Cholesterol Fat and Heart Disease.

I found out I had arthritis at 46 I immediately knew I probably had it two years earlier as this is when I started suffering continuous knee pain and swelling.
I had put on a little weight in those years, so I began to change my eating habits.

I saw a TV documentary about what later became the 5:2 diet and tried this with some success. When I had a cortisone injection and was able to cycle again I found the 5:2 rather annoying as I had to eat when my cycle trips became longer.

This whole time I was looking at the latest research and studies on diet and health and was discovering something I did not at first believe. Eating fat might actually improve your health !

I have come a long way since then. I never stopped reading the latest developments and research and I reduced my carbohydrate intake in favor of fat. My weight dropped and then stabilized. It changes slightly depending on what type and volume of exercise I have been doing.

Most people, including the Nutrionists that advise the government seem to think that fats are bad for you, in particular saturated fat (SFA). They say they cause Cardiovascular Disease ( CVD ) and Coronary Heart Disease ( CHD ). So lets look at the latest evidence.

Since I started more and more research has been published supporting the fact that most fats are not harmful but actually healthy ! One of my favourite studies found that eating yoghurt regularly decreased your chances of heart disease.
       The consumption of yogurt, and other dairy products, in observational studies is associated with a reduced risk of weight gain and obesity, as well as CVD, and these findings are, in part, supported by randomized trials. However,  Replacing SFAs with carbohydrates of high glycemic index is also associated with a higher risk of CHD. 

So beware of choosing Low Fat Yoghurt. They probably have taken out the healthy SFA's and replaced it with sugar !

What to Eat

This is going to depend a lot on how much exercise you do and you're age.  Making it simple.
1. Please ignore the UK GDA ( Guidline Daily Amouint )
Here is what is recommended by the industry funded government advisers

I'm afraid it's complete nonsense and quite meaningless. For instance, performance athletes and anyone over 37 should be eating 2g per Kg lean mass of protein a day. So around 110g for me. Also that amount of carbs on a sedentary ( normal ) person is going to make them FATTER !

Also they are ripping you off, it only adds up to 1870cals.

I have listed what I normally eat in a day in a previous blog.

If I go out for a cycle which I know will be at a decent pace and over 90 minutes I WILL consume carbohydrates. I adopt a before, during and after formula. That's all you need to know for now :)

I've learned that we can all drastically reduce our carbohydrate intake and replace the lost calories with good fat.

Cholesterol

The thing about cholesterol is that people get excited if its high. Over five is meant to be high but most people in the UK are 5.5 It's split into HDL and LDL ( high density lipoprotein and low density lipoprotein ). It's in the body for a reason, it carries the necessary molecules around to make repairs in you're arteries. HDL is called good :) and LDL is bad ( more on this later ).

When you get a test at the doctor's they will tell you the Total cholesterol, the HDL count and the ratio.

Example Tot 5.8 HDL 1.7 Ratio 3.4, HDL should be over 1 and a good level is 1.5, if the percentage of HDL to Total is 20% then the risk of CHD is average if it's greater then the risk goes down. In this example the percentage is 1.7/5.8(*100/1) = 29% so very good !
The above example is me on a LCHF diet for 18 months !!

It is of course a wee bit more complicated. For years researchers have been finding out that LDL has two types or patterns larger more buoyant type A and a smaller denser type B. The Type A don't seem to pose a risk, however the Type B have been associated with a greater risk of CHD.

 The vast majority (but not all) show a significant univariate association of small, dense LDL with increased coronary heart disease (CHD) risk. (Low-density lipoprotein size and cardiovascular risk assessment, M Rizzo, K Berneis 2005)

What's more frightening is that the Type B are linked to the consumption of carbohydrates.

More research is always needed but the majority of the latest research strengthens the theory ( scientific theory = fact backed up by evidence ) that  carbohydrates and not fats are undoubtedly responsible not only for obesity and type 2 diabetes but also CVD and CHD.

One Whole Week. Food And Exercise.

OK folks here it is. I took the trouble to record everything I ate and the exercise I performed for one whole week.

12 minutes of exercise on Wednesday, 90 minute cycle on Friday, 25 min run on Saturday and another 12 minutes of exercise on Sunday.

Carbs were highest on the Cycling day, I thought the cycle would be longer smile emoticon

To cut a long story short, I lost 1.5 Kg this week.

The Best Heart Rate Zones For Running ?

From around 2010 through most of 2013 the slightest bend of the knee in the wrong direction could result in painful swelling for days or weeks.

After much hard work I have recently, quite hesitantly started running again. It's slow, more like gentler jogging. As with the cycling I am trying to follow some sort of plan. With cycling I could use power zones along with heart rate zones, with running it's going to be pace zones.

I established my pace zones by putting my time for a given distance into a pace calculator.

Here is one from Runners World but there's one on Strava settings if you use that and they both give the same result.

So here's mine. Yes the pace is very slow, if you've had my trouble over the past few years you will appreciate my softly softly approach. Something else I needed was heart rate zones.

Now there's the easy way to get HR zones and then there's the better way ! You could work out you're max HR by going for a run and getting steadily faster until you eyes pop out of your head, then set up your zones as percentages of this. It's better than using 220 minus your age but it's still not right.
It does not factor in your resting pulse like this.

Look at the formula box to see that resting pulse is a factor of the zones, it's added on. I used this method up until last year when I started training on the bike. I then discovered the Coggan method of using your Lactic Threshold Heart Rate. I established this on the bike by doing my 20 minute power test to find my Functional Threshold Power. This is fully explained HERE. 

So what I did this time was find the last run I did for an event, which is where I ran as hard as I could for 40 minutes, my average HR was 178. This gave me the following zones.

What did I hope to gain from this BETTER method ? Hope fully a correlation between running pace zone and HR zone. Now I know from my cycling power zones and HR zones that there is always some overlap, and that this would probably be worse with running especially when there was any sort of gradient involved. Here is my first try at running in Pace and HR zone 2.

I'm pretty happy with the results. 85% in pace zone 2 and 96% in HR zone 2 ! You may have noticed that I have six pace zones and only five HR zones ? Well I'm going to wait and see if I need to adjust things. I am doing mostly zone two running with one of either tempo, VO2max or Threshold per week so it may take a few weeks for me to decide what to do, if anything.

Watch this space and hope I don't get a knee injury.

One Year Gone

I have now past a year since returning to cycling.The last few months I have been doing a lot of standing up on the pedals for short periods when out cycling, something I could still not do without feeling a bit of knee pain.

Although I am Totally Metric, I also completed my first ever 100 mile cycle.

A great Highland Cycle, I took it easy and felt great at the end. Probably won't match this distance again until next summer. So far this year I have clocked up 3500 Km cycling.

You can see it's my best year yet.

My knees have been feeling so good I took an extraordinary step last week.  I went for a run !

Now during my years of unending knee pain and swelling I visited three different physiotherapist, all of them told me my running days were probably over. I may be pushing the boat out a little too far here but I want to give it a try.

I did get a bit carried away and went a wee bit too far and fast for someone with my knees.

So to set the record staright I went out again a few says later and went a bit shorter and slower !!

Both these runs were done in fields of stubble, as the weather gets worse or thses fields are ploughed I will have to do some running on the road. I was told about Hoka One One running shoes. After a bit of research I purchased these.

 I have made up a couple of workouts based on the pace guides from runners world I have from years ago. These pace zones tie in pretty well with the zones generated by Strava.

Yeah the pace zones are fairly lethargic, but bare with me. Proper specific training has helped me over the last year and I'm hoping it will help me with running too.

Why Are The Government Making You Fat ?

I'm going to cut straight to the answer for those of you who get bored with reading. It's very profitable for big business that's why. Yes it's all about making money. Still with me ? Want to know more ? Here's how it's happening. You are being told to eat far too many carbohydrates, mostly in the form of sugar. A recent critical analyses study into the treatment of Diabetes with a low carb diet was packed full of useful information.

The table explains that the obesity epidemic started after carbohydrate intake reached 43% of total daily calorific intake. For a man eating 2500 calories a day this is 269 grams per day.

So lets have a look at the government guidlines in the UK.

Well what do you know ? The UK guidelines say you can eat 300g a day. For a man that's 48%, way over the amount that causes obesity !

So why are the government advising you to eat far too many cabohydrates/sugars ? I told you, money.

There are eight advisers to the government on Nutrtion and 5 of them are in the pay of sugar and confectionery companies.

You can read the full article HERE

So how do you lose all that fat the government and big business have been feeding you. You eat fat, that's right, eat less carbs and more fat. Eating fat does not make you fat, carbs do.

Eating fat is healthy there is no link between fat ( whether saturated or not ) and heart disease. In fact it looks likely that Carbohydrate intake is linked to coronary disease.

Even our 'Fast Diet' friend Dr Michael Mosley has now been convinced that we had it all wrong.

A low carb. high fat diet is the way to a healthy life, I know I'm on one. 

Carbohydrate Intake During Exercise

I'm sure you all know that in order to maintain your ability to run or cycle over 90 minutes you must intake carbohydrates. Certain companies who supply carbohydrate powders and gels would like you to take up to 90g per hour.

I'm no expert but I do like to experiment with my training and nutrition. Since October 27th 2013 I have been mostly on a Low Carb High Fat LCHF Diet.

It's great ! Initially on exercise days I ate more carbs especially on days with long and/or strenuous cycles. Lately I have been reducing the amount of carbohydrates consumed on exercise days.

For example, I would consume around 50g carbs on a non exercise days and up to the government guideline amount of 300g on a workout day. ( WARNING: If you follow the governments advice on Carbohydrate intake, you WILL get fat ! )

Now it's around 150g or less more when exercising. I don't even bother with the essential post workout carb intake. I just have protein.

Lets go straight in and look what I did at the weekend.

A 4 hours cycle over 100km

You can see average heart rate is 149 BPM, for me this is classed asTempo (Zone 3)as per my LTHR zones.

 My effort was averaged out as 139 watts which is Endurance ( Zone 2 ). There's always a wee bit of crossover here depending on other factors.

Anyway after 90min I really should have been tucking away up to 90g carbs to keep my muscles going right ? Well no.

What I had was one scoop of High 5 2:1 Energy Source in each 750ml drinks bottle which lasted me the whole four hours. Each serving ( which is two scoops ) provides 44g carbohydrate. So I only consumed 11g per hour. No cramp, no exhaustion.

Ah, maybe I just scraped home before my carb supply ran out. Well luckily I have been monitoring my blood glucose during this experimental period. If I have two Weetabix ( under 30g carbs ) for breakfast my blood glucose after two hours in around 5.5-5.8 m/mol. Immediately after this ride it was 5.8 m/mol.

Wait a minute, if I had consumed all those recommended carbs I would have done a much better job right ?

Let's see.

Trust me, that's the same ride from three weeks ago. Shows how accurate the Garmin is when you look at the Km. Anyway, I knocked 10 minutes off the ride time and with a lower heart rate and power output than in this one.

Food for thought, so long as you keep your carbs lo :)

#LCHF

Using A Power Meter: Power Curve.

In my effort to combat the effects of arthritis I had managed to overcome the knee pain hurdle by slowly increasing my cycling distance and intensity. I also had a cortisone injection !

Having made some good gains cycling outdoors I could see myself losing this initial fitness during the winter so bought a turbo trainer and joined Trainer Road. Full details of this are HERE.

The decision to buy a power meter was made easier with the introduction of the Stages Power Meter, why ? Price. I did consider the Powertap G3 hub, but the hassle of having to get it built into my wheel put me off, it would have meant a week of missed training with me driving to our NOT LOCAL bike shop.

So now I've used power for training, what next.

The other thing Trainer Road does with my data is that it builds up a power curve. It uses the power I am able to produce over given time periods.

It builds a graph with this data. All the above data has been gathered during my training sessions which have been Sweetspot Intermediate Base 1. I won't show you the program, you'll have to join Trainer Road.

I also use Strava, and the premium version will also build a power curve for you. I upload my Trainer Road workouts to Strava but I can also include my outdoor rides.

Today I went out and did a 30 second all out sprint, and then a 5 minute paced effort, they were both on uphill Strava segments.

http://app.strava.com/activities/121733658

You can see three of my attempts on this segment. Position 3 and 2 were last year when I had started building my strength outdoors. In October I beat my September result by pushing the lap button and trying to beat my previous speed.

I achieved my fastest time yesterday by pushing the lap button and simply looking at the Watts I was producing. Time and speed were not an issue, I knew it would be 5 or so minutes and what wattage I hoped to produce.

Overall on the segment this gave me a pretty good result.

I did well, segment wise and I also gleaned valuable power information. I actually paced the 5 minute effort, based on recent efforts so that I didn't blow up halfway into the 5 minutes.

I now know that I should be able to maintain 267 watts over 5 minutes.

The Strava curve also gives you Watts/Kg.

Now for comparison. My 4 w/Kg would make me CAT4. The pro riders are pushing out 6-7 w/Kg !

So to stand a chance I would have to increase my 5 minute power from 267 watts to 462 watts !!

After my training is done I'm going to be doing an FTP test, more about that later.

What Do I Eat ?

I got back into cycling at the end of last year. Read the full story about my arthritis HERE and the motivational tools and training aids HERE

There is still a missing parameter in the fitness and health equation, my diet.

The word diet has all sorts of connotations and people have tried to get around this by saying, this is not a diet is a lifestyle ! Well, this is just the stuff I eat after a lot of research, several attempts at similar eating regimes and a little give and take I arrived at this.

It is to a large extent Low Carb High Fat. Yes, I'm a cyclist and I'm saying LCHF ! Also see bottom of page for info.

That may sound crazy, Carbs are your easy fuel, to cycle you need to eat as much as possible right ? Well not really. Take a look at what I have eaten over the past few days. Now I don't usually track my food all the time, However I was away from home last week and ate the food in the Hotel so I'm just checking I'm back on track again.

Normal day with no planned workout would be something like this:

The food tracker is Fatsecret and I have set a RDI of 2200 calories. You can see the small amount of carbs consumed and fat eaten in it's place. What about the Protein I hear you ask ?

Well a recent article in Cycling Fitness by an Olympic Nutritionist suggests that over 35 years of age should consume 2g of Protein per Kg of body weight. (Dr Sharon Madigan )

At 66kg - 67 Kg that's 132g. Having eaten that regularly over the last few months I'm pretty sure that most over 35's are NOT getting enough !

Anyway, onto a workout day. This was a 60 minute turbo session workout around the Sweetspot, see my Trainer Road blog.

Aye the good old Weetabix for breakfast, two hours before the training session, also there's the PhD ISO 7 drink post workout. I never even managed to get near the set RDI. I'm actually just eating to hunger, as I said I don't usually even track what I eat. Last Fridays 2225 calories may have been related to the fact that I ate quite a lot of carbs at the Hotel the day before. I have discovered that when you eat carbs it actually makes you hungrier throughout the day and the next day !

Tuesday and we are having a day off again. Few carbs and lots of lovely fat.

So what's eating all that fat done to my body and my fitness ? Well I have beaten all my Strava segment times from the past few years so I'm a lot fitter and have MORE muscle mass.

My cycling performance has increased. Here are my results for a local hill climb.

I had been back cycling since August and only started my exercise and diet program at the end of October. I thought my September time was fast and that I would not easily beat it !

As for my weight and body fat, well here is the graph. I was 71Kg in October 2013 and 22.1% body fat.

Today I'm 66.4Kg and 18.4% body fat, the main thing is I feel great aswell ! Another great benefit is NO heartburn/indigestion. Over a year ago I was taking Ibuprofen and Paracetemol for my knee pain. I stopped because of an upset stomach but the indigestion continued all year until I started my new way of eating !

When I first started doing this along with cycling I had a lot more carbs before, during and after excercise. I have been cutting this back recently with no negative effects. As I continue to experiment I will take food or a gel out with me just in case I need it :)

I would just like to say a big thanks to Andreas Eenfeldt   

It's nice to see some sense in a sea of diet confusion and stupidity !

If you want an excellent example of a self inflicted scientific study with proper control and all the data ( even more than me ) have a look at this. Peter Attia, experiment.

Another cycling and triathlon specific story can be found here Bob Seebohar

Get fit and lose weight, there's no excuse. LCHF !

Stages Power Problems Timeline.

This is a more concise version of events for those who don't want all the data, tests and pictures.

Full Report Here.

 8th February. Used for indoor turbo trainer sessions. First battery lasted 7 hours. Replacement battery lasted around 5.5 hours.

With the third battery I did tests to make sure the ANT+ and Bluetooth were 'going to sleep' when the unit was not in use and concluded that they were, so something else is draining the battery.

 22nd February. Meanwhile I had contacted stages Technical on  and later posted a link to my blog report on their facebook page.

 25th Feb. Stages' Evan Gaspar replies after reading my blog and says he will send out a new unit.

6th March Email from Saddleback saying my new Power Meter has been sent out.

11 March New Power Meter arrives, fitted in minutes. I will leave the battery in. Have an indoor session tomorrow and an outdoor on the 13th.

18 March After a week and several rides and workouts I used the Stages App to check the device and the battery was still showing full :) Happy days.

Stages Power Meter Battery Drain !

If your don't want to read the whole thing then hit the link below for the very short summary.

Updates and complete timeline now here.

I have contacted Stages to see if they can help as I'm in the UK and the unit was purchased for me by a friend in Colorado Springs.

I emailed Stages Technical about the problem on 22-Feb-2014.

Well the first battery lasted for a total of 7 hours riding time. I didn't panick at this stage although it had not quite achieved the claimed 200 hours !

I replaced the battery with  new one. It lasted around 5 hours. The third Duracell is being taken out when not in use.

The sad thing is that Stages haven't made an Android app so I have to take my bike to an iPad user to get the data. If there was an Android app I would leave the battery in and check it throughout the day.

Duracell battery put in the day before but removed overnight.

My firmware is up to date 2.0.38

I don't see the point of the zero reset, it merely shows you a figure and doesn't reset anything to zero !

Don't know what the slope or DPOT values are for.

I have discovered that the earlier ones shipped to the UK had similar problems.

Tri Talk Forum    and here   Bike Radar Forum

I decided to perform a test on my 'unworthy' Android device as it does support Bluetooth 4 and so can see the power meter when its awake and transmitting. 

Look at the times in the upper right. I had woken up the device in the first pic and then let it alone for ten minutes to put it back to sleep. You can then see me searching for it at 15:06 and it is not found after several attempts. I backed up this test with the Garmin Edge 500 and the same thing happened for ANT+.

I have decided to leave another battery in and check it tomorrow night if I can get access to an i-device.

It's now the next evening 24-Feb-2014 at 18:30 GMT.

No reply from Stages yet. I will link this blog on their Facebook page.

The battery has been in place for 30 hours but only two of those were spent cycling.

No access to an i-device tonight so lets try the Excellent Trainer Road.

Trainer Road attempts to find Stages Power Meter.

Nothing happens. Also nothing on the Garmin Edge 500. I remove and check the battery on a battery meter which says the voltage is good so I replace it.

I get something but the signal goes from good to poor to bad. I'm going to leave it for another day, this time in the house.

Here is what I hope will be the penultimate update. I arrived home tonight to do my 1 hour turbo session. I had left the bike in the house overnight. I got ready, put on Trainer Road which detected my HR monitor. Then I spun the crank and Trainer road detected the Power Meter.

Got on the bike to start the workout and NOTHING, battery out battery in still NOTHING. Removed battery replaced with another new one and away we go, no problem. I later tested both batteries on a simple good/bad battery meter and they both moved the needle to the same good position. I'm baffled.

The good thing is I got a very good and detailed response from Evan at Stages who is going to send outa new one. That's why I hope I'll only be making one more update to the blog :)

Updates and complete timeline now here.