and butter in the case of veg. Anyway, Sunday I went for a 5hr ride on the road bike and with yesterday being LCHF (less than 30g carbs and lekker pork crackling for dinner), today having maybe 5g carbs in my breakfast, my 2hr road ride wasn't the greatest (http://app.strava.com/activities/62706934)... Legs were sore the whole ride and the last hour I was really limping home. And so the suffering has begun.

 

I'll keep you guys posted as things go up or down and ask for the odd recipe.

[htone]

Good luck HT.

 

I think you came from an IT background? Any chance with contracting? It's what I do to counter the old pale male syndrome?

 

Been out of IT for 10+ years, so looking at other options around sales or team management... don't worry too much, if the going gets tough I am going to start charging for LCHF advice .

 

Thanks for the wishes everyone, much appreciated.

[tombeej]

Please do some blogging on this thread for us, Helpmytrap, will be keen to read about your progress.

[Helpmytrap]

Will do, I'm hopefully getting well borrowing a power tap from Thursday. So will also be able to see how my max power changes over the next few months.