App INSIDER: The Top 5 Reasons Triathletes Get Fat

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Today we're going to talk about weight management and specifically weight management and fat loss for triathletes because we gotta haul our asses around a lot of places and in some cases, the smaller those asses are, the better, or waistlines or hips or bellies or whatever else. And you know, I come from a background where I have raced at £210 before, and for, for me, it was more muscle than fat, but I still.

Experienced a great deal of discomfort carrying and cooling that amount of body mass over a distance.

Fat loss and weight loss is not only a really good consideration when it comes to your comfort and your speed during the race, but also, I know a lot of us are in this sport, frankly, because we want to look good, we want to look sexy, we want to have good aesthetics, and we want to get rid of our waistline and all that good stuff. Unfortunately, I see many times this sport come back to bite people in the butt. They do it because they think it's going to help them lose weight. And sometimes the opposite ends up happening. You end up putting fat in new places or not losing weight or kind of starting the sport and then stopping it and then ballooning and getting even.

Bigger, which actually happens to a lot of folks. We see people who have started into endurance sports and then stop. They just balloon because their metabolisms are damaged and their insulin sensitivity has been.

Tossed out the window and their thyroid is gone. So there are definitely some considerations for us when it comes to weight loss. So kind of similar to the nutrition and recovery roundtable that we had the other day, what I want to do is give you guys a few ideas.

A few of my thoughts when it.

Comes to weight loss and fat loss and some of the things that really pertain to triathletes and endurance athletes specifically, and then kind of open it up to your Q and A and your.

Burning questions about, about weight loss or.

Weight gain or whatever your goals are. So I'm going to cover five things. There's always so many things you can.

Talk about because there's. I think I've got one article and it's like 24 different reasons that people don't Lose weight.

And so there's obviously lots of little.

Things that we can delve into, but I want to dig into the biggest things that I tend to see as an issue.

I want to throw one caveat out there because I know that some of you might call me out on this at the time that I'm doing this recording, trying to gain £30. So you may see me actually not following some of the rules that I'm actually presenting to you when it comes to weight loss.

I know that some of you do not have weight gain aspirations right now, but for me, I'm in a phase of my life where I am eating like a freaking horse and lifting heavy stuff. And that's kind of where I'm at.

Right now anyways, though, so let's start into some of the things. The first thing that I tend to see really be an issue in triathletes and endurance athletes especially are evening starch.

Sugar and carbohydrate intake. Okay.

There's a program out there called it's by John Kiefer.

It's called Carb Night, I believe is the name of it.

That whole program is based around the idea of working out in the afternoon or evening at a pretty intense hard rate that leaves you with a relatively.

Elevated metabolism for hours on end after.

That session and then really only eating your primary amount of carbohydrates in the evening. Now, if you are the type of.

Athlete who's going out around 4, 5.

Or 6pm and throwing down your workouts around, then that's a case where a little bit of extra carbohydrate with dinner is okay, and essentially robbing Peter to pay. Paul.

Eating low carbohydrate, getting lower levels of.

Starches and sugars up to that point, and then kind of reloading with the.

Primary amount of your carbohydrate intake after.

That late afternoon evening workout can work. But for about 75% of the people that I see, we're getting up in the morning, we're getting our workouts done over with, having breakfast, and then the evening rolls around and it just gets.

Way out of hand. From rice to popcorn to dark chocolate.

To wine to drinks to just like all this stuff that you're dumping your body right as you're getting into a window of inactivity where a lot of.

Those carbohydrates are going to be more.

Likely to get shuttled to the liver and converted into fatty acids and deposited.

On your waistline or your butt or your hips or wherever you tend to.

Deposit Them now, of course, for example.

When I was ordering a smoothie last night with Mikael, he had a little shot glass with MPX100 in there to try and control his blood sugar from carbohydrates he was eating in the evening.

Cinnamon works similarly. Apple cider vinegar works similarly. There are little tweaks and hacks that you can use to try and control your blood sugar response with evening eating of carbohydrates. But ultimately what it comes down to.

Is that unless you're exercising after about.

4Pm, the majority of your intake in the evening should be comprised of meats.

Fats, avocados, roasted vegetables, things of that nature.

And if your goal is to lose.

Weight, shed fat as quickly as possible.

That's a real, real big win for most folks. And this also kind of comes down to the concept of periodizing your nutrition and all that means. Even though it's a big fancy word.

That strength coaches like to throw around.

To look smart, all it means is that you change up your nutrition from day to day. If you've got a work, if you've got a day where you have a morning workout in the evening, you're working all day and heading home and having dinner with the family or whatever the case may be, that's a day where you're going to shove more carbohydrates in the morning with breakfast, and then as you're approaching the evening, you're tapering carbohydrates off. Evening carbohydrate intake, though, is one big.

Big issue I tend to see.

And for me, just with the amount.

Of time that I've kind of been in the weight loss industry and the fat loss industry, I can tell you.

That when I cut evening carbohydrates or tell someone they need to restrict evening.

Carbohydrates, it makes a big difference in most of the folks that I work with and remember.

My whole gig for years, even before.

I got into triathlon, was I was a personal trainer who specialized in making people look good. And this is advice that I started into way back then. I don't want to toot my own horn too much here, but I was the top personal trainer in America in 2008. One of the reasons for that was because I was able to get people results. And one of those strategies that I used was you cut out the carbohydrates in the evening, late afternoon period.

So only exception to that rule is.

When you're throwing down a big workout in the later afternoon or evening. But other than that, you limit that.

So that's number one. Number two is, and after I go.

Through each of these, you guys can return and ask questions about specific topics that I addressed that you may have further questions about.

But number two is gut imbalances, specifically with gut flora. And a lot of research recently has shown that folks who have poor gut flora tend to struggle more with overweight or obesity. Now raise your hand if you introduce a large variety of fermented foods into your diet. Kefir, kombucha, yogurts.

Technically, chocolate is a fermented food.

Believe it or not, all the hands went up. The key with probiotics is not to just get your hands on some good.

Therapeutic grade probiotic and start popping that. I always travel with the probiotic just because fermented foods are hard to come by.

A lot of times when you're traveling in Asia, not so much, but in many other places that's certainly the case. But the key with probiotics and building up a healthy gut balance, there's multiple keys, but number one is a wide variety of probiotics. So it's okay to do things like switch brands if you're using a probiotic supplement. It's okay to do things like if.

You'Re using, say you're buying like coconut kefir from the grocery store one week to switch to like kombucha another week.

Or to combine different flavors, get brands from different sources, cycle through different yogurts.

As long as those yogurts indicate on the back that they have active live.

Cultures in them, or trying to introduce our guts to a lot of different healthy bacteria as we go through our daily diet. And I try every day to eat.

At least one fermented item, one type of item that has a probiotic in it.

And it seems dumb. It doesn't seem like that would correlate.

Too much with obesity.

But there's all sorts of things that happen when you have a healthy gut flora.

Last night, the anti aging doc hit on the neurotransmitter imbalances that can result when you have bacterial imbalances in your digestive tract.

And some of those imbalances, such as.

A dopamine deficiency or serotonin excess, a.

Lot of those things can lead to.

Appetite cravings and you just not being able to kind of stop when it's time to stop when you truly are full.

And you can trace a lot of.

That back to gut and bacterial imbalances.

Of course, in addition to the commission of consuming probiotics and fermented Foods.

There's also the omission aspect of this.

Really being careful with foods that are.

Going to do damage to the bacteria in your digestive tract. Some of the things that can, that.

Can really contribute to that would be.

Overgrowth of bad bacteria. Carbohydrates, sugars and starches consumed in excess are a really good way for that to happen, especially if you have an underlying candida or yeast or fungus type of overgrowth in your digestive tract, which.

Is incredibly common, tough to diagnose unless.

You get like a stool test. You know, for example, in the US there's one called the GI Effects panel.

Which is really good.

I guess they do a stool test.

Here, it sounds like, but looking at what's going on in your digestive tract.

I do a stool test once a.

Year and I've never ever tested and.

Not found a parasite, yeast, fungus, something going on that I had to take care of.

So it's really common.

And when you have something like that going on, it's very easy to feed and for that bacteria to kind of, kind of basically overcrowd the good bacteria.

So considering your bacterial imbalances is really, really important.

And there are, there are tonics that you can use. I mean, like, I think most of you know, I'm a fan of, for example, oil of oregano to control like overgrowth of bad bacteria in the digestive tract. You know, I'm a fan of sometimes using like that Capricleans stuff I've talked about if you've got like parasite issues, things of that nature.

But ultimately there is not a disconnect between the health of your gut and especially the health of your gut flora.

And your waistline and obesity or overweight or struggling with losing weight.

So the next thing is pre workout fueling.

Excuse me.

Saturday we had a big ride and.

I really wasn't sure what to expect on that ride. Like, I wasn't sure if it would get really gnarly, what kind of pace.

We'D be pushing, even though I was told to be a casual ride, which it didn't turn out to be. But ultimately, pre workout fueling is for the most part overemphasized too much. Most people stuff their faces before they.

Go out for the workout.

And the problem with that is you're burning all of that exogenous fuel that you put into your body. But then when you get back, you're usually still kind of hungry, even if you had breakfast before, usually hungry when you get back. So it typically turns into a couple of meals and you burning far fewer calories from your waistline than you would.

If you had, say, gone out relatively.

Fasted or perhaps with water and some amino acids or.

Mikael saw me this morning, you know, for our workout this morning, our brick, I did amino acids and some adaptogenic herbs and that was it. Saved everything else for after the ride.

So pre workout fueling, heading out to.

The pool in the morning with your banana or your sport drink, or heading out on that morning hour, hour and a half long workout and setting the clock early so you can get up and eat breakfast for the most part.

Your liver glycogen stores and your muscle glycogen stores and pools of amino acids and everything else like that can fuel.

That type of workouts.

And I see a real issue with.

People who are trying to lose weight.

Doing their pre workout fueling and then.

Within a 20 to 60 minute window after that workout, while they're still burping up their pre workout meal, rushing off.

To eat their post workout meal. And it just ends up being this.

Caloric compensatory effect that winds up you never really being at a calorie deficit by the end of the day. And there's all these arguments out there that maybe a calorie isn't a calorie and it's really the hormonal effect of food. It's.

But ultimately you do get to a.

Point where a freaking calorie is a.

Freaking calorie and you need to take.

Into account how much you're eating during the day. Doing morning workouts fasted is a really good way to shed weight off the waistline. And when I am in a phase where I'm trying to burn fat or shed fat fast, I'll often do that for several weeks leading into an event.

And there was an interesting study a.

Couple of years ago that they did in cyclists where they gave them some.

Pretty intense caloric depletion in the few weeks leading up to their event and.

It did not have a deleterious effect on their training. Doing like more fasting, more caloric depletion. Some people get nervous that they're just going to waste away and lose performance.

And certainly if you're really cutting calories to a really large extent, that can happen.

But ultimately thinking about shoveling as much fuel as possible in your body for the last few weeks leading into the races is going to not be as effective as going out and doing like pre workout or going out and doing your workouts in a fasted state.

So pre workout fueling blown out of.

Proportion, nine times out of 10, you don't need it even if you're going.

Out for a three hour hard ride.

Not really, no. I mean, you can take amino acids, you can take water, you can take electrolytes. And I'm just saying from personal experience.

When I was doing the ketogenic thing, I could easily go out and do something like that.

And if your goal is weight loss, then sometimes you do need to send.

Your body a signal that it's got to tap into its own energy stores.

Now what happens is after several consecutive weeks of caloric depletion, with no refeeding.

And being hungry all the time, you can get some metabolic downregulation.

Right.

There's a law of diminishing returns where you're actually going to get down regulation of thyroid production from constant caloric depletion. So it's not like you would go smash it every day on an empty.

Stomach, but putting in a few of those sessions where you just learn to push hungry, that's okay.

It's not going to kill you no matter what Gatorade tells you. So it's okay to do that. It just wouldn't be like every workout, for example, that you'd want you to.

I would be able to because I lose weight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Consistently. Day in, day out.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you're training like an animal and I mean you're pro triathlete and for you, some of the things that I'm saying, you know, like a pro.

Athlete training multiple times a day, like for example, with this whole eat within.

20 to 60 minutes after the workout to properly replenish your amino acids and.

Your, your storage glycogen. If you eat two appetite within eight hours, your body restores all of its glycogen levels and you're able to restore.

Your energy levels just fine.

So unless you have another workout scheduled within eight hours, that post workout meal.

Is not as crucial as a lot of people would have you to believe. Now, in the case of a professional.

Triathlete, they might be working out again in two hours and then again in four hours. And so for that person, pre workout.

Fueling post workout snack. Pre workout fueling post workout snack. You know, a situation like that, that becomes a little bit more of a consideration.

But then again, for most pro athletes, we're talking about weight loss goals that.

Are really not as intense or as large as most age groupers who might be needing to lose 30, 40, 50 pounds. For a lot of pro triathletes, it's yeah, I gotta shed 2 pounds of fat before race day. And that's just a whole different ballgame. You know, it doesn't take quite as much.

So the next thing number four would be nutrient density.

Can I just ask you on that point because people might be interested delaying feeding post workout for people that want to, like, lose muscle mass? Because I often get asked that question because people are like, you know, I'm not built like a triathlete. They've got too much muscle. So if you delay feeding, you do get protein metabolism.

You can put yourself into a catabolic.

State if you actually want to shed muscle. That was one of my strategies when I went from being a bodybuilder to a triathlete, was I would do long rides in a fasted state without giving my body much fuel. I would wait for a really long.

Time after working out, and I was catabolizing muscle. It's not necessarily healthy.

This all comes down to that trade off between health and performance.

For me, I wanted to be a.

Really good Ironman triathlete, and I knew I had to lose weight and I knew I had too much muscle, so I just had to do that. I sacrificed strength, I sacrificed power, I sacrificed my hormones a little bit, but ultimately put your body into a catabolic state.

Now, I could have maintained a lot of that muscle mass and then just lost primarily fat if I'd have done something similar.

But then dose with branched chain amino acids or whole amino acids, or the type of things that if you have high levels of circulating in your blood, you're not going to dip into your body's own skeletal tissue as much or cannibalize yourself.

So nutrient density, foods that are void of really, really dense nutrients tend to just leave you needing to eat more and more. For example, breakfast downstairs, man, when I'm here, I got to keep eating and eating and eating at breakfast because, like, let's face it, like, compared to the kale, cacao nib, coconut milk, you know, Brazil nuts, what else do I freaking have in there? You know, like chlorella spirulina. Compared to that type of shake that I have at home, I dump that shake, you know, whatever, 12, 16 ounces into a cup, take that thing down, and I'm good.

I'm full for hours.

I eat breakfast down here where it's like some fruit and some congee and some noodles, and that's not nutrient dense food. You guys may have noticed this too. You're just hungry a lot more after you take in those kind of foods. So darkly colored, nutrient dense foods. When we're talking about dinners, more along.

The lines of things like wild caught.

Fish and organ meats and roasted vegetables and grass fed steak. And even if you're, even if you're.

Vegetarian, you know, soaked and sprouted quinoa and chia seeds and flaxseeds and a.

Lot of these foods that are high.

In amino acids and fatty acids and vitamins and minerals.

That's the type of stuff that keeps you full and leaves you really able to feel like you can just push yourself away from the table and you're good to go and you don't need to eat again for four, five, six hours.

By the time we finish our strength.

Session today, I guarantee I'm going to.

Be hungry again because like for breakfast.

I had freaking like congee and steamed.

Carrots and some yogurt and some dried fruit.

That stuff doesn't really pack a big nutrient punch compared to just like the.

Everything in the kitchen sink smoothie I'd make at home.

So that's really important to think when you look at your plate, if it's got more cardboardy, white, thin flakiness on it, in most cases, that's really what you're looking at in terms of nutrient density. And you can certainly biohack your way into this. You could, for example, eat a meal like that.

And then like if you have like chlorella or spirulina powder. And I love chlorella. I talked about this the other day during our recovery and our nutrition session. It's like one of the most complete foods on the face of the planet. I mean, it almost ranks higher for me than like a cut of grass.

Fed steak cooked in butter in terms.

Of everything that it has in it. And so I have back in my room, I've got like these little chlorella bits, like the kind that you can just dump and eat. I'll use those a lot when I'm traveling. And you know, there's something you could, for example, eat on an airplane, that can just be a meal, you know, like half a cup of those.

But having some of that stuff around can certainly help a little bit. But ultimately, when it comes down to just your day to day nutrition choices.

If you're trying not to engage in.

Mindless eating and you're wanting to get.

Away from a lot of calorie cravings and appetite cravings and stuff like that.

Man, get nutrient dense foods. One of my favorite websites for looking at the nutrient density of foods and.

Kind of learning more about foods and why they're good is whfoods.com whfoods.com the.

Other thing, and I know that a.

Lot of people are aware that I.

Have the Superhuman Food Pyramid on my website. And that's a downloadable PDF, it's free.

And at first glance it just looks like a pyramid.

But if you zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom in on the PDF, you see like all these lists of foods underneath each row. And one of the main categorizations used.

To choose whether a food falls into the eat, moderate or avoid category is the nutrient density of that food. There are some other considerations that I have in there, like its potential to be an autoimmune trigger to aggravate your gut, that kind of thing.

But that's really built on nutrient density.

And I also have almost, for almost.

Every single food listed on that pyramid.

I have a full article written on each food, how to prepare it, its benefits, everything. Over@superhumancoach.com that's not something I want to eventually take all those articles, just turn them into a book and put them out with the pyramid. But a lot of people don't know that. I have literally like 100 different articles on almost every food on that pyramid over@superhumancoach.com so if you see something on.

That pyramid, you're like, well, freak.

I don't know much about natto, where.

To get it, what's in it, how to cook it.

You could go to superhumancoach.com and just do a search for natto and read my article over there on natto and it'll tell you everything you need to know about how to use that. So that'd be a really good resource for you if you want to kind of self educate yourself on nutrient density. And you don't have anything better to do with your time than to surf to another one of my websites.

The other thing, the last thing I wanted to get into, and this is something I kind of touched on with what I just said as far as calories, a calorie, but it's this whole healthy calorie paradox. Now there are a lot of people out there who are making a shift.

Into healthy diets, paleo diets, primal diets, you know, like vegan diets that are a little bit more of kind of like maybe like the, like the healthy vegan diets, like a rich roll esque diet where you're doing lots of smoothies and juices and seeds and nuts. Gosh, what else? I mean, there's so many different diets out There a lot of the ones that I see that are kind of like in the Paleo community and stuff, because I've got a lot of followers in that community and I go to these conferences, like I go to the Paleo FX and the Ancestral Health Conference and all these things.

And a lot of people there are.

And I'm just going to use this term, and it's not super PC, but they're fat. They're just like, they're. They're fat.

And the reason is that they're eating really good foods. Like, they're eating nutrient dense foods like.

Bacon and organ meats and kale salads.

And fermented foods, but they're eating craploads of those foods.

And that's the issue. You know, it's all like in the Paleo community, for example, there's like this almost like, I'm going to shove this plate of bacon in your face, you know, to the, to the vegan community or whatever, and ha ha ha, and eat it. But that's like 4,000 calories worth of bacon.

And like, there's this kind of trend.

In the health and the fitness and the nutrition community to take a healthy.

Diet and then still not really ever engage in caloric restriction or in learning.

How to be hungry, or in learning how to hold back or in learning.

How to push yourself away from the table when you're 80% full.

So I really want to give that caveat to a lot of you as.

Well, is when you make a shift into a nutrient dense diet, when you make a shift into eating like one.

Of these diets is really healthy for.

You, you still have to get to the point where you look at your plate and you're like, wow, that's just too damn much food.

I shouldn't be eating that much food. And that's one kind of pet peeve of mine is I see these people, I know they're building up high amounts of visceral fat, high amounts of fat on the outside of the arterial wall and all the places that make you.

More prone to a heart attack or more prone to insulin resistance. And if you looked at their diet, it's like, you know, when I get diet logs, I look over the diet. It's like really healthy food, but it's just like too many calories. And, you know, it sounds simple and stupid, but no matter how healthy your.

Diet is, no matter how cool of a switch you make into the best.

Diet ever, you still have to be.

Aware that you can't just walk around eating plates of bacon and expect the fat to magically disappear from your waistline. So that whole kind of healthy calorie paradox is something I see quite a bit as well.

So you guys, those are the five main things.

Evening carbohydrate intake, poor gut imbalance or poor gut flora.

Pre workout fueling and sometimes overemphasizing it.

Too much low nutrient density and then switching to a healthy diet and then just thinking you can eat as many calories as you want because all of a sudden you're on a healthy diet.

So now that I've fed you through the fire hose for a little bit, let's take some questions.

Yeah, I probably eat the pasta on too much carbs in the evening. I train in the morning at lunchtime. So in the evening I have a big pasta or high carb diet. What was the subs you mentioned before.

That counteract that a little bit?

Okay, so I'm going to repeat some of these questions just because I'm recording.

But some alternatives to or some things you can consume in the evening, like when you're craving pasta, which shouldn't really be in your vocabulary anyways, unless it's quinoa pasta or rice pasta. Really, the longer time I spend researching carbs in the health industry, the more I'm convinced that gluten is pretty much just crap. So when I'm talking about pasta and rice noodles, stuff like that is what I'm talking about.

But things you can use cinnamon, I'll use that more often earlier in the.

Day because it doesn't go well with most dinner foods. Unless we're talking sweet potatoes, cinnamon goes pretty well on something like that. Apple cider vinegar, bitter melon extract, all.

Of those can help quite a bit with the response to that food if.

You do eat it. Now, as far as kind of controlling a craving for a food like that.

It all comes down to the source of your cravings.

That gut imbalances issue that I brought up, that could be an issue like starting out to a good probiotic regimen can help with cravings. Neurotransmitters can also be an issue. And a lot of times neurotransmitters are related to, as you learned last night, things like amino acid deficits. Consuming higher amounts of fat with the meal can really help keep you from eating more of the pasta part of the meal.

There's a book called the Super Health Diet and it's.

I don't agree with everything in the.

Book, but one thing I learned in.

That book that I think really helps is to get about 10 to 20 grams, which is a lot but like of an essential amino acids supplement in about an hour before you eat. So you can use like that master amino pattern stuff as a hack and literally just like take a bunch of capsules of that before you go eat. And it really helps with cravings. Kind of helps to shut down the appetite when you eat. So that's another option is to do something like that. Other questions?

The whole paleo thing that I mentioned, just quickly. People do get obsessed with it, but they don't realize that in those days they used to eat one meal a day and someone's not going to eat for two days because there just wasn't availability. And now everyone's going out and eating 10,000 calories for two days.

Yeah.

With their fat, you know.

Yeah.

So like that, that whole deal with going long periods of time between eating. There is zero research that indicates that eating anything more than three meals a.

Day is going to elevate your metabolism.

Now you do actually get a little.

Bit of a higher metabolism. A greater thermic effect of food is.

What it's called if you're eating a.

Couple times a day versus once a day or like breakfast. Skippers tend to have a lower thermic effect of food than people who eat breakfast and maybe also eat some lunch and some dinner.

But once you get into like the.

In between meal, snacks and all that stuff, you know, I used to tell people this all the time back when I was, you know, a young personal trainer was like, eat your six to ten small meals a day, Mrs. Jones. And that's going to keep your metabolism.

Up during the day.

It's like, you know, I'd use the analogy, your metabolism is like this fire and you have to constantly keep it.

Stoked by putting food on it. That's really not the case. All it does is it teaches your.

Body how to burn that fast burning.

Kindling that you throw on the fire.

Right. Usually sugars and snacks and things like that.

You throw a slow burning log on.

The fire in the morning. You know, you have some fats with breakfast and another slow burning log on there during lunch with some more fats and then, you know, finish it off with dinner and then, you know, let those fire kind of let the fire kind of burn down with dinner and don't eat a lot before bed. And that's kind of a better way to do things. And people talk about the sumo wrestler diet and how you get fat if.

You don't eat a lot. And then you Eat a lot at.

The end of the day or something like that. That's more macronutrient composition. I guarantee if you do avoid eating all day and your diet is not indeed a deer that you hunted down and killed, but instead ate an entire vat of white rice, that's kind of more of the sumo racing rest of the diet. So kind of comes down to macronutrients a little bit too.

What would be a good fasting, like how often would you fast? If you just like how many days a week would you do a 24 hour fast or what sort of fasting would you do?

I'm not a huge fan of doing a 24 hour anything more than about once a month. I like some of the mental benefits.

That come along with the 24 hour, where you just have one day from.

Like lunch on Saturday to lunch on Sunday, where you drink green tea, maybe.

It takes some amino acids, cup of coffee, stuff like that. But it's Mostly just a 24 hour fast. Has a really good hormetic effect in terms of clearing out some cellular junk and cellular debris and that kind of thing.

Mentally, especially in triathlon, most people can't.

Handle a weekly 24 hour fast.

Just because, you know, we're training ruins our training the next day or you.

Know, we're hungry all day, we're doing the fast because we trained the day before, you know, that kind of thing. So that's tough.

I personally almost every single day do.

A 12 to 16 hour fast though.

When you're training or when you want to lose weight.

Just every day, period. Yeah, yeah. Even if I'm trying to gain weight, I'll do 12 to 16 hour fast and just eat more in the window that I actually am eating, you know, in that 8 to 12 hour eating window. But yeah, overnight fasting and like you know, doing that intermittently fasting deal. It certainly has a lot of benefits.

If not from a performance standpoint, just.

From like a health and longevity standpoint. So makes your cells heartier. Other questions.

So I reduced my weight quite a lot and it seems now it's totally stopped. I'm steady no matter what I do. And my food is, I eat the same every day except for dinner because.

I like having the same.

So for breakfast I eat the protein puppet and then I eat a tuna salad, no dressing for lunch with lemon cow. And for dinner I eat like either the grass fed steak with vegetables or salmon poached or cob salad.

Right. So you're eating a healthy diet, you're exercising and weight Loss is just plateaued. Now, in the case of someone who's training, someone who's doing triathlon, usually we can trace that back to some kind of a hormonal issue. Usually it's because of thyroid downregulation or a pregnenolone steal, meaning that you're getting more of your hormone shifted towards cortisol rather than towards more of the metabolic elevating hormones like testosterone and growth hormone.

That's just kind of the nature of the beasts.

And it's one of those deals where you get to a certain point where.

You get to your weight that you're going to be at. You have race and then you try.

And reset your body and give your hormones a chance to recover so that you can continue to lose weight. You either go through like a juice cleanse or a detox or a period of time where you're doing lots of yoga and tai chi and mobility work and not doing a lot of swimming and biking and running, and you just give the hormones a chance to reset. That's one of the things that can really help. You can also throw hormetic stressors onto your body, like doing more cold thermogenesis, doing like moderate cold swims, things of that nature. So you do cold thermogenesis every day. Now you do a cold shower?

Yes, I do like the 10:20 routine for five minutes, six days a week. And then I do full dip for.

20 minutes, full cold water immersion every Sunday. Yep, yep. The other thing, and I'm saying this.

To you specifically because I know you have a hectic kind of like travel schedule, things of that nature.

And remember that a lot of your.

Fat burning hormones and a lot of like brown adipose tissue activation, a lot of the things that cause your body to be able to burn fat as a fuel or to generate heat by burning calories occur when you are asleep in a deep sleep phase. And sometimes some of those phases can get messed up when you're traveling a lot. So that can be an issue too.

You know, and this tends to be more of an issue with women than men, I find.

But hypercortisolism can also cause a little bit of fluid retention and you can just be holding on to water. And a lot of it can be water and not just fat. They're just not shedding. There's a lot of issues when it comes to weight loss plateaus. But in an ideal scenario, I like.

To get somebody to whatever event that they're doing, get them through the that event continues.

As many strategies as we can Cold thermogenesis and restricting evening carbohydrates and taking supplements.

And then once we get through that.

Event, we hit the reboot button on the adrenal glands on the thyroid. Give the body a chance to recover, detox a little bit, cleanse a little bit, eat fewer calories, do more fasting. And then once you take a look at the hormones and they're looking good, then you move back into training. Yeah, it's always tough once you throw triathlon into the mix though, because it's like, it's that fine balance between still having your body ready to race, but then also putting it under what really is a stress. Losing weight is a little bit of a stress. So, yeah, it's kind of a tough balance and it makes my job really hard, honestly, because I got to do detective work all the time to figure stuff out.

Did you bring your thermogenesis vest?

I did not bring any of my cold thermogenesis stuff here because it's just tough to travel with the ice packs and everything. I should have. I totally blanked. Like I'm wearing my 110% compression socks right now or pants. And you can actually like take the, the ice packs that come with and just empty all the ice out of them and they travel just fine. But I totally blanked bringing them. But like in a situation like this, like after the race, I'll take these tights and I'll go to the hotel ice maker and just like get bags of ice and just put them into the sleeves of these. So. Yeah, and I could also, if I wanted to use that as like a weight loss strategy if I were trying to do that.

So there's not a lot of weight on you though at the moment, is there? Really fat wise for me? Yeah.

No, my body fat is low right now, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because like I, you know, I just did Ironman Hawaii. I got super lean for Ironman Hawaii. And yeah, so I've got a long road to go for my own mass gain protocol.

So like, what if you want to be. I mean, I don't want to be no attention to get to the super elite, but just want to have a good physique. Not all these skinny triangles that they have and skinny necks. They walk around like that. Yeah, I mean, to see the cycle's.

All crash though, you don't want to.

Look like somebody who would get sand kicked in your face at the beach.

Have a reasonably good body with it, but just have the six pack there.

Right.

After workouts and stuff.

No, I think that, that for you. No offense, but I don't think it's a deal where you.

Where, you know, again, it's like a, like a commission type of thing where you need to take all these magic supplements and take all the stuff.

For you, it's omission.

You gotta, you gotta quit eating crap at night and you gotta quit throwing around words like pasta and stuff. Like for you, that's gonna be the case. So yeah, I mean it's not complex, it's not magic. I mean just, it comes down to pure food. Yeah, yeah. Because looking at you've got muscle, it's just covered up by that layer of fat. In many cases that's just from carbohydrate conversion to fat in the liver. And there you have it. So. Yeah.

Let's go with one more question. That gives us time to go kid it up for the weight room. One more question.

It has to be the best one.

If it's the last question, it's got.

To be a good one, right?

The whole glycogen.

Sorry. Okay, we'll go with two more. Since you both have questions. Let's do it.

I do.

I love milk and I'm trying to find sources.

You love milk? I do.

I used to drink the fastest milkshake drinker in south.

Yeah, I used to drink a lot of milk too. Yeah.

So I cut it down the last few weeks while I was really intensely trying to finish my paper. I was having three or four and I reckon in the last four weeks I've put on two kilos. The only thing that I could think of was my milk.

Milk is a great way to make.

A little baby animal into a big fat animal. And it does the same thing in adult humans.

It's one, it's a, you know, it's.

One of the secret weapons of bodybuilders and you know, like power lifters and stuff. It's like down that glass of milk now. It's also the reason that when I go to like a fitness show like Ursa back in the States or whatever and all the big guys are walking.

Around, they're all red in the face and puffy and everything because they're just freaking inflamed.

Their entire body and connective tissue and everything is on fire from milk and crappy whey protein and processed foods. And I was in the same boat. I used to down five ABB bodybuilding shakes per day because I was sponsored by abb.

They sent me all these cans and.

It was just like milk with crappy whey protein in it and preservatives and artificial flavors and I just drink them.

And yeah, milk is, it's got its really good properties.

It's really good for the digestive tract. If it's from a raw dairy source.

It'S really nice for making yogurts.

It's got some good saturated fats in it, in it.

It can be good for cell membranes. I mean, like, it's got some cool properties to it. But if you are trying to lose weight, you shouldn't be drinking milk and.

You shouldn't be doing much dairy at all, period. Now, I know I talked about probiotics.

And everything, but you can get away.

With 4 ounces of full fat, like Greek yogurt from an organic source on a daily basis. And that's supplying you with a ton, like billions of probiotic organisms. And, you know, you don't have to have like the entire container of yogurt with fruit, with Rice Krispies, with raw almonds and frozen blueberries. You know, it's like so sounds good, doesn't it?

I just made up a new recipe.

And dark chocolate chunks, of course. Yeah.

But yeah, milk is a great way.

To get fat fast. So. Yep. And there is a photo somewhere out there on the interwebs of me running with a chocolate milk shirt on.

That.

Was published without my permission. I still get flack for that. I'm not sure this is a pertinent.

Question for this clinic, but the whole.

Glycogen storage usage and when it gets.

Tapped and when it doesn't get tapped.

And how you train the body to use it.

Is it purely at the high end?

If you get fed and you get.

To the point where you are using.

Fatty acids for fueling at a certain.

Intensity, it'll suddenly start tapping into glycogen.

And how do you.

Right, so as far as like, you know, your glycogen reserves is the question. Like, even if you are, let's say you've been eating a high fat diet and you're fat adapted and you're not burning tons of carbs as a fuel and you are, you know, there's this measurement called the respiratory quotient that you look at when you go into a physiology lab and you get tested and the higher that that RQ is, the more carbohydrates that you're burning and the lower that it is, the more it approaches kind of like 0.7 ish, the.

More fats that you're burning and everybody's at a mix throughout when they Start.

Walking on a treadmill. It's some carbs, mostly fats. As they get faster and faster, they wear this mask where they measure carbon dioxide out and oxygen in. And as you get to a higher.

And higher level of intensity, your RQ.

Approaches 1, and you begin primarily burning.

Carbohydrates as a fuel, which would indicate.

That you're burning either exogenous carbohydrates that you're taking from sports drinks or gels or Superstarch or anything else, or you're burning your body's own liver carbohydrate reserves or muscle carbohydrate reserves.

For everybody, it's much different. But what you tend to notice is.

That in the fat adapted athlete, they are achieving higher and higher intensities at a lower rq.

So one of the things that I ran into during Ironman Canada was I was able to maintain my muscle and.

My liver glycogen levels by primarily burning fatty acids as a fuel, with very small amounts, about 100 calories per hour worth of starch coming in from Superstarch. And everything else was just fats and oils. And I was using my own adipose tissue.

But I did get to a certain point in that race at about the one hour mark where I really needed.

To use a lot of carbs. I started to go faster. I shifted into what's called glycolysis, started to make the muscles burn.

And at that point, my muscles were.

So close to the edge of glycogen depletion that even though I'd taken in what probably like 1000 calories worth of Superstarch by that point, and some of the proteins that I was eating were getting converted into glucose, you get to a certain point where the, where the glycogen just gets completely exhausted, and that's kind of the point where you bonk. Now, if you were to just go out and exercise without eating anything at all, for most people, it takes about two to three hours for you to completely bonk. If you've had nothing coming in and you're trying to exercise at intensities that bring that RQ closer to one. But if you go out and, you know, this kind of returns to, like, Tamsen's question. If you were to go out and just like, you know, train with no fuel for four or five hours at an aerobic intensity, you could technically, I mean, you've got 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 calories of storage fat on your body. As long as you've got water, you could just go and go and go if you wanted to so it doesn't.

Work though, does it? I mean, if you ask even a pro cyclist to go out for five hours, even at low intensity, because you get neural fatigue, don't you?

You get. Your brain does need trace amounts of glucose, but you would actually get gluconeogenesis.

From cannibalization of lean muscle tissue in most cases. The reason that we say it doesn't work is because there's just so few like fat adapted people out there that you can't do it. But there are people, there's like, there's the Run Keto group on Facebook and on the Internet where most of those guys are going out for super long ultra runs with nothing at all, just water. There's a guy on Jack Cruz's forum, Dr. Jack Cruz's forum, he works with a lot of Tour de France cyclists. He's been doing fat Adapted for like 10 years. And he'll go out and just like run the mountains for hours and just have like a bottle of water with him. But it takes quite a bit of training to turn yourself into that kind of metabolic machine, to get yourself to the point where you can just go and go and go, and you're also going to get some cannibalization and stuff at a certain point. So these are skinny people who have lost a lot of muscle too.

So you're worth mentioning about immunosuppression and fasting if you're going to do fasting workouts.

So there's a lot of diminishing return when you fast. You certainly do get what's called a hormetic response. You clear out some cellular trash and cellular debris, and you can strengthen your immune system with small amounts of fasting kind of inserted throughout the day or throughout the week. You know, like intermittent fasting, 24 hour fast once a month, that type of thing. But if you really send your body a message of caloric restriction in the presence of exercise for too long, you can suppress the immune system. And this is a discussion Tamsen and I had a little bit on a ride the other day where you see a lot of like low white blood cell counts and stuff in athletes. And some of that is just due to pure calorie depletion and kind of overworking the body. So as an endurance athlete, especially if you're trying to protect your immune system, losing weight is not about being hungry all the time. Okay, so it's not like more is better.

But there are certainly some times when.

You know, you might be uncomfortably hungry out on a ride, and that's okay as long as it's not like an everyday kind of thing. And this is total soft science. Like I don't know the exact number of days you'd have to train in a row fasted to totally suppress the immune system, that type of thing. I do know that it takes about four weeks of excessive calorie depletion to down regulate the metabolism, you know, like the whole starvation mode kind of thing. But as far as the immune system goes, you just want to be careful. And if you're sick, cold, fever, that kind of thing, don't starve it. Like take care of your body from a nutritional standpoint and feed your body if that's an issue you're worried about.

And if you're stressed at work or something and your cortisol's high and then you go and do a fasted workout and then don't eat afterwards, your immune system is going to be suppressed. And so if there's any bugs around, if you go on public transport, people are coughing around you, you're going to.

Be more susceptible and you'll still lose weight, but you'll be like the skinny.

Sick athlete and you don't want to be that person either. So it's always, always that balance.

So yeah, that about wraps it up you guys.

So hopefully you got some tips out of there. Thanks.

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