I am an average guy, slightly overweight (I’m 6’ 3" so my 20 lbs are evenly distributed so I don’t look overweight), I go cycling about 30 - 40 km every couple of days and I’m generally fairly active. And thirty years ago I was a young snot Tour de France poseur. So I’m not exactly a high performance athlete. However, if I don’t eat enough, I’ll bonk and, if I’m in an urban area, grab a chocolate bar or something.
But then there are people who are undernourished and still seem to perform normally and, in some extreme cases, there are female gymnasts and possibly other athletes that I’m not aware of, many of whom are apparently encouraged to lose weight etc but can do incredible feats of athleticism.
I also know a woman who is close to skeletal but she has to get her zillion daily steps in, and can do this.
Beyond the psychological element, how are these people capable of doing these things without bonking or crapping out?
Their bodies have adapted to a relatively low calorie diet that has enough protein for them to maintain their muscle mass. Why they aren’t hungry all the time is likely psychologically driven by their fear of gaining weight, or for some other reason.
Metaphorically running out of gas. If I’m out for a ride and I bonk, I’m done until I get something to eat. It’s a unique feeling in which one just can’t go any further. It’s hard to describe. In the 2006 Tour de France, Floyd Landis “bonked”, “hit the wall”, or, as the Wikipedia article ( Floyd Landis doping case - Wikipedia ) put it, had “…a meltdown…” The contrast between his visible performance during his bonk and his usual performance was spectacular (notwithstanding the associated drug scandal).
So basically my question is about how professional cyclists, and Velomont, can bonk if they don’t fuel themselves (and professional cyclists are known for their epic food intakes before a stage), while some gymnasts, for example - encouraged to lose weight to the extent that some are allegedly reducing their fuel intake - don’t bonk and can seemingly perform to a high level regardless.
The rigorous demands on gymnasts, ballet dancers, etc, to maintain a very thin habitus may certainly put them at risk for eating disorders, but they couldn’t do what they do if they were actually clinically malnourished. Up to a certain point, it’s perfectly possible to be a high performance athlete with a lower than normal BMI. Also, gymnastics isn’t an endurance sport; these women probably don’t have the fat stores to ride a bike full speed for a hundred miles, but they don’t have to.
People who DO have eating disorders, sadly, often don’t manage; anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, worse than depression, schizophrenia, or addiction. That skeletal woman you know, if she’s really anorexic, may just drop dead one day while doing her zillion steps, if her electrolytes get too out of whack for her heart to function.
yeah, also gymnasts and ballet dancers, at least professional ones, almost assuredly have their diets strictly monitored by their teams and helpers. While they may run a caloric deficit from time to time to manage weight, muscle mass, etc., overall their nutritional needs are adequately met so they can perform their best. This may include not only eating specific things, but also at strategic times to ensure adequate energy reserves for their performances.
Professional athletes are the exact opposite of undernourished (or overnourished!): they are instructed on what, how much, and when (nutrient timing) to eat for peak performance for the specific event.
I’m no nutritionist, but your description of running out of gas, or ‘bonking’, and grabbing a chocolate bar as a quick fix is telling. It sounds like you’re suffering from a sugar crash, and ‘fixing’ it with a candy bar, which is just perpetuating a ‘quick fix and crash’ cycle, kind of like a drug addict.
When I did a keto diet a few years ago, one thing I noticed about doing low-carb is that I never had that ‘low blood sugar, shaky, starving’ feeling I’d sometimes get previously. It was almost a superpower. I’d think ‘I could eat’ but it was never a desperate, urgent feeling.
I think it’s similar to eating a diet that is made up of more natural. less processed foods-- the starches and sugars are bound up more with fiber, so the sugar release into the bloodstream is more gradual, so you avoid the ‘spike and crash’ cycle. I don’t know if that’s what’s going on with people like this you describe:
But they surely aren’t eating a lot of junk food or sugary stuff, and so they’re not going to get the spikes and crashes. Whatever fuel they are running on won’t last forever if they do have a genuine eating disorder, but I think the human body has evolved to perform very well for long periods of time on relatively few calories.
Americans would commonly term this “hitting a/the wall”, which is one of the tems you mentioned. “Crashed” is a common American English verb for this same “out of gas” feeling, but obviously ambiguous in cycling contexts. There are some further American English terms that are close in meaning: “conked out”, “smoked”, “burnt [out]”, “fried”, “[just] done”, etc.
I do not know how long it takes you to cycle the 30–40 km, but if you are really running out of energy you can suck down some “energy gel”. You are also supposed to fuel up before the race, in any case (I would not feel good doing it if I were starving).
Compared to the average American, and probably to the average adult in your age range where you live … you’re basically Miguel Indurain. I would bet you’re in the 99th percentile among all adults in your area for calories spent exercising per week.
“Bonking” is absolutely a term I’ve heard here in the U.S. for the phenomenon; PowerBar used it in a tagline for their advertising here (“Don’t Bonk”), but it was a campaign which ran about 25 years ago. I wonder if the term has just fallen out of general use among endurance athletes (or, at least, is not widely known anymore).
ISTM the OP was more discussing amateur athletes such as themselves. Rather than true pros who earn their living doing whatever event and have a staff of pro assistants to handle feeding planning, workout planning, and everything else planning.
Decent bet some in-shape amateurs are sabotaging themselves with a diet based on urban legend, random internet “research”, and bad habits.
The OP themselves may not be one of those well-intentioned but misguided folks. But the skeletal zillion-stepper almost certainly is.
While ‘bonk’ in British English has a very different meaning, one typically associated with what could be described as a form of exercising, albeit typically horizontally.
Definitionally, if you are able to maintain a high level of physical activity, you are eating “enough” calories to support that activity.
The “starving yourself” family of eating disorders is relatively rare for how much attention is (or once was) paid to it. Just in terms of causing death - there’s about 5000 deaths per year in the U.S. from causes related to obesity for every 1 death from causes related to anorexia. The numbers for “severe health problems not causing death” are probably roughly the same. Restrictive eating disorders are real, but way, WAY more rare than most people would estimate.
I’m sure you’re right. Sometimes athletic people** view themselves as “the default person” and view couch potatoes as “the one-in-a-zillion outliers” when the reverse is actually true. Sometimes (maybe not this thread) this perspective affects the contexts of both the questions and the responses.
** “people who exercise regularly” may be a better descriptor.
When I go to the local gym, I assume that most of the people exercising there are not professional athletes, but none of them look “skeletal” (or obese), either.
