Quote Originally Posted by tulip View Post
You need to eat and drink before, during, and after your ride. I don't know where you got the 90-minute refueling info, but that's plain wrong.
I've heard similar.... there have been a number of articles like this one http://nutritionwonderland.com/2009/...s-good-or-bad/ where the OP probably saw the 90 min info.

It is of course a *very* individual thing, but as a general rule of thumb we tell our new riders. Under an hour take at least water/water with electrolytes. 1-2 hours have at least fuel in your bottle - ie a sports drink with calories. 2+ hours fuel in your bottle and something more solid - bars, blocks etc. How well fueled you are before your ride and how hard you ride will of course have an effect too, as will a number of medical conditions. If you tend towards hypoglycemia or are diabetic you'll of course need to take more care and monitor you intake carefully.

Note we give minimums, we don't tell people to limit their intake - we certainly don't want bonks on our rides, but I think this advice is given because there is definitely a tendency for people to overestimate the number of calories that they burn and to not know the amount of calories in their drinks/foods. If I were to go on an hours easy ride, I'd probably burn about 300 calories. If I were to take a bottle of cytomax and eat a bar I'd eat about 340 calories worth of food. 100 extra calories/day is something like 1lb of weight a month I seem to remember.