Bob Seebohar (Founder of eNRG Performance): Fixing Runner Gut Issues & Metabolic Efficiency for Endurance Athletes

In this episode of the Maximum Mileage Running Podcast, coaches Hannah Witt and Faye Johnson sit down with renowned sports dietitian and exercise physiologist Bob Seebohar, founder of eNRG Performance and a leading voice in endurance sports nutrition.

Bob shares how his journey from triathlon led to a career focused on solving one of the most common issues endurance athletes face: gastrointestinal distress during training and racing. Instead of accepting GI problems as “part of the sport,” Bob explains why they’re often preventable, and how improving gut health can dramatically change both health and performance.

We dive into Bob’s Metabolic Efficiency Training philosophy, how athletes can train their bodies to burn more fat and rely less on constant sugar intake, and why biomarker testing and daily nutrition strategies should come before performance-focused fueling.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why GI distress is so common in endurance athletes
• How Metabolic Efficiency Training works
• Why more carbs during training isn’t always better
• The role of gut health in endurance performance
• Bob’s four-step framework for athlete nutrition: testing, daily nutrition, nutrient timing, and supplements

If you’re a runner or endurance athlete who wants to fuel smarter, protect your gut, and perform better long term, this episode is packed with practical insights.

Bob will also be returning to the podcast soon to dive deeper into nutrient timing and fueling strategies for training and racing.

Right, that's us done. If that was useful… share it. Stick it in your club WhatsApp, send it to that mate who's always getting injured three weeks before race day. You know the one ;)

If you want to go deeper on any of this, Nick puts out videos every week on YouTube, and the entire team of coaches are sharing helpful tips on their instagram channels... links below. And if you're thinking you actually need a proper plan and someone in your corner… we've got Guided Coaching from 97 quid a month, right up to full one-to-one coaching with the coach of your choice. Either way, maximummileagecoaching.com is where you want to be.

See you on the next one.

To work with us - https://join.maximummileagecoaching.com/home-page-9835

Nick's YT - youtube.com/channel/UCgdIPeN3bF7I7-tcspyFbVg/

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Rachael's IG - https://www.instagram.com/rachforthelongrun/

Hannah's IG - https://www.instagram.com/coach_hannah_witt/

Matt's IG - https://www.instagram.com/ultracoachmatt/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the Maximum Mileage Running Podcast. I'm Hannah Witt, joined today by my co-host, Coach Faye Johnson. In this episode, we're talking with renowned sports dietitian and exercise physiologist Bob Sebohar, founder of Energy Performance and a leader in endurance sports nutrition. Bob shares his journey from triathlon into a career focused on solving one of the most common problems endurance athletes face: gastrointestinal distress during training and racing. We discussed his approach to improving gut health, the principles of metabolic efficiency training, and why prioritizing health and biomarker testing is key to long-term performance. Let's get into the conversation. Okay, fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

Yeah. Where are you located again?

SPEAKER_03 0:50

I'm in Colorado.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

Okay, great.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:54

How is the weather over there? I think we're like in this like weird ship where it's warm here, but it's cold there.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

And it's well, we have we have not had a winter. I'm just, I'm about, I'm just south of Denver. Well, literally, we have not had a winter. Like it's everyone, like we are we're everyone's like serious drought. Our ski mountains are hurting right now because we just have not had any snow, which is so crazy. I'm not, you know, besides the whole, you know, drought and fire, you know, damn or fire thing, I'm not complaining because you know, I love being outside and running in shorts and a t-shirt still, so I'm good.

SPEAKER_05 1:28

Yeah, that sounds like the dream, probably more so for Hannah than me, but like I think it's bad we've just got a lot of gray damp weather.

SPEAKER_04 1:38

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

I live at 5,000 feet elevation and we have like ski resorts here, and they've had a great winter because there's been so much snow.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

So that's incredible. It's completely the opposite, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Yeah, a bunch of ice though, so conditions aren't great unless you like the ski in that.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

But yeah, yeah, you gotta have really sharp edges on your skis for sure.

SPEAKER_05 2:04

Absolutely. Cool. Okay, so again, I'll just start and then we'll we'll go into things and yeah, just we just chat and we'll we'll we'll kind of direct the conversation and you know, yeah, just tell us everything. So yeah, cool. So welcome to the Maximum Mileage podcast, myself, Sae and Hannah, joined by Bob Sieboha. Yes, yes Bob Sieboa. And basically, we're here to talk around the topic of nutrition, as we have done uh a couple of podcasts ago in a slightly different vein. But what would be great, Bob, is if I hand over to you, introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about kind of your background and yeah, the kind of streams of work that you are or have been involved in.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Yeah, well, stop me if I am too long-winded. I've been doing this for quite a while. So I my my background, I grew up in athlete, team sport athlete, soccer, basketball, and didn't find the love or the joy for endurance sports until I was in my sophomore year of undergraduate. And it was simply off of a dare from a friend of mine. He dared me to do a triathon. Uh, it was a sprint triathon. I had no idea what a triathon was, by the way. I did not grow up swimming because I was a very much a land athlete. So I flailed, absolutely flailed in my first triathlon. But, you know, in almost finishing, probably second or third to last, you know, I was not that success story, like, oh my gosh, I'm so great. I was so enamored by just, I was so fascinated by why that sport was so difficult for me because I had been an athlete. So I'm like, of course, this will be easy. So I, you know, it was probably that was the kind of turning point in my career, if you will, before I knew what my career would be, where I was just so fascinated with why I was so bad at it that I strove to be better, right? And I think that just kind of cascaded into everything. Like I wanted to understand the body better and I wanted to understand nutrition and exercise science and coaching. So that kind of started it, right? So a few degrees later, I've got degrees in exercise physiology and in nutrition and became a registered dietitian and just created this path to be a sport dietician just my entire life. Like I'm just I'm focused on working with athletes. Uh and please let me let me stop by saying an athlete is anyone, in my in my opinion, anyone who's active, right? It doesn't have to be your Olympic gold medalist. It's it's us. It's we're just out there having fun. We might compete, we might not compete, but everybody is an athlete as long as they're active. So, you know, I just kind of paved my way throughout, and I've had some really cool interactions with athletes, with institutions. Um, currently I own my own business, Energy Performance, where I provide consultation services to teams, to athletes, to different sports, national governing bodies. So I do a little bit of everything. I I won't say I focus on endurance athletes. I started my career with endurance athletes because I was an endurance athlete trying to be better and understand that. But since then, I've worked with so many different types of athletes from team sports, strength sports, aesthetic. Obviously, endurance is my love. I am a runner. I am a not tri athlete anymore. I love doing obstacle races now. So I'm doing like an ultra-obstacle course race in a few months that just combines, you know, to 50K. So it combines long distance trail running with moving heavy objects. So that's kind of me in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_05 5:46

Amazing. That's great, Bob. I mean, if we go back to the start of that, where you decided to do a triathlon. And I think anybody who, you know, is involved in endurance sports hears about triathlon, whether they've taken part in it or not. Your kind of beginnings with triathlon sounds very similar to mine. I could ride a bike and I could run. So I thought, well, I'm sure I can swim. And simply that was rubbish. And so that set me on the trajectory to become a triathlon coach because I wanted to learn more. But what was it that kind of because yeah, what that that's quite a kind of escalation. What was it that really you wanted to learn more about and and help people with?

SPEAKER_00 6:32

You know, I felt like in kind of the the same thing. Like not only was I studying exercise science, but that actually drove me to become a triathlon coach just like yourself, right? So I went through USA triathlon, became a coach way, way, way back when. But what drove me was literally my my question. I'm so competitive within myself that I didn't want to accept that I did not know really how to swim. I mean, honestly, when I swam back then, it was you know the the head out of the water, and I'm just kind of preventing drowning, basically, right? So I I wanted to be better, but also kind of shifting into nutrition. And if if I may kind of make that shift. Yes, of course, yeah. Yeah, what I noticed after I became a registered dietitian and and really just dedicated my life to sport nutrition, I started working a lot with endurance athletes because again, that I am one, I understood it kind of sort of. What I was finding with endurance athletes, tri athletes, runners, cyclists, whomever, was there was a common theme in nutrition. And the common theme was they didn't know, in addition to me at the time, how to feed themselves for a sport that is very complex, right? And even running is very complex, even though it's just one sport. Triton is three times that because you just have to figure out way different things going on mechanically and physiologically. But what I found is a lot of endurance athletes just had no clue what to eat. It was like way back when, I'm not gonna date myself too much, but way back when it was the whole just eat as many carbohydrates as you can and hopefully that works. Cross your fingers. And unfortunately, I was one of them who had the unfortunate experience of having GI distress. Never had had GI distress growing up as a soccer and a basketball player, ever, right? Once I moved into endurance sports, and especially once I started training for half Iron Man and Iron Man distances, the GI distress monster bit me big time. And that was another thing I noticed with the athletes I was helping as a dietitian was everybody had GI distress. And I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? Right. So I scoured the research, I talked to other professionals, colleagues, professors. I'm like, why is this happening? And it's so funny, Faye and Hannah, that these are the answers I got way back when. Oh, GI distress is just kind of par for the course for endurance athletes. You need to accept it, you need to deal with it and move on. Well, obviously, these also were not people who were doing endurance sports because, as we know, if you guys have ever had GI distress or any of your listeners, it's not fun. You know, it's not fun having to plan your training sessions around portapodties and having your races disturbed by pretty significant GI distress. So that was a key turning point nutritionally for me, where I literally devoted my career to trying to help people, including myself, get rid of GI distress. Because here's the beautiful thing, you actually can get rid of it, but you know, 20, 30 years ago, we didn't know that. Like we didn't have those strategies. So that's kind of what it led me to kind of, I mean, literally my whole path with nutrition as a sport dietitian has been to how number one, how do we curb GI distress? How do we eliminate it? Number two, how do we improve health through different markers, which we'll talk about today, which then spills over into how do we actually improve performance, right? Because you can't be, you can't perform well without being healthy. So that long-winded answer, but that's kind of my my path to actually what I have done as a sport dietitian. And really, you know, I'm just not one who, you know, jumped into sport nutrition and said, hey, I just want to work for a college or whatever, right? I was like, I want to solve a problem, and the problem was GI distress or GI distress.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

I mean, it can be so multifaceted, obviously. I it some people have celiac disease, some people have I feel like I experience any kind of GI distress, it's almost like a snowball effect, and you can't really make it stop for that session. And it's almost like irritation and the lining of the gut, it just kind of perpetuates, and trying to halt it mid-session is close to impossible. And then you're dealing with dehydration and electrolyte imbalance in general, things like that. So, and then other people have GI distress just because maybe the jostling of whatever nutrition is in their stomach and water, etc., just causes them to feel nauseous. So you are an expert in this field. What would you say? You know, I gave three examples, but could you expound upon other types of GI distress?

SPEAKER_00 11:26

Yeah, so it's a great question, Hannah. I I feel like this also, like GI distress has also evolved in the past 30 years with endurance athletes. So I gave it away. Yes, I've been doing this for over 30 years, right? So earlier on in my career at least, we didn't see many athletes with celiac disease or IBS or Crohn's, right? I mean, it was there, but we just it wasn't as popular as it is today for whatever reason. So what has happened is the evolution of GI distress has progressed, right? Obviously, we've always had the symptoms of GI distress, so nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, flatulence, heartburn, right? Rigor vitation, all of the bloatedness feeling that's always been around in endurance sports. But I kind of feel now there's a lot of different factors that are predisposing GI distress, right? So as you mentioned, it could be some disease states. It could be as simple as, you know, a stomach bug, right? You eat something weird, okay, yeah, we get it, right? But what I've noticed is especially, well, here's here's the good and the bad. And I know we all kind of keep up with the whole sport nutrition industry in terms of products. 30 years ago, like literally, we had Cook Bar, Power Bar. I mean, that was we had a few others, right? But that's it. Now it's amazing what technology has provided us as coaches, athletes, dietitians. But on the flip side, it's very confusing to athletes. The reason I bring this up is because back in the days, we were just looking at glucose, maybe a little bit of fructose, right? But now we have all these different sugars. We have sugar alcohols, we have uh cornstarch-based, we have higher glucose fructose, we've got different ratios, we have different delivery systems. I feel like there's more positive effects of using sport nutrition products when not used correctly, if that makes sense, right? So a lot of the athletes I work with, I try to work with them at least six to nine months before their race. Because as we know, we actually have to acclimatize the gut to respond to different, not only products, but also foods, right? So if Hannah, you came to me saying, hey, I've got a whatever marathon Iron Man in, you know, six months, I'd say, okay, let's look at your daily nutrition. Are you do you do have do you have GI distress? And then we move down the line into saying, okay, well, if your gut is healthy, and let me just stop there really quick. I also believe through all anecdotal experience that many endurance athletes cause GI distress is because they do have an unhealthy digestive system, right? And basically, when I say unhealthy, I just mean that good and bad bacteria is very imbalanced, and they may not just be eating appropriately to support a healthy gut microbiome, right? And that will in turn kind of spill over into some type of trigger that will cause that GI distress, right? But so so backing up to this is really looking at, you know, I look at do we need to heal the gut first through different dietary strategies, different maybe stress management strategies. Do we need supplements to do that? Maybe, maybe not, right? So once we heal the gut and then implement certain nutrition programming or strategies, it's it's not a hundred percent, but it's probably about 90% certain that they will not have GI distress. Because here's the other thing if I can just go off on a rant, I feel like a lot of endurance athletes are very reactive to GI distress, right? Oh, I've had GI distress in the past, I don't really address it. I'm just gonna try a different product, right? Yeah, and and that'll be fine. It does, yeah. And sometimes it works, which is great, but sometimes it doesn't. And so I kind of feel like instead of being reactive, and this is what I teach my athletes, let's be proactive. So we heal the gut, then we explore different products or foods that they can eat in the nutrient timing system, right? Before, during, and after training or races. And then we try that for months and we explore if those will cause any triggers or any symptoms of GN distress. If not, we're pretty good. If if so, well, we just have to pivot a little bit. But that's that's one of the messages I like sending athletes is like, hey, let's be proactive instead of reactive with your food and sport nutrition products.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

And being proactive, and I guess starting initially stage one, healing the gut. Oftentimes I I mean, is that the cessation of exercise? Because exercise seems to be the cause. And that's probably why athletes tend to be more reactive because they do not want to stop training. But yeah, or maybe cross-train so that I mean I find I don't have GI stuff if if I bite or do anything, but so do you have to have that conversation with athletes? We're going to have to cut back training. Maybe athlete says 45 minutes into a run like clock where I start to have GI distress. So we're gonna have to cut it to less than 45 minutes until we get the gut healthy. What does that protocol look like?

SPEAKER_00 16:25

It's it's interesting that you asked that, Hannah, because it's it's a good point. I usually don't I usually don't structure or let me just say, take away exercise. What I do is I I help under help them understand it. So typically, not always, but typically it's the intensity factor that perturbs the digestive system, right? So as we know, some endurance athletes do not like following their coach's recommendations, like a zone two run or training session. And he, I mean, you know, it happens all the time. We kind of push the envelope in terms of heart rate or power or pace or whatever. What I tell them is like, hey, we're gonna back off intensity, because that's usually when we get these perturbations in the digestive system. But I will tell you, probably 80, 90% of all this is literally just recreating a good daily nutrition strategy. I mean, you'd be surprised. Even when I present uh about to athletes about pre-biotics, probiotics, postbiotics, they have no idea what I'm talking about, other than, oh, I take a probiotic supplement, right? Which we can go down that path later if we want to. But my point is like not allow athletes to actually understand the power of food, the power of nutrition. But yes, it does it could take a few months to actually heal the gut through nutrition while adjusting training load, but more specifically training intensity. However, to your point, Hannah, if if an athlete is like, hey, 45 minutes into a session, I it always happens. I would probably one look at intensity. And if that's low, then I would say, yeah, let's let's back that volume down because we just I don't want that happening. Although, and the other side of my mouth, as I'm thinking of this, it actually might be a good test to see how well the nutrition plan is actually working, right? So we we hate athletes having GI distress, but we have to test it out sometimes.

SPEAKER_05 18:15

And that's the time to test it, isn't it? Exactly. You when you've got time on your side and you know you you have opportunity to let's use the word experiment in training situations. Yes. I wonder, Bob, have you with have you noticed over the last I don't know, even the last 10 years, changes in, I know we talked very much about kind of the gut and nutrition, but with the changing trends in daily nutrition, in the amount of processed foods that we're now eating, but also how that has an impact on our cortisol levels and you know how stress has become kind of a secondary to most people, you know, in life now. There is that often that that suggestion that more highly strung stressed people are drawn to endurance for how how do you how do you kind of have how have you seen that change, like that, I'd say potentially an increase in stress and you know that processed food element of things?

SPEAKER_00 19:24

So, so reel me in if I go too deep into this, okay? Because you started something now. So not not that this is a history lesson, but here's what's happened as as you know, some of your listeners, if they've been in this sport for a while, they they understand this. But you know, 20, 30 years ago, it was all daily nutrition was focused on, as I mentioned earlier, high carbohydrate, very little protein, low fat, like low, low, low fat. And so the reason I'm giving this because we're gonna put it in the stress context here soon. So then as we progressed, you know, in quote unquote diets have always been around, right? They they just kind of cycle and they'll they come, they go. I it's it's kind of dime a dozen with those. But as we progressed the past 20 years and now in the 10 years, we've seen the advent and the introduction of a lot of what I would say questionable diets, right? I hate that word. That's why I'm using air quotes because I I even I don't even like saying that word, but but that these diets, so we've got Tito, we've got carnivore, we've got Atkins, we've got so many South Beach, like you name it. What's happening, in my professional opinion, is that athletes are choosing these particular diets and stressing their systems even more. So as we're talking about stress and cortisol and just all just the adrenal gland in general, right? Anytime we change our nutrition, we add stressors to our body, right? Not that that's sometimes bad stress, but most of the time it is because human nature says, oh, well, black, white, right? If this isn't working, I'm going to void my diet of carbohydrates and try this, right? So I believe that a lot of athletes who swing in that completely opposite direction. So for example, if they're usually if they follow like a high carb, low protein, low fat, and then they all of a sudden go to low carb, high fat, that is a huge stressor to their body, right? And we've heard this, we've seen it, we've heard about the keto flu. Now, granted, some people actually respond pretty well to that for other reasons, but most of the time, that stress, those stressors are so great. Not only will it disrupt the gut initially, and I say initially because sometimes it actually helps to heal the gut, and that's that's a whole different topic just from a disease standpoint, like Crohn's and stuff like that. But most of the time, what happens is because they do this complete, you know, 360, it adds more stress to the body. So you add that on top of a high training load. And already, as we know, most endurance athletes are type A, O C D a little bit anyway, right? What we're creating. Is that ultimate kind of kind of cauldron for this plot boiling over and the plot being stress, but it also being this opportunity to have a greater chance for GI distress, also just a greater stress a greater chance for poor health. And we haven't talked about that yet, but I do a lot of biomarker measurements with athletes, especially before we start doing nutrition changes, because here's the other thing, right? We all jump into it. We're like, hey, maybe this is the bet the next best thing. What I always tell athletes is do foundation testing first. So this could be blood work, it could be metabolic efficiency testing, it could be a host of different tests. See where you're at first. And and I I, you know, N of one, but I put myself through the same, the same measurement about 14 years ago. I did a little N of one experiment. And if I may, very quickly, I did blood work testing and metabolic efficiency testing, which we can talk about what that is a little bit later if you want, on day one. And then I changed my my nutrition plan, my daily nutrition plan. So I actually used to be pretty, pretty hardcore vegetarian, not vegan, but vegetarian for about 10 years. And then I just asked myself, I mean, as a sport dietitian, I like to be a guinea pin for myself and do a lot of different things. But I said, well, what if I just went back to eating meat? So did blood work, did metabolic efficiency four weeks later. So I introduced animal products, nothing crazy, not carnivore, nothing crazy, right? But I just started eating meat. And I told myself, at the end of four weeks, I don't really care about the metabolic efficiency, which is basically how efficient your body is at using fats and carbohydrates, right? I we can measure that. I didn't really care about that. I cared about my blood work. And I, so a lot of your listeners might resonate with this too, where genetically I do not have great cards that are that have been dealt with me in terms of cholesterol, blood lipids, right? All that stuff. So I'm working against some genetics. And what I found at the end of this four-week experiment after doing my blood work again is a vegetarian diet was horrible for me personally, because of my genetics, because of my blood work. And that that was a turning point for me where I said, oh my gosh, I need to have every single athlete do blood work before we really experiment with their diets. Because what if we're giving that? Like, what if an athlete is like, hey, you know, I feel better. Like I didn't feel if you're gonna say, hey, did you feel any different? Vegetarian versus, you know, omnivore, I didn't feel any different at all. But my blood work suggested that I was healthier when I actually included animal proteins. So what I want, one of the messages I'm trying to send is like, just because you don't feel different doesn't mean you're actually healthier or not healthier, right? So we need to, I call it popping the hood, right? You need to pop the hood, see what's going on inside the body first. In addition to all that, Faye, you we can actually measure biomarkers for stress, right? There are certain markers where we can look at cortisol levels, diagonal cortisol, some markers in your blood. So we can actually see what's working and not working and manipulate at least some of it through nutrition, other other parts through exercise and through lifestyle management.

SPEAKER_05 25:15

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's that makes such a good point and covers so many interesting kind of strands of of thought around the number of diets. I use again that it's yeah, and and kind of suggestions of do this, do that to feel like this or perform like that. And how people do often go into it completely blind with very little kind of guidance or support from a professional because they've seen it on you know, a platform or a you know, whatever it might be, you make a very good point there. It's kind of you have to, like with everything, like with your training plan, the same with nutrition, it has to be about you and like your starting point and what that looks like, rather than trying to pigeonhole yourself into something else.

unknown 26:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 26:13

I think it would be great, Bob, is if I thought we could move on and talk about the metabolic efficiency training and kind of where this kind of started and kind of what it's all about and how how you found this to support athletes over the years.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

Thank you for asking because this is this literally is like if you're gonna ask me my philosophy, this is it right here. We're getting into it, right? So I'm not your traditional sport dietician. I am a classically trained exercise physiologist before becoming a sport dietitian. That's important because I I pulled a lot of metabolism, a lot of sport science into this concept when I was thinking about it. So, this the first time I ever talked about metabolic efficiency training, just to let you know before I tell you what it is, 2003. So just to kind of give you a little reference, right? And I remember talking in front of a group of my peers, I was talking at a sport nutrition conference, and I introduced both nutrition periodization and metabolic efficiency at the same time. And it was, it was like crickets in the room when I was presenting. And I was like, oh my gosh, they they really did not like my my you know presentation. This yeah, kind of hurts a little bit. And then afterwards, every single person in the room like lined up and they they were asking me, what are you talking about? Like, we have no clue what you're talking about, even though I just you know gave a great presentation, whatever. So that was the beginning of metabolic efficiency training. Let me tell you the why behind it, which I actually already did. It was, it's it was all at that point, it was centered on eliminating GI distress in endurance athletes. That's all I wanted to do, right? Right. So I did a nosedive into research looking at you name it, associated with gut health, digestive health, exercise, metabolism, energy expensive, you name it, right? Um I'm just trying to answer the question why is are so many athletes, including myself, always prone to GI distress? Granted, as Hannah pointed out, so multifactorial, we know this. But what drove me to that, so that's the why of getting rid of GI distress. I had no idea how huge the impact, the positive impact would be on this until a few years later. So that was the why. Metabolic efficiency training is basically nutrition and exercise strategies to help fuel the body and the brain at different times of what I'll say, sport development, but also life development. And let me let me break that down a little bit. So metabolic efficiency is basically improving your nutrition and exercise programming to utilize or teach your body to either use more fat as energy and store more carbohydrates, which actually makes sense for a lot of ultra endurance athletes, right? Or the flip-flop of that, teach your body to burn more carbohydrates and store more fat. Now, some some of your listeners are like, why would you want to do that? There are actually athletes who that is extremely beneficial for, right? A lot of elite athletes, a lot of short distance athletes. So our body is very malleable and very smart. Like we can literally teach it to accelerate carbohydrate burning and store fat, or accelerate fat burning and store carbohydrate. And literally we teach it more, and this is where metabolic efficiency comes in. Metabolic efficiency training is 75% nutrition-based and 25% exercise based. So let me talk about the exercise real quick because that's the easy part. Zone one, zone two training, we know that improves fat oxidation at the cellular level, improves mitochondria, it improves everything economically with the mitochondria. So we know that low intensity training improves fat burning. Okay, great. But it's not the predominant part of this equation, which we know from research way back when, because they did the research. They, and this is what I looked at way back when, in like the 70s and 80s, when the crossover concept came about. If you guys know what the crossover concept is, basically the relationship between fat burning and carbohydrate burning from low to high intensity. And what the researchers found back then was that at a certain exercise intensity, and what that was defined as back then was between 63 to 65 percent of your maximum heart rate or BO2, anything under that, you're burning more fat. Anything over that, you're burning more carbs. Okay. So I challenged that because as I was reading all this research, I was like, well, they did they didn't control nutrition, they didn't feed them differently. All they did was they looked at exercise intensities. So I came in, I said, well, what if I manipulate? This is where the biochemistry and the metabolism comes in. I said, what if I manipulate nutrition? What if what if an athlete eats higher carb versus higher fat, right? What would happen? So I started doing that uh on a few athletes who let me kind of poke and prod a little bit, and I did it with myself. And lo and behold, what I found was that if you manipulate nutrition, you can basically lead your body to either burning more carbs or more fat. And again, it kind of I always present that to athletes where it's like, okay, what what are we trying to do? But here's the here's the but here's the key with this. So metabolic efficiency training, it's not a diet, it is literally periodizing your carbs, your protein, and your fat based on your needs, needs being sport needs, health needs, longevity needs, and also where what your health goals are. So not everyone falls in this category, but just anecdotally, I've seen because I do a lot of biomarker testing with athletes, a good handful of athletes who follow a very disruptive period periodized nutrition program, meaning super high carb, super low fat, their blood lipids and a lot of inflammation markers are completely wonky. They're they're so off and they're just there, it's it's it's horrible, right? It's not until we kind of periodize their macronutrients to be a little bit more balanced where we see better health outcomes. So that was a kind of a byproduct that I didn't expect in the first with metabolic efficiency training, was now, oh, we can actually affect different health markers, reduced inflammation, better blood lipids. I've actually had some athletes where I've turned them from pre-diabetic to non-diabetic just because metabolic efficiency, by the way, is all about controlling blood sugar and insulin through food. Like if you were in the elevator with me and you're like, hey, what is it? That is literally what it is. It's using food to optimize blood sugar and insulin. That's all it is. That's why it's I was very adamant in not putting the word diet anywhere in there because it's not a diet, it's literally a lifestyle change. Where, because all of us, and you and you, you ladies too, you probably have eaten more or less carbs, more or less protein, more or less fat. And we just do that naturally. But there's actually a reason why at certain points in our life. And I don't want to get into the whole, you know, as we get older, unless you want to go down that road, because you know, master's athletes require a little bit different. And that's that's the beauty of periodizing macronutrients, is we all need different levels of macronutrients, but we still want to optimize blood sugar.

SPEAKER_05 33:36

I think you make a really good point there with periodization, periodization within nutrition, because I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head there because I don't know about in the state, but here in the UK, uh if we talk about health and nutrition for health, it's a very generic one size fits all kind of template, which to be fair is incredibly outdated and not relevant to today's society at all, really. And with the increase in an aging population and people with comorbidities, it's it's almost irrelevant to many people. And that's just the general public. So then you throw into that people who are, you know, perhaps not as healthy as they could be, but they want to start taking part in a new sport or activity like winning or triathlon, it's finding that pathway that's actually going to keep them healthy because we all think I'm gonna start running, it's gonna be great for my health, it's gonna be great, I'm gonna be a new person, but actually that's such a small part of the whole program. And as you say, you don't know what's going on with that person and how they will respond to the exercise. And subsequently, if you start messing around with their nutrition in extreme ways, that's gonna have an impact on their physical performance.

SPEAKER_00 35:05

Yeah. And sometimes it's positive and sometimes it's negative, right? So, I mean, I I've seen a lot of athletes, I've worked with a lot of runners who started running and they've had a horrendous introduction to the sport because for various reasons. Maybe they overdid the physical part of it, but they weren't ready from a nutrition perspective. Because as we know, I mean, running is kind of harsh on the body, right? Like we need to need to be ready for that. But also nutritionally, I kind of feel, you know, Faye to your point earlier. I kind of feel like all of us are like we have inflammation in our body all times, right? But I kind of feel like a lot of people have heightened inflammation at certain times of their life or like whatever. Like it depends. Like there's a lot of life stressors. I kind of feel like that's usually when when individuals get into endurance sports, they're like, oh, I need that stress reduced or I need like whatever. But they're adding fuel to the fire, right? Because they're not accounting for the inflammation that's already there. And now they're adding more to that, but they're eating the same while they're adding all these other stressors, right? So that's that's again kind of where the metabolic efficiency comes into play because once we reduce or once we control blood sugar and insulin, it actually we can we can positively impact inflammation also. And that's a key thing. Like I always tell people initially, like, hey, let's let's and you we've all heard the whole anti-inflammatory diets, right? Call it what you will. We know that that food can reduce or increase inflammation in our body. And I feel like that's a really necessary first step for a lot of individuals.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

Well, since sugar tends to increase inflammation in so many like race day type nutrition are sugar-packed. Oh how do you help those? I mean, in general, if you think about athletes who are professional level, even athletes who, you know, every day like us, you know, they're taking in large quantities of these sugary race day kind of nutrition. And that increases inflammation because sugar causes a rise in inflammation. Does that affect their gut microbiome in such a way that they are unable to absorb other nutrients appropriately? You know, having that high sugar diet when you're taking in race-aid nutrition versus your microbiome being changed because it's used to processing that your inflammation is chronically high because you're taking in such a steady diet of that. Does that affect the absorption of the nutrition that you should be taking in for health and making sure that you have a balanced diet in general?

SPEAKER_00 37:37

100%. And I'm so glad we're going down this road, Hannah. Thank you for putting this in there because you know we're we're gonna get on a soapbox here, right? Because as I've kind of told you, sport nutrition has evolved, right? And where we're at now, it's a little bit on the border, in my humble opinion, of being ridiculous. Okay. Now, I love that we're pushing, I love that we're pushing the the buttons on performance, like we've got shoe technology, we've got all this tests, we've got all this great stuff. I just kind of feel like sometimes it's it's it's a little bit noisy, if you will. Right. So to your point, I remember this vividly. This was literally like 20 years ago. I was sitting down with with an Olympic triathlete, right? Uh, Olympic distance triathlete who was going to progress into long course racing. So he's doing Olympic distances, ITU racing, was gonna go train for Iron Man's. And I sat down with him, he's like, hey, so I want to talk about my nutrition as I as I go up in distance. He's like, so you know, I do like Olympic distance for for it was a male, for a competitive male, like, you know, they're finishing in under two hours, super, I mean, fast, if you will. But moving to Iron Man was a little bit more of a stress reform. And he said, you know, I, you know, usually I do some sport drink or maybe a gel on the bike for my Olympic distance. But you know, I've been meeting, I've been talking to a lot of these guys who make it to Iron Man distance, and you know, they're doing like 10 to 15 gels on the bike with all these sports drinks, and I was like, oh, okay. And he's asking my opinions, like, is that like, should I do that? I'm like, well, I'm not gonna tell you not to do it, but but basically I presented this. If you consistently consume simple sugars, and I think we need to identify simple sugars only because technology these days, we're getting a little different, right? Which we can talk about later. But simple sugars, glucose, fructose, sucrose, those kind of things, right? The more you consume those, yes, not only does it can it disrupt your microbiome, because it is actually displacing the good bacteria and bad bacteria. So it's creating more of a feeding environment for bad bacteria in your gut. So that's gonna throw that off, which by the way, downstream or upstream, however you want to call it, you know, the vagus nerve connects a lot of things in our body, specifically the gut to our brain. So if our gut's not healthy, our brain's not healthy, let me just put that on the side. But I presented to them like, well, if you're eating, you know, 10 to 15 gels, you know, during your training sessions, do you know what that's doing, not only to your gut, but also to your brain and potentially to blood work? Like it, it may, I don't know, because elite athletes are a little different than us, right? Their physiology is different. But I said, it may increase your fasting glucose, fasting insulin, HBA1C. And he was like, Oh, well, what if I just do it one time a week? I'm like, no, it's not how that works, right? Because there's gonna be some spillover where you're gonna be eating more sugar even on your shorter training session. So, Hannah, to your point, I get really heated in this discussion because, and it's not an argument, it's certainly a discussion of basically how much, right? And at what types. Because, as you know, we've gone. I literally just had this conversation with someone yesterday, sport nutrition recommendations for carbohydrate consumption per hour during training. Okay, that has evolved from 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour to now we're at six, you know, 30 to 90 grams an hour, but we're not even there. Now we're going 90 plus in some athletes, albeit I do want to make sure your listeners understand these are elite professional men and women, very different than us. And I have that, I have to state that to a lot of people. Are they seeing success with 100, 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour? Yes. What we don't see is their buildup to that, right? So I'm kind of straying away. I'm I'll come back here in a second, Hannah. But you they whenever somebody needs to eat more carbohydrate, like copious amounts of carbohydrate, like that much, they need to go through at least a few months of a gut training protocol to see how their gut's gonna respond. Now, I'm not gonna say I am anti that, but I'm pretty darn close because I do not believe we need to be overfeeding our bodies that much during training. I feel like a sweet spot, to be honest with you, and I'll explain myself in a second, is anywhere between consuming 10 to 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour. Now, some of your listeners are like, wait a second, 10? What's going on with that? Here's what's interesting. When you coming coming back to the metabolic efficiency training concept, right? If you change your nutrient, your daily nutrition plan, so you periodize your carbs, protein and fat, you're not going crazy on carbs, you're doing enough to support your health, support your training and your recovery, but you actually have enough protein and enough fat for hormone production, for recovery, muscle, everything. What happens is you train your body to use more fat as energy, which means you're storing more carbohydrates. When you train your body to use more fat as energy, you actually increase the intensity in which you can use that fat. And there is, and there's actually published papers on this years ago. I was the only one saying, I know we can burn fat higher than 65% because I've I've tested athletes. I see it in my lab, but I'm not a PhD researcher, so I can't publish anything. Finally, in 2017, a paper came out saying the exact same thing. They studied 11, I think it was like 1,100 athletes, men and women, and they did metabolic efficiency testing. And what they found was that there, the crossover point, which I call the metabolic efficiency point, the point at which the body crosses from more fat to more carbohydrate utilization for energy, that can happen up to 87% of max VO2 or heart rate. And that's important because it tells us that our body is adaptable based on what nutrition plan we follow. Now, all of that said, it's important to understand that the more metabolically efficient you are, aka the more fat you can use as energy. You actually require less carbohydrates per hour in training. And it should make sense, right? Now, is there an intensity factor? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But it should make sense. If we're using nutrition, daily nutrition, food, to improve our fat oxidation or fat burning. Therefore, we're storing more carbohydrates until we really need them, which is at higher intensities. We are training our body to not need as many exogenous or supplemental carbohydrates from drinks, bars, gels, gillumines, whatever. So I have been saying this for 20 years. I'm like, hey, once you develop better metabolic efficiency as an athlete, you only need about 10 to 40 grams of carbohydrate per hour. I go up to 60 because I have found some higher competitive level athletes, not elite, but just higher competitive age groupers who have a crazy high energy expenditure who do require just more calories coming in. But I feel like here's the pendulum. There's not a right or wrong here, right? So I want to make sure everyone understands this and your listeners. Like, I'm not saying everybody eats 10 to 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour. I'm saying your daily nutrition plan will basically dictate how many grams of carbohydrate you will need per hour. So, as an example, if you follow a super high carb, low protein, low-fat diets, right, you're going to need more carbs per hour. You might need 60, you might need 80, you might need 90 grams of carbs per hour because the more carbohydrates you eat in your daily nutrition plan, the more you will burn during exercise, which could, to your point, Hannah, cause some kind of concerns with the microbiome, with blood sugar, with insulin, with health markers, right? So the interesting thing is we, you know, every person who I kind of feel like every single athlete is standing on a fence, right? If you kind of kind of like a balance being fence, you can choose to fall on either side. And then you can choose to come back on the fence, and you can choose to go to the other side if you want. So I kind of feel like we all have the choice. And the choice starts with foundation nutrition, with your daily nutrition. Will you follow a more metabolically efficient nutrition plan, which is periodizing all your macros, or are you going to choose more of a diet, which is going to, which one, they're super harsh on the body and they're you can't sustain them for too long. And two, it may not actually provide you good health results and performance results. So the beautiful thing is we all have a choice. There's not a right or wrong. And like I gave from my personal example, I know eating a super high carbohydrate vegetarian diet is horrible for me because of my genetics. I hope that kind of loops everything back in.

SPEAKER_02 46:36

So I would follow up with so in this age of almost super fueling during races, it's kind it's negating and or minimizing the oxidation of fat. And so unless if you are professional elite level athlete and you are at that higher intensity that is above that percentage of VOP max maximum heart rate, and you are predominantly burning carbohydrates, being at that higher intensity, but that obviously just isn't applicable to the majority of everyday athletes. So my next question would be if Lionel Sanders walked into your office, are you familiar with Lionel?

SPEAKER_04 47:17

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

Obviously, he's had some issues with nutrition recently. Testosterone was really low. He's had stress fractures, rib stress fractures, just basically had a tough time. And he is very transparent on YouTube's social media that his diet has been in his own words crap. So and he eats a ton of sugar, processed foods. If Lionel Sanders walked into your office and he, you know, obviously is taking in the sugar, you know, in his daily diet, but also due to race demands.

SPEAKER_04 47:52

Right.

SPEAKER_02 47:52

What would you say, you know, to help him? Obviously, this is going to be applicable to the people who are at his level, but it's just an interesting case study since he's such a popular, transparent guy, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:04

Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. It's it's a good point because I mean you have to put everything in context too, right? So so really it's okay, it's Lionel Sanders. What what are his goals? Like, is he still going to race competitively? Does he still want to be trying to chase that podium? I I always come back, even because I've worked, I I continue to work with some Olympians, and I always come back to the whole I understand performance is paramount for you. It's your job, it's your career, it's your passion, right? But if if we don't get your health right, you're not gonna perform well, at least long term. Like I've seen some athletes when you guys have probably seen this too, they can pull out a couple of years of great performances and then they're gone, right? Yeah. Or they're going through what Lionel's going through, right? So with him, I would, or anyone in that position, I would strongly encourage and try to, you know, just really state the facts. Like the this is what we want to do first. Like I we want to fix some things, we want to heal some things first. But also, I kind of feel like I would have so much data from him anyway, like blood work tests, all this testing, that I could actually have a blueprint say, oh, well, now I know what direction to go because I see what's happening inside your body, right? That's the easy part. The hard part is guessing when you don't have any blood work, you don't have any testing. Because then you're like, well, I know we need to control blood sugar, we need to control insulin, but how we get there is very different based on the person, right? But you know, to your point, Hannah, I mean, I I I also want to be clear like I'm not anti-sugar, like, you know, sometimes during training and racing, we do need carbohydrates. We know that, right? We also have the choice these days of different carbohydrates, different amounts of carbohydrates. I mean, I just kind of feel like, you know, I think we're overdoing it. I think we're all these product companies are doing great at marketing right now.

SPEAKER_04 49:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:55

Because people are buying it, right? But with Lionel and anyone in that situation, I would try to talk him out of just trying to focus on performance and bring it back to health. And listen, I say that too. Like I work with a lot of younger athletes, a lot of Olympians, where I'm like, listen, I know you have 10, 15 years of your career ahead, but we've got to get the health now, otherwise, we're gonna be sacrificing it later, right? This isn't like a one and done kind of a thing.

SPEAKER_02 50:21

Maybe he's got a similar genetic profile to you where he, you know, his wife is vegetarian, she does a lot of the cooking. I I watch a lot of YouTube, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, maybe he really is low in protein. Do you think low protein intake from animal sources could be contributing to lower testosterone? Are the is there a link between those, or is that I'm sure it's much more complex than that, but I like this like that.

SPEAKER_00 50:48

Yeah, I love this now. 100%, right? And I'm not picking on plant proteins. Listen, plant proteins are fantastic. I include plant proteins still, I encourage that, unless they don't work for people. But here's the thing: since you threw out the T-word, right? Testosterone, uh, I actually work with a lot of male athletes who were having some issues in that you know department. And listen, well, well, even to back up to just the metabolic efficiency training concept itself, let me I'll get to testosterone in a second. Backing up to that, this is actually how I teach athletes to eat. Here's here's the secret. There's no secret, right? It's literally to control blood sugar and insulin. When you eat, and listeners, listen up, you choose your protein first, right? So protein is number one. Then you build color around it, fruits and veggies. And then if you need extra carbohydrates, which we were talking about, periodizing carbs, if you're like, yeah, I need I need a little bit more, I'm training a little bit more, whatever, then you add whole grains on top of that. Okay. So protein, color, and then starch is the way I teach it. Okay. That said, back to testosterone. Yes, I see there's a there's a complete disconnect with males in testosterone these days with protein. Now, obviously, we're talking about the endurance world, not like bodybuilding and all that stuff, right? Because it's completely different. I I have found, and I've been on a mission for 30 years with my endurance athletes to emphasize protein first. And it's not because it's more important, although protein is used to build so many different things in our body, hormone, it's part of hormones, it's part of DNA, it's part of enzymes, you name it. But it's usually the macronutrient that is most forgotten or overlooked in an endurance athlete's nutrition plan. And we all know this, like carbs are carbs are everywhere. Carbs are easy, right? Protein is difficult. Protein is perishable, it's very difficult to cook sometimes. It's it's just it's just hard, right? So, to your point, yes, I see typically lower animal-based proteins when when when an athlete is consuming less animal-based protein. And okay, let me just stop myself. I am not by any means shunning vegetarians or vegans. Like I said, if I was a vegetarian, I work with vegans, like it's no, we just have to find the right plant for each person. But I do feel there's a connection from all the blood work testing with athletes I've done in males that low animal-based protein usually reflects in lower testosterone levels. And I'm not gonna, nothing is easy in the body. Like if Lionel would come up, Lionel came up to me and said, Hey, I need to increase my testosterone. If I if I just eat more protein, will that do it? I would say that's part of the plan, but there are also different nutrients, different lifestyle activities, right? Different stressors in terms of training that will also increase that. So I feel like, yeah, protein is part of it, and it's probably the place I would start nutritionally, but there are a lot of different factors that that fall into place also.

SPEAKER_02 53:49

So with your view on protein, what do you think about for the Americans in the house? The inverted food pyramid, are you oh my gosh, or is that just kind of do you get a lot of this convert like topic for your clients? You're like, what's going on with the food pyramid? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:05

I you know it's it's interesting. I I honestly have not since it came out, which is kind of new, right? But I have not had one of my athletes yet ask me about it, which is interesting, but it's cool because I'm like, oh, I'm dodging this bullet, right? Unfortunately, I can't dodge the bullet with you guys, so I'm gonna talk about it. It's it's it's funny. It is funny because when I first saw it, I'm gonna be completely honest with you. I celebrated because my first thought was this, or not exactly. Okay, let me let me back up. Let me put context here. Not exactly, but the overall concept is actually what I've been teaching for 30 years in metabolics.

SPEAKER_02 54:44

That's why I brought it up because I know this this is kind of in line with I've been researching the food pyramid and and it made sense with what you're saying. Is it applicable for every person on in the United States? Perhaps not, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 54:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so to that point, I I love the fact that it it meshes a little bit more because the message is, and again, everyone's gonna interpret it differently, but the way I interpret it was I celebrate it because I'm like, finally, they're putting protein where it needs to be, right? That is a spotlight, right? Is it the most important macronutrient? No, but it's been so overlooked for decades. So that's what I love. Like, I saw protein, I saw fruits and veggies, and I saw healthy fat a healthy fats. And like, oh my gosh, metabolic efficiency training. Finally, someone's listening, right? Again, to your point, it's not for everyone, the food pyramid, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and and and we're recording this, right? Everyone's gonna listen to this. I think all just about every single person in this world, minus kids, should follow metabolic efficiency training. And because remember what I said earlier, all it is is manipulating food to optimize blood sugar and insulin levels. Everybody needs to do that. Kids are a little bit different because their growth and development is is still going. So they need extra nutrients at certain times. Okay, so obviously that's that's probably the one category that I would say, yeah, we still need to balance our blood sugar, but they need extra stuff.

SPEAKER_02 56:14

Okay, for college athletes, Linda's childhood and adulthood, obviously you hear so many. I mean, that's kind of where red-s originated was the allegiate female runners and lack of menstruation or very dysregulated. Where would you say that kind of transition? I guess it is right there, and that's such a tricky time because nutrients are in flux.

SPEAKER_00 56:37

Yeah. Well, it's it's a great question. I I don't think there's a definitive answer in terms of a chronological age. I work, I I work with a local university here, so I can speak to that, uh, specifically work with males and female teams. I I firmly believe just knowing how college sports nutrition is in the states, I don't think I can set a chronological age to that, to that, to that degree, to that, to that switch, right? I I treat my college athletes as they are still developing because I know the food resources are usually, let's just say, not the best in the college atmosphere. So I always, even if they're done growing like maturation, I still consider them part of you know developing because they just don't have great options. And we know a lot of college athletes don't make great choices. Then we kind of trickle down into what sport, what influences, what philosophies, what are the coaches saying, you know, I mean, so but but in my mind, a college athlete is still a high school athlete.

unknown 57:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:41

Do you work with wrestlers at all in college? Wrestling was the worst because oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 57:48

Totally. I I am I'm not gonna use the word fortunate, but I'm gonna say fortunate in that the school I work with does not have wrestling. I have worked with wrestlers in the past. That is, if you're gonna ask me what's the most challenging athlete or sport you've ever worked with, it's wrestling. Absolutely hands down. It's getting better, but it's still a challenge, right? Because of those strict weight cutting, it's just just the whole philosophy in general. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 58:14

Wow. That's not generally something we have at universities here.

SPEAKER_03 58:18

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 58:21

That would be great. That would be quite entertained to see in balance.

SPEAKER_02 58:26

I had horror stories of wrestlers where I went to university, like spitting into a can on the bus to the meats because they're trying to drop weight, sweatsuits, wow, everything. The oddest things, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's why I thought of that most extreme example. There are a lot of extremes, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_05 58:44

That's brilliant.

SPEAKER_02 58:45

I thank you. Yeah, I have so many questions because I do want to be interesting. GLP one agonists right now, hot topic, being promoted, and you know, everyone I feel like is taking them or looking at taking them.

SPEAKER_04 59:02

I know.

SPEAKER_02 59:03

I look I researched recently with because it seems that a lot of people, when they come off the GLP one agonists, they're regaining.

SPEAKER_03 59:09

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 59:10

I'm thinking, I think I saw 60% of the weight back or things like that. But I don't know if there are a lot of endurance athletes taking this kind of medication, but have you had clients who say, hey, I'm on this? And obviously, this is all being affected. It's an agonist for well, I'm gonna let you explain it, obviously, because you have the scientific understanding. But what do you see the connection between that and endurance training?

SPEAKER_00 59:36

It's it's definitely becoming more popular. I don't have too many athletes yet that I know about, right?

SPEAKER_05 59:43

At least it's probably transparent.

SPEAKER_00 59:47

Exactly. There is, which is weird because at least in the States, it's so prevalent and it's so easy to get now, and the prices are dropping, and oh my god.

SPEAKER_05 59:57

It's incredibly pre it turns out it's very prevalent in the UK as well, but it's become almost, yeah, it's become like a normal thing. You know, people are having conversations and then they'll like whisper to each other and go, I'm on that. Oh, me too. You know, it's like, yeah, it's become the new thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:20

It is so what I'll say is I I do feel there's a time and a place in in some clinical applications. I totally support the use of this medication. Absolutely makes sense. So BCD models, yeah, yes, right. I feel like once we start bridging it into sport, let's just let's look back up. So the whole pro the whole purpose of GLP1 medication is to do what? Is to provide satiation. So you're not eating as much, you feel full, like all that stuff. What I don't understand is that we actually do the same thing through nutrition and especially metabolic efficiency training, because remember what I emphasized before is protein is the number one, and protein has that exact effect, and and which which we actually know activates GLP1. So it's it's to me, it's baffling. And here's what's even more baffling because I just saw an ad for the new GLP1 pill, right? The tablet, not the not the shot. And I can't remember the company that puts this out, but they said, you know, like in the in the in the fine print or whatever, or it wasn't even fine print, they said, you will lose, or we we have proven a 14% loss in body weight in 12 months. Okay. So I'm like, huh. So I got my calculator out, and I was just like, because I'm I'm working with a couple athletes who are trying to do weight loss right now, right? So I put in their body weight, and I'm like, and I did all these calculations. I'm like, okay, 14% of their body weight, 12 months, divide it by you know, 52 weeks. Basically, I'm trying to get at how many pounds a week is that? Like, if you're gonna take that pill, how many pounds is 14%, right? And obviously, yes, it depends on where we're starting with body weight. But you know, for the for the male I I'm working with who weighs about 230 pounds, right, and wants to reduce the body weight, that came in to, I believe it was 0.75 pounds per week. Now, let me just put that in perspective. When we try to simulate weight loss in anyone, safely, what we're recommending is 0.5 to one pound a week of weight loss.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:28

It's not safe. They're burning lean muscle mass. I know, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:32

That's what I'm saying. I'm like, well, wait, this is what we already do through nutrition and exercise and lifestyle. Why do we want to take the chance of now getting to the same place, but now you have less lean mass, which we know is actually not a great thing for longevity because it's actually a predictor of mortality when you have less lean mass. Yeah, and listen, as we get older, we already lose lean mass. So why would you want to take something that is accelerating that when you can already have very similar effects? Which, from what the drug company tells us, 14% over 12 months. So basically, you kind of hear my my my voice changes here. I I don't understand for the athletic market, especially if they're not significantly or trying to lose significant weight, meaning they are not in the obese category. I don't necessarily understand it.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:24

Yeah, I saw Serena Williams, she's a spokes spokeswoman for Roe, and I thought, why on earth would she do that? But it was hard on baby weight, and that was still kind of bizarre to me. But you know, she said that she was at risk, I think, for cardiovascular disease, and that's why she thought she needed to lose the weight. But yeah, yeah, you know, it it's not like she was morbidly obese or anything. No, no, yeah, it is confusing and it's hard to navigate when you're getting that kind of information.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:59

So I gotta do it. Exactly. Exactly that. If they see someone who we consider to be an athlete, a reputable, successful athlete, yeah, people are gonna go, well, that will work for me then, surely, because you know it's endorsed, it's you know, it's got the backing.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:16

Exactly. Yeah, it's it's it's gonna be interesting because also we don't know the long-term effects of this. But exactly that. That's even more interesting to see what happens in 10, 20 years, because because we nobody's done trials yet, because we've it's they're so new, right? So I I mean, I'm I'm not gonna say I don't support the use. I just I just think we need to think in what populations is it most applicable. And I think that's more clinically really clinical obesity, I think is it could be it can do wonders initially at least in that whole process of becoming more healthy.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:49

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, before we wrap up, Bob, I would love for you to, you know, if if you could kind of put everything into, if possible, into like a nutshell to kind of send a message out to our listeners, what what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:05

You know, I feel like a lot of a lot of us, right, we try to make nutrition too complex, right? I've got I've got a lot of mantras, a lot of sayings. This is one of them. Simple is sustainable. So I feel like from a nutrition perspective, don't bang your head against the wall, don't follow latest diets because they are all very complex. Eat this, don't eat this, eliminate that. If you just bring it back to do some basic blood work to see what's going on inside your actually, not basic, I would do more comprehensive blood work, see what's going on inside your body, and then meet with someone who is qualified to look at those biomarkers and say, here's what's happening. Here is the food and nutrition plan that will actually support improving health and performance and longevity. Don't just follow one thing because someone else does it, right? I would just say, just take it back to basics, right? And that may not be as simple as you think it is because your listeners are like, well, then I have to get blood work, then I have to see a specialist. But listen, we only live one life, right? I kind of feel like the more we go up and down with these diets, the more we're harming our health potentially. And remember, our health is not, I feel like a laugh, a lot of athletes just think physical, like muscle. We have to also protect the message of improving our cognitive functioning and our cognitive health. And there's a direct relationship with food there too. So bring it back to basics, blood work, interpret it, get a food plan that is basically customized for you, you physiologically, and then start there. That's the best place to start. Just make it simple.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:45

People will work with you, Bob. Is that basically what that roadmap would look like? They start working with you. Okay, let's do blood work. Okay, let's build a roadmap. If they've got the GI distress, like we talked about, step one would be healing that situation. So if athletes want to work with you, is that how you would encourage them to approach that?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:05

Yeah, it's exactly it. And I actually work with athletes. I've I've developed, again, as I alluded to, I've worked, I've been doing this for quite some time. I've got a model that I use that's super easy. This is again simple as sustainable. So I've it's a four-step process or model that I use with athletes. So when someone comes to me, I say, okay, testing. What have you done? What have you missed? What do like I don't want to test just to test? I want to test to use the data. So I see whatever they've done, I collect that. And then I say, you know what, we're missing some. So we do this. Once we have all the data, then we go to that next level and say, how do we use it to build a daily nutrition plan? The daily nutrition plan focuses on optimizing health, which is blood sugar and insulin, and then any other ancillary things like you're saying, Hannah. Maybe it's maybe it's uh digestive distress or GI distress. Maybe they do have celiac, maybe they have Crohn's, IBS, like something around there. Maybe they have brain fog, maybe they have some hormonal imbalances. That's what the daily nutritionists for, right? So we really customize that. The third step is nutrient timing, which we haven't had time to talk about. But basically, based on all this and your sport and your level of competitiveness, what do we need to have you eat or drink before, during, and after training or racing? And then the last step is if supplements are necessary, then we talk about supplements. But I don't really talk about supplements until I have testing and we we put together a good daily nutrition first to see what else could we do to optimize health and potentially performance. So that that's yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:37

We're gonna have to have you back on the podcast to talk about nutrient timing, and also you said something about deliverability of sugars based on the product that you use in your race. I guess I'm thinking layman's terms here, the more complex the carbohydrate is, the longer the delivery window is going to be. But it's probably a much more complex.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:01

It's more complex just because technology has been introduced into sport nutrition. It was a lot easier when we were just talking about glucose and fructose. That was so easy.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:11

But that's an interesting one because it comes back to sometimes you don't have to use off-the-shelf sports nutrition. If you do train using less, you know, normal foods, you actually have more control over kind of how though how you utilize that fuel.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:30

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I and I think I feel like there's more athletes, like more once you get into more of that ultra distance where literally the intensity is lower and you can eat, you can consume things. That's usually the category of athletes doing that. But I still have some, you know, more higher intensity based athletes using sometimes some real food. So it is possible. But again, back to initially what we said too, you have to train your gut. You have to make sure it's it's like if you're if you're gonna use, you know, dates as a carbohydrate source, you don't want to do it, you know, the the day of the race. And I mean that's like for the first time.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:02

Yeah, I want to hear about like for the Kona swim when athletes, the lead athletes at least are finishing in 50 minutes to an hour, maybe faster than 50 minutes. How do you like time the nutrition for that? You know, what would you do? Obviously, you can't feel during that. So exactly lots more things to discuss.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:18

Yeah, well, let's let's put that on the docket. I'd love to come back and talk about nutrient timing.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:23

Awesome. So, Bob, if people wanted to find out more about you and the work that you do, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:30

Yeah, I'm you you can just Google my name if you know how to spell my last name. But my company is called Energy Performance, E-N-R-G performance. That's probably the easiest place. Just Google Energy Performance or go to energyperformance.com. You can find out everything. You can go, we've got a YouTube channel. I do a lot of videos. So I'm I'm everywhere on the internet. So it's I'm pretty easy to find.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:49

Cool. We'll put like some nice. Can people work with you remotely? Just put question.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:55

Oh, and most of my work actually is done remotely. I would say 90% is all virtual. I would also say a good starting point since we've been talking a lot about metabolic efficiency training. This is a concept that I pioneered. Hence, I also published a book on the topic. So that would be a good place to start. Um, make sure you get the third edition because I just recently updated it a couple years ago. That that's always a good starting point so people understand what we've been talking about a little bit before they just jump in. And if they want to work with me, great. But that's a good starting point to understand this whole concept first. And you can get that on Amazon through my website. Uh, you can get it a lot of different places.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:34

Great. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Bob. And as Hannah said, we'll definitely have to get you back on deeper into some of those topics. So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:45

You're welcome.