Nutrition and diet is a massive subject with any number of highly qualified experts offering equal and opposite opinions as what we should eat and particularly what we should eat for athletic performance.

I don’t claim to be any kind of an expert but I am able to report on what is working for me. A few years ago I became increasingly aware that I was slowly gaining weight to spite eating an apparently healthy, clean, mostly vegetarian diet with very little processed food and few bad habits. Was I just getting old? Was this inevitable? Yes I’m getting older for sure but surely that does not have to mean getting fat and slow.

Extra weight is no help for my preferred sport of windsurfing and is certainly no help for cycling either. Something had to be done!

It so happened that around this time I’d been noticing many positive mentions of Wheat Belly on Facebook and decided to look a little deeper.

Wheat Belly‘s Dr Davis (A cardiologist) states that:

“Over 80% of the people I meet today are pre-diabetic or diabetic. In an effort to reduce blood sugar, I asked patients to remove all wheat products from their diet based on the simple fact that, with few exceptions, foods made of wheat flour raise blood sugar higher than nearly all other foods. Yes, that’s true for even whole grains. More than table sugar, more than a Snickers bar. Organic, multigrain, sprouted–it makes no difference.”

That’s quite a thought and if you study “Wheat Belly” it you’ll find that Dr Davis offers some very convincing reason to seriously question eating wheat. However being a little distrustful of American “fad diets” and authors becoming rich and famous on the back of them I read a little further into the subject of grains and hit upon the Paleo Diet.

“The Paleo Diet is based upon everyday, modern foods that mimic the food groups of our pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer ancestors.”

The idea being that humans have evolved over many hundreds of thousands of years to eat and digest “pre-agricultural” foods and that these foods still represent our optimum nutrition. You hear of very few people who are meat or vegetable intolerant but many have real problems with wheat and dairy.

Eating predominately nutrient dense single ingredient foods simply makes good intuitive sense to me as does the idea of avoiding refined and processed foods where possible.

If you dig further into the why’s and wherefore’s of these diets you can get embroiled into all manner of plausible arguments for and against and backed up by scientific studies either way. I find all that somewhat exhausting, much like researching the existence of UFO’s or covert illuminati governments and other conspiracy theories. The only certainty is that we cannot depend upon “Government guidelines” to accurately guide us in any area of our lives!

I prefer to make an informed choice, trust my instincts, try things out and gauge the results. I don’t have any health issues or obvious food intolerances that I need to consider.

To this end in September 2013 I drastically reduced my bread, pasta and fruit consumption and increased my fish, meat, fat and vegetable consumption. I quickly lost weight and felt far more energised. I went from 89kg down to 83kg by Christmas that year.

It was a fairly effortless process as I simply felt less hungry on this diet and quickly stopped craving bread and toast, though I did not stop eating bread and grains altogether. The hard part was, and still is, dealing with the convenience of just grabbing a sandwich or a slice of toast etc. particularly when away from home.

However in the years since then my weight gradually climbed back to over 88kg by August 2016 as old bread and pasta habits crept back in.

It was in July of 2016 that I began riding my bike more and thinking increasingly about improved fitness and weight loss again. This slowly progressed to me going full on into signing up for TheTransatlanticWay race.

Getting trim is a bit different this time round as I am now expending 30,000.00+ calories a month training. However I am now back down to a lean 83kg and targeting 80kg or lower as my race weight.

To achieve this I’ve applied principles that make rational sense to me but don’t demand rigid weighing out of my food or calorie counting and the like. I simply eat combinations of nutrient dense single ingredient whole foods with few grains and fairly low carbs.

Post ride I quaff a whey protein drink or some roast chicken plus some fruit but otherwise I’m still on a low-ish carb paleo-ish diet of wholesome simple and mainly organic foods. No sports drinks, gels, bars and other sports nutrition industry paraphernalia. I feel great and am losing weight and gaining strength month by month without cravings, harsh hunger ignoring self-discipline or others challenges.

As of writing this the race proper is about 13 weeks away and I am now researching and planning more refined nutrition strategies for that because I am acutely aware that fuelling adequately for multiple long, long days in the saddle is very different to my current day to day needs and training rides.

A lower carb diet allows your body to adapt to using fat for fuel rather than carbs. I want to optimise my fat for fuel metabolism in a balanced and sustained manner that let’s me enjoy the ride and does not require me to be chowing down handfuls of Haribo, Mars bars, doughnuts and other high calorie low nutrition junk.

I’m undertaking a very long 4 day “rehearsal” ride in a couple of weeks and shall report back on progress after that.