People do that, I hear. They forget to eat.
I have a friend who works at a computer all day, most days and his Facebook posts occasionally say things like “3 pm, guess I should eat something today.”
But not me. I wake up hungry. If I don’t snack in the evenings I’ve been known to wake up at 3 am hungry.
I never forget supper. Mid afternoon comes around and I’m thinking about food. I snack, the goal is to snack healthily, so I can make it to dinner. I snack on veggies while I cook.
People talk about eating when hungry and stopping when full as if it might push them to eat less. But I’m often hungry. Not vaguely snack-y, I mean stomach growling, actually full blown hungry hunger.
Until recently.
Twice recently I’ve realized that I’ve forgotten to eat. Both times, of course, on bike rides. That’s bad.
Last week I had a 5 pm training ride. They’re hard. I had lunch. Returned to my desk. Started to get ready to leave for the ride and realized, “Oh, crap. Food. I have to eat.”
That’s an external cue, bike ride!, rather than an internal one, hunger, but it didn’t matter. Intuitive eating be dammed, I need to eat. So I found a protein bar in a vending machine and off I went.
But it wasn’t enough. Three quarters way through the ride, I was rustling through my jersey pocket trying to unwrap gel blocks without either a)tipping my bike over or b)getting dropped. I managed but I stopped halfway home and ate a sports bar and then real dinner when I got home at 7.
We’ve written a lot on this blog about cycling and food. See:
- Why riding fast and long requires lots of food
- It’s all about the fuel!
- How much biking does that breakfast get you?
Here’s some of what I’ve written:
For me biking is one of the few contexts in which eating intuitively doesn’t work at all. If I work hard I don’t feel like eating but you can’t ride a bike without food.
I blogged about my experiences in the post Hunger and Nutrition.
I wrote,
I struggle a bit with this because I’m often not hungry when I know I need to eat–during long, intense bike rides is the most common example–and at other times I’m famished even when I know there’s no need for extra calories (after long bike rides when I’m often hungry for the rest of the day and into the next one even after I’ve refueled.)
I know from experience that if I don’t eat while riding my performance suffers. It’s not just that I struggle while riding, I’m also hungry for days afterwards. By the time I get off the bike I’m eating anything and everything in sight. Often I’m still hungry the next day.
But if I eat regularly, before I’m hungry, and keep eating throughout the ride, I’m fine.
If I get the balance right not only can I ride faster, for longer, there’s no big swing in hunger associated with a long hard ride. I can have dinner that night as usual.
So I do it because I know it works even if it means setting aside my usual “eat when hungry” mantra.
If I find it tough, I think, again based on experience, my smaller cycling friends have it tougher. Food management can hugely affect cycling performance. It’s worth experimenting to find what works.
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I’m not sure what’s caused the missing meals thing with me. I’ve got some guesses related to medication I’m taking. The experience has been a bit of an eye opener about intuitive eating If my hunger cues are so radically different when presumably my energy needs are about the same, hunger might not be such a reliable guide. Indeed, regulating hunger and appetite turns out to be something the body isn’t very good at and many people think these hormones (not a relapse to old ways and bad habits) are a big part of the explanation of weight regain.
The good news is that I might even be able to run in the morning. See here for why I haven’t been able to in the past.
