Every cycling coach and nutrition article on the internet will tell you to fuel early, fuel often, never skip breakfast. I skip breakfast every day. Have done for years. This episode is why.
Key Takeaways
The standard advice in cycling nutrition is track your macros, eat every three hours, don't let your glycogen drop. That's not wrong for race day. But most of us aren't racing — we're trying to lose a bit of weight and ride better, and obsessing over macros is doing nothing for us. What actually moved the needle for me was compressing my feeding window. I eat dinner around 7 or 8pm, skip breakfast, break the fast at lunch. That's a 16-hour fast, 8-hour eating window. I didn't change what I was eating. I just cut the hours I was eating it in. Six hours of feeding versus twelve. The calorie reduction takes care of itself.
The second piece is the one people ignore. When you stop putting food in, your body stops running the digestion process and starts repairing damaged cells instead — a process called cellular autophagy. Pre-cancerous cells, cells linked to Alzheimer's, cells responsible for aging. The body goes to work on them the moment it has nothing else to process. One thing worth knowing: aspartame in Diet Coke and Coke Zero can trigger insulin production even with zero calories, so those don't count as fasting. Black coffee, black tea, water. That's your fasting window. Start there, give it two weeks, and see what happens to your weight before you touch anything else.
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If you want more on how fasting fits into cycling performance specifically, the training fasted episode covers the practical side of riding in a fasted state. And if weight loss is the goal, the five fixable reasons you can't lose weight episode is worth your time.