Sport and the BBHC Program

Nick Howarth, founder of Best Body Health Coach, argues that fat-fueled athletes outperform those on carbs, citing his own experience as a South African national 800m champion. He switched to a low-carb diet and now cycles 200+ km fasted with better endurance and mental clarity, though he learned the hard way that electrolyte balance matters more on fat than carbs.
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Hi, Nick here from Best Body Health Coach again. So in this video, I'd like to talk to you about our health program, our way of eating, and sport. So, you know, people do different kinds of sports, and different kinds of sports demand different kinds of physical ability. Some sports are explosive, some sports are endurance, Some sports are just basically skill. But in this video, what I'd like to basically go over is the benefit of throwing out carbohydrates as a dirty fuel, as a fuel that is very short-lived and very, very old school. Very, very '80s, '70s type of mindset as far as carbo loading goes. And, and that kind of old school thoughts. And there's a lot of sportsmen, especially my age, who swear by, you know, the carbo loading and, and so on. And then when you actually have a look at the 2, in other words, fat as fuel and carbs as fuel, and you look at it from a logical and practical point of view, you find that burning fat as fuel as a sportsman is far more beneficial than burning carbohydrates. And a good analogy of the difference is burning carbs as fuel. So if you're basically fueling yourself with Carbohydrates, when you're doing sport, it's kind of like throwing newspaper on a fire to try and keep the fire going. So you're constantly throwing newspaper, there's black smoke, there's little bits of paper flying, it's very dirty. Whereas when you're burning fat as fuel, it's like throwing this log on the fire that kind of builds up steam and like just eventually it's like a raging, hot fire. Fire. And that's how I feel when I'm— I'm an avid cyclist. I'm also a runner. I come from an international-level running background. I was national champion in 800 meters. I was also— I had the world's fastest time for 800 meters for a 15-year-old boy. I'd also had lots of other different kinds of championships that I'd won. South African championships in the 800 meters, the 1500 meters, cross-country. I also played provincial soccer at school. So I merely mentioned that just to show my background as a sportsman. I've always done sports. There's almost not a day that goes by that I don't exercise. And I've experimented with lots of different kinds of diets. In my early 30s to mid-40s, I experimented with like high carbohydrate type diet. And although I could still perform at a reasonable level, I just started putting on weight. And it just didn't work for me. And so what I did was I switched over to fat as fuel, and I cut out all carbohydrates and all sugar. And everybody told me I was going to die of a heart attack and cholesterol and stroke. And quite honestly, the exact opposite is true. And this is what's not understood about this way of eating and doing sport. So what I found was, When I was switching over from this high carbohydrate, high sugar type diet to a fat burning type of diet, I really felt bad in the beginning. Like, I wanted to give up. I went for a run one day. It was merely like an 8 kilometer slow run. And I got like 3 kilometers into this run and I walked home. I thought I was getting sick. I thought I had I tried again the next day, I just had nothing left in me, I had no power whatsoever. Also, this was 10 years ago for me, so I didn't know a lot about this type of diet. So there's a lot more technical specifications that have been added into it by myself through research. As I've gone along on this little journey, I've run into certain problems along the way and found solutions to those problems as I've gone. So the one thing that happened to me was we did a long ride. It was 180 kilometers team time trial, and it wasn't really a— it wouldn't have normally been a hard race for me. But what actually happened there was I'd had a bit of like a lingering flu, leading up to this race, probably about 3 weeks, and I hadn't done much riding on the bike. And then I was invited to this race, like on the Friday before the Sunday, and I agreed to do it, which was— I don't know why. In my mind, I thought I could do it. Anyway, I lasted about 140 kilometers, and then we hit some big mountains at the end, and I completely petered out. I went into like massive cramping. I literally, every muscle in my legs was cramping, the worst cramps I've ever had. And I had to walk certain stretches of this last 40 kilometers of this race. It was very embarrassing. And I had people cheering me on from the side of the road going, you can do it, you know, and it was totally not like me. I'm very competitive as a sportsman. And to be walking along a cycle race is just like not kind of within my nature. But it did teach me a valuable lesson. It taught me that, you know, with eating high fat and cutting out all junk food, sugar, carbohydrates, all that kind of thing, you're also cutting out a lot of your electrolytes because they are laden with salts like sodium and monosodium glutamate, MSG in other words, and all sorts of other like of the harsh electrolytes and there's no balance there as well. You know, you don't have your potassium balancing out those types of electrolytes. So what I— the entire race, at about 90 kilometers, I took, I think, 300 or 500 milligrams of potassium and probably, I think, 1,000 milligrams of salt, which is completely the wrong way around. It should have been— those ratios should have been the other way around, and times 4 or 5. So I completely underestimated how many electrolytes I was supposed to take, and I felt it. I felt like my legs were literally shutting down before the cramp started. I just, you know, the electrical energy in the legs was just like getting less and less and less and less, and it's like my battery was literally going flat because the electrolytes were out of my system. And then the cramp started. So that taught me a lesson about this particular diet. So from there on, I started researching more about electrolytes and which electrolytes are most important and so on. So I handled that kind of thing. And then I started realizing that I was very good at endurance and going the long rides, like, you know, 150, 180 kilometers on a bicycle. It was very easy for me. I could do that without eating. And I felt like the further I went, the stronger I got, as long as I was putting electrolytes in the body. I would always do this fasted. I've also always found that if I eat before I ride, I'm very sluggish on a ride. To me, that looks like my digestive system is taking all the energy and all the oxygen and everything that's needed to go into my legs. It's actually now in my stomach trying to digest my food. So I don't eat before I ride. I can ride probably, I could probably go up to about 200, maybe 250 kilometers without eating energy, without eating anything. So I've not done that as yet, but I probably could. I know people who've done 300-kilometer rides fasted. And actually, I know a guy from Cape Town, South Africa, who's done a 500-kilometer ride without eating anything, completely fasted. So I realized as I was going along that it's better not to eat before my ride, better not to eat along the ride, and just keep those electrolytes going in. But going back to when I started this journey and running into the first barrier, which was like literally running out of Fuel while I was on the run. So I would go run an 8-kilometer run, and I'd do 3 or 4 kilometers, and I'd walk home. And I'd be telling my wife, I'm going to give up with this, I don't want to do this anymore. And she was the one that encouraged me to keep going. She said, look, this is what will happen. You just got to keep going. Your body hasn't switched over from burning glycogen. And it has to switch over to burning fat, which basically turns into triglycerides and ketones, and the body loves ketones, let me tell you that. The body loves ketones. Glycogen, I never want to experience that anymore, or again. So, I carried on with it, and it took me a little while because I was a very bad eater. I ate a lot of sugar, and my teeth are broken as a result of that. I've got horrible teeth inside my mouth because of all the sugar that I ate. But I, so I continued with the fat burning. And suddenly, after, it took quite a while for me to kick into this, because I also wasn't taking enough electrolytes. So it took me quite a while to kick into the fat burning thing. And it probably was about 3 to 4 weeks before I started to feel anything. And the day that it really turned for me was on a 15-kilometer run along the beach. And it was from point to another. And it was quite a hard run. And there was, I think, about 1,200 people in this race. And I came 15th. I ended up coming 15th. And I literally hadn't done much running. I'd done like 3 days a week of 2 or 3 Ks or 5 Ks maybe. And I ended up coming 15th in this race. And I just felt like I could go forever. And the funniest thing was the next day my legs weren't sore. This whole lactic acid thing had changed. And from that point on, I realized that this is the way forward. And everything that I've done since then with regards to sport has improved. My running started to improve, my cycling improved, surfing improved. There was— and it wasn't only the physical ability. It was the mental thing as well. It's like I became extremely sharp. It actually feels like it raises your IQ, but it also made me very razor-sharp. So if I'm in a race and I need to be thinking straight and I need to be, you know, sharp and have a very, very quick reaction time, to various things that go on in a race. I also work out strategies very quickly while I'm in a race, or even when I'm just on a club ride, I'm always working out strategies. It's a lot easier to do that on the Ride On, and I literally feel like a steam train. It feels like the further I go, the stronger I get. So I recommend if you're a sportsman, please contact me. I'd Get you on a specialized program to get you into this state where you feel that you are burning fuel like really efficiently. It's a great feeling. And it's a great feeling all around. You can go, you know, the whole day without eating, ride your bike in the morning or do whatever training you have in the morning, and still go the whole day without eating. You don't have to eat. All the time. In actual fact, it's better for you if you don't. It's a very old-school thought that you've got to put the protein in after training, and you've got to put the carbohydrate in before you train, and this recovery drink, and that. It's all commercial rubbish, and it's all pushed on us by the very huge sports nutrition industry that basically just sell loads quality supplements to people and sell them as high-quality supplements with nice packaging. So don't get fooled into that. You can get, you can get supplements and you can get the nutrition you need from your food and other natural organic supplements. And you know that it will actually give you more longevity as a sportsman and just generally in life. So if you're interested in getting into this, please contact me. I just— you have to know that there's going to be a few weeks of pain and suffering where it feels like this is not working, and it's horrible, and you're grumpy, and, you know, your legs are tired or your arms are tired. And And it's just the body has run out of glycogen stores, which is actually a good thing, you don't need that. When it kicks over into using ketones, man, it's a whole new ballgame. You start to feel like Superman, you start to produce more testosterone, your body produces more human growth hormone, it's just like, the difference is immense. Also stem cells, it also takes broken proteins and regenerates it into new proteins, you know, so your body just, the longer you go on it, the better it gets. And for me, I've been doing this for 10 years now. I can't believe that I'm still feeling new benefits from being on this program. And I'm pretty strict about it. I stay on it pretty well. So if you'd like to know more about it, please contact me and please subscribe on the link below to our YouTube channel. We'd love to see you around more, and I'll be here to give you more tips on all sorts of ways of losing weight, being a better sportsman, handling children with this diet, pregnant women, breastfeeding women. There's all sorts of different areas that we can handle with, with this program. So yeah, contact us, let us see if we can help.
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