Firstly it comes down to what type of cyclist you are; a sprinter won’t need the same food in the lead up to an endurance cyclist. As a rule of thumb, personally I believe that if you are eating a nice balanced diet with plenty of Salad/Vegetables, a nice portion of lean protein and carbohydrates in each meal, you can’t go wrong. Just remember to stick away from those foods high on the Glycemic Index or high in fat.
I would also suggest breaking your meals up to 6 times per day. As long as you keep an eye on what you eat and how much you are consuming, this strategy is good for both losing weight and maintaining blood sugar levels. The regularity of eating every 3 hours or so keeps the body in a state of high metabolism, and given low GI foods are eaten during these meals and High GI foods are ignored the blood sugar levels should not spike, nor drop leaving you feeling much more consistent and alert throughout the day.
High GI foods aren’t bad for a cyclist, but there are specific times when they should be and should not be consumed. During or immediately after a ride, the body has used up all the muscle glycogen; it is during this state that we need to refuel our body with High GI fuel. Something as simple as a packet of snakes is an easy fix. You can also get glucose to add as a supplement to a drink bottle to consume as you ride.
The point of Carb loading is to raise our glycogen stores for a long hard ride.
As a rule of thumb for a 70kg rider, you should consume around 11g of carbohydrates per kilogram of bodyweight. Be careful about reading labels!! Pasta is 70% carbohydrates, this means that we would need to eat 1.1kg of raw pasta. Now pasta doubles or more in weight as it cooks which means we need to eat near 2.5kg of cooked pasta... Obviously this isn’t going to be done in one sitting so I recommend cooking up the pasta and making a couple of different sauces and to eat through a number of sittings throughout the day.
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