Nutrition

I like eating. In fact I love eating. Sadly my genetics are such that my natural body shape is a fat b*****d, so I have to be careful. Obviously exercise helps ease the strictness, but still I can't go nuts (all the time at least, ahem).

Due to my weight gain over the end of 2009 my first goal in 2010 is to trim the fat off. Along with the training this needs a carefully constructed food plan (diet is the right word here, but its so badly mis-used these days I dodge it altogether). And in its first appearance in my blog, this is where my obsessive side really starts to kick in.

Everything I know about eating for fat loss comes from . It’s a bit gung-ho American in style, but its not a gimmick (just an e-book) and I'm not trying to sell it to you. I use it and I like it. Pointing you there also gives you the option to find out how I cobbled all this together and saves me detailing stuff you may well not care about. The main points I take from this (I don't take all the points, one thing it repeats is that you have to find what works for you) are:

• I eat 5 meals a day, starting with the biggest (calorie wise), then 3 meals of the same calories, ending with dinner being the smallest. This is hardly a new thought, but one society seems to have lost these days.

• To maintain muscle (and as cyclists I'm guessing we want more muscle in our legs, I know I do) I eat every 3 hours and it must contain protein.

• Dinner has no carbs and lots of green veg.

Please don't think that's all there is to it, far from it. I'm just trying not to bore you all to tears.

The book uses a formula (using your current weight and body fat %) for how many calories you need for a given number of days training per week. In order to burn fat you create a deficit by subtracting a percentage. A common mistake here is to subtract a percentage that is too big, in most people any more than 15% and you will lose muscle too. I will stick with the deficit until about April, at which point the amount of training (i.e. distance) will increase to a level that I just can't do without the full daily calorie allowance. Hopefully by then the fat will be down at an acceptable level.

So my general diet (ignoring December) is good. But one problem I have, which I really should address, is that it's not varied enough. I figure out one menu plan and pretty much stay with that. Yep, all the time. Told you I was obsessive. But I need more variation, especially with fruit / vegetables and the nutrients that come with them. Currently I'm still figuring out how to rotate it all around.

One tip I can offer (apologies if you already know this) is that when you eat fruit you should eat dark fruit (like berries) because they are very high in antioxidants. You need these because high levels of exercise (especially the insane hours we spend on the bike) produce a lot of free radicals, which in short are very bad. Antioxidants combat free radicals. So do yourself a favour and swap that banana or apple for something darker.

So that's nutrition, roughly speaking. Next will be training, at which point I will try to stop spamming my own blog and leave it to the more regular planned updates.