Food has become a particularly prominent feature of my life in the last few months as my Ironman training has ramped up. It’s not unusual for me to put away 3,000 calories on a fairly chilled day and almost 6,000 on a high-volume day — that’s the equivalent of 23 McDonald’s cheeseburgers. Don’t get me wrong, putting away this volume of food is no hardship for a greedy guts like me, but it does take some creativity to ensure it doesn’t become too unhealthy or expensive. This week’s edition of Things I learnt last week is all about how I fuel my workouts and eat well between meals.
1. Personal Nutritionist
After experimenting with ChatGPT, MyFitness Pal, Macrofactor, Cronometer and a few other apps, I’ve landed on a tool built specifically for people training for endurance events — Hexis.
Hexis is built on the principles of “Fuel For the Work Required”, or periodisation, and makes planning meals an absolute breeze. It might seem overkill for a rookie athlete like me, but it just removes the guesswork, overeating or, more likely, under-fuelling.
You simply connect Hexis to whatever training programme app you’re using (I use TrainingPeaks), tell it whether you want to lose, maintain or gain weight, and it will provide you with a dynamic daily fueling plan detailing how many of each macronutrient (carbs, fats, protein) you need throughout the day, total calories and even what you need to take during the workout itself. It has been developed by Dr Sam Impey, who pioneered research in the field of carbohydrate periodisation and has worked as a nutritionist for British Cycling.
2. One Good Thing Bars
There’s a lot of junk and gimmicks in the realm of fitness nutrition, with thousands of companies shilling overpriced and overprocessed sugar and salt, but a couple of weeks ago, one of my best mates, Charlie, shared an innovative new product called OGT bars (“One Good Thing”). These delicious oat-based bars are coated in a natural beeswax “wrapper”, keeping them protected and ready to eat at all times, without the need for a traditional plastic or paper wrapper.
I was sceptical at first, thinking that the beeswax layer would either be highly ineffective or taste completely vile — I’m delighted to say that I found neither to be true, and I am now happily scoffing these on my long bike rides. Last weekend, I shoved five of these into my jersey pockets and they were good to go to keep me fueled during a four-hour ride in drizzly Somerset, and better still, no dirty wrappers to keep for the remainder of the ride.
3. Cheap and Cheerful Rice Cooker
I’ve never been able to cook perfect rice. It’s annoying because it should be quite simple. Add the right ratio of rice and water to a pan, and cook at the prescribed temperature until light and fluffy. I’ve never done that. Not once. It either turns out as one homogenous lump of starch or as hard as bullets.
I recently purchased a cheap and cheerful rice cooker from Robert Dyas. It has no bells and whistles, but it does one thing well: it cooks perfect rice every time. 25 quid. You can’t go wrong.
4. Not So Cheap But VERY Cheerful
At £180, the Ninja Creami is by no means cheap, but for an ice cream connoisseur like me, it is life-changing—and it makes me ever so cheerful. This amazing device takes inspiration from a much-beloved chef’s gadget called a Pacojet, a mainstay of a high-end commercial kitchen. The Pacojet uses a rapidly spinning blade to shave a solid block of frozen mixture into ultra-fine crystals, resulting in a smooth, creamy texture. Chefs use it to create all manner of weird and wonderful frozen creams, savoury custards, sorbets, and mousses. The Ninja Creami takes inspiration from this £6,000 (!!!) device and brings it to the home kitchen in a not-so-compact package—it’s about the size of a coffee machine and weighs a tonne—allowing incompetent cooks like me to churn out (get it?) delicious, healthy ice cream by the pint-load.
Yes, you heard me correctly, I did say “healthy”. You can chuck anything you like into this thing and it will produce delicious, smooth and Creami ice cream. Here’s a simple recipe:
200ml milk / non-dairy milk
100g of full-fat Greek yoghurt
1.5 scoops of your favourite protein powder.
Add to the pint container, mix, freeze and shove it in the Ninja Creami.
Easy. Even I can do it, and I can’t even cook rice.
Have a great week, all 🙏