Beyond Gels and Dogma: My Journey to Real Fuel, Health, and Lifetime PRs
For years, I was the cyclist you’d expect. My pockets were stuffed with Clif Bars and I dutifully squeezed down a gel every 45 minutes on the bike. It was just what you did. But I had a bigger goal than just finishing a ride: I wanted genuine, long-term health and performance. I wanted to be fast, not just for a season, but for life.
That goal sparked a multi-year journey alongside my wife, Chris, who coaches people to find optimized, sustainable health. We threw out the rulebook and started experimenting. We tried everything. We went full Keto, but I found myself without that critical top-end power on the bike. I simply wasn’t metabolically flexible enough to make it work.
Then we swung the other way to a strictly plant-based diet. The initial results were stunning. I got incredibly lean—down to about 9% body fat—and I was fast. That burning, lactic acid feeling in my legs was gone. But after a few months, the foundation crumbled. I got sick, and my body just couldn’t heal. I lost all my power. We realized the diet had a nutritional hole; a lack of critical nutrients like Vitamin K2 from animal sources was devastating my body.
The real breakthrough came when Chris put me on a new protocol. We focused on eliminating inflammatory foods like polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) and oxalates. The biggest change, however, was a simple rule: eat 50 grams of protein before consuming any carbs or other foods at every single meal.
The impact was immediate and profound. My body composition completely changed. I dropped 10 pounds of fat and gained 10 pounds of muscle. I was 12% body fat. Even more incredibly, I smashed my threshold power and broke all of my lifetime power PRs.
By October 2024, I was feeling invincible. I was becoming truly metabolically flexible, and I thought, “Now I can be strategic. I can use sugar as a pure performance tool on the bike when I really need it.” I started using gels again during intense rides. And it felt like it was working. My power was great, and I felt strong.
Then I got my quarterly blood work done. The results were a shock: I was pre-diabetic.
How could I be setting performance records but be on the verge of a metabolic disease? I bought a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) to see what was happening internally. The data was terrifying. The gels were causing drastic blood sugar spikes, but the crash that followed was just as severe. My body was on a violent metabolic rollercoaster, even if I felt “good” on the bike.
That was the final turning point. In February 2025, I ditched the gels and synthetic drink mixes for good. I went back to real food—dates are now my go-to—used only as needed. Crucially, I started focusing heavily on electrolytes, using salt (LMNT is my choice) to maintain my hydration and performance.
The result? I now complete 2- and 3-hour training sessions, even with intense VO2 max efforts, with little to no fuel on the bike. I’m no longer dependent. I’m resilient. My performance comes from my training and my robust metabolic health, not from a fragile reliance on a constant drip of sugar. This journey, with all its trial and error, was guided by my wife Chris and her incredible work helping people find lasting health, which you can see in her client’s success at www.uminus20.com.
Why Did I Go Through All This?
My motivation for this experiment came from a history of terrible experiences with on-bike fueling. I used to rely on the constant drip of liquid carbs and gels, but I often found myself crashing anyway. It felt like those small hits of sugar were causing my energy to spike and then plummet, leaving me worse off. My view now is that I simply wasn’t metabolically flexible.
This leads me to a bigger idea: what if our society’s reliance on a high-carb diet is fundamentally unhealthy? What if we could use nutrition as a form of medicine to address the wave of modern, lifestyle-related diseases?
This journey has led me to view different nutritional protocols as powerful tools:
- Low-Carb: (<150g of carbs per day) A sustainable approach for most people to improve their general health.
- Ketogenic: (<50g of carbs per day) A more targeted intervention for conditions like obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and potentially even as a metabolic therapy for cancers and improving brain health.
- Carnivore: (Zero-carb) An elimination diet that has shown promise for people struggling with stubborn autoimmune diseases, allergies, arthritis, and skin ailments.
It all comes back to the ancient wisdom: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Metabolic health is the key.
A Critical Look at the Pro Peloton
“But what about the pros?” people ask. “They consume massive amounts of carbs and they’re the best in the world.”
The pro carb revolution is, in my opinion, widely misunderstood. Look at the physique of a top Grand Tour contender. They are incredibly powerful in the legs, but they carry very little muscle mass elsewhere. Their arms are tiny. They have to be light, but this creates a specific metabolic reality.
With minimal skeletal muscle mass, they have very limited capacity to store glycogen. Combine that with their phenomenal power output, and they are constantly at risk of hypoglycemia. They aren’t just eating for performance; they are eating to survive. They have conditioned their bodies into a state of absolute dependency on that external fuel.
Without a constant stream of exogenous carbs, their engine will stop. Their tank will be empty.
We call them endurance athletes, but what we see with team cars, domestiques, and constant feeding is the ultimate display of dependency. It’s not a showcase of a robust, flexible metabolic system. Their “faster on carbs” belief is a bit murky. They would bonk horrifically without them precisely because their metabolism has been trained for nothing else. Furthermore, their extreme physique puts them at long-term risk for osteoporosis and sarcopenia post-career without diligent resistance training.
Isn’t it ironic? Many of the sponsors in professional cycling are focused on sustainability, green energy, and better battery life. Yet, the athletes themselves are a model of inefficiency—requiring constant refueling when a more sustainable, powerful energy source is already on board. They just need to train their bodies to access it.
I have found inspiration in pushing the body to new levels of endurance from Sean ‘Sako’ Sakinofsky. Thanks Sean for speaking your mind and looking at life differently.
0 comments