View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Stephanie Howe, Ph.D. is a CTS Pro Coach and nutritionist. She has a Ph.D. in Nutrition & Exercise Science from Oregon State University and a Sports Nutrition Diploma from the International Olympic Committee. She is also the 2014 Western States Endurance run champion.
Episode highlights:
(25:43) Weight loss for performance: nutrition for performance and nutrition for weight loss are at odds, keep training volume low, start making changes well before your goal race, hormonal effects of undereating and sex differences
(37:23) Macronutrient breakdown: dependant on goals, maintaining lean muscle mass, increasing protein relative to carbohydrates, using MyFitnessPal
(55:34) Eating as a social activity: diets that limit certain food groups are generally unsustainable, some diets work in the short term due to practical caloric restriction, weight rebound after diets, food should be fun, sustainability of diet is the most important
Additional resources:
Dynamic Energy Balance Figure
Example of factors that impact EI and EE (Full article)
My Fitness Pal most user friendly to track intake
USDA Food Data Central. Most accurate database for food composition
Harris-Benedict equation
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media: Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Stephanie Howe, Ph.D. is a CTS Pro Coach and nutritionist. She has a Ph.D. in Nutrition & Exercise Science from Oregon State University and a Sports Nutrition Diploma from the International Olympic Committee. She is also the 2014 Western States Endurance run champion.
Episode highlights:
(25:43) Weight loss for performance: nutrition for performance and nutrition for weight loss are at odds, keep training volume low, start making changes well before your goal race, hormonal effects of undereating and sex differences
(37:23) Macronutrient breakdown: dependant on goals, maintaining lean muscle mass, increasing protein relative to carbohydrates, using MyFitnessPal
(55:34) Eating as a social activity: diets that limit certain food groups are generally unsustainable, some diets work in the short term due to practical caloric restriction, weight rebound after diets, food should be fun, sustainability of diet is the most important
Additional resources:
Dynamic Energy Balance Figure
Example of factors that impact EI and EE (Full article)
My Fitness Pal most user friendly to track intake
USDA Food Data Central. Most accurate database for food composition
Harris-Benedict equation
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media: Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupecast.
Speaker 1:As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Koop, in this episode of the podcast, I guarantee you is going to hit home with many of you athletes out there, and that is because of the confluence of what we are going through right now. Coming off of the holiday season, everybody is setting New Year's resolutions as well, as many of you have your season set up and you know what races that you are aiming at for 2024, and the combination of all of those things leads a lot of runners to want to drop a few pounds, either in advance of starting their training or at some point during the training process in advance of their goal race, and that proposition is not as easy as it seems on paper. So to help set up a little bit of a blueprint and some framework for how you can go about doing this, I brought in one of our crack coaches as well as one of our coaches who is also a nutritionist, stephanie Ham PhD, to discuss what she actually does with her clients and her athletes to navigate this particular landscape, and what I hope the listeners will take away from this is some sort of framework that you can use if you are DIYing it yourself. You want to lose a few pounds, what pitfalls are actually out there, and how you can manage the process if you are looking to optimize your performance or if you are just looking to shed a few pounds, to kind of get into the right area of body composition.
Speaker 1:I know that a lot of this has been taboo over the course of the last several years to even talk about. There's been a lot of bad practice within the coaching space and also within the nutrition space, and we start out the conversation with just that how we can move through some of these taboo aspects to talk about this in an adult manner, in a manner that can resonate with everybody and also one that, at the end of the day, is going to be effective and practical for you to implement. So with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with Stephanie Howe all about weight loss for ultra runners. Well, steph, thanks for coming on the podcast. Like I said earlier, I'm appreciative of your time. It's always hard to coordinate these things when we're talking about our European recordings, because it's like six in the morning for me.
Speaker 2:I know you had to wake up early and I'm having my afternoon Gute right now.
Speaker 1:Oh there we go. Very good, very appropriate. So we're going to talk about weight loss and fat loss and body recomposition I wanted to make sure I got all those terms in right off the gate for ultra runners. But I think that before we get into some of the like the really practical pieces of it, we have to rip the Band-Aid off on some of this taboo stuff that really has been kind of like going around over the last few years. And I was reminded of it maybe about a month ago when I was talking with some colleagues that there's honestly been some like really bad coaching practice that you and I have both seen in the arena around this issue.
Speaker 1:And I think when we see that it makes coaches and practitioners a little bit hesitant to talk about this with their athletes because they don't want to run afoul of any of the things that have been rightfully so going on that are just wrong and bad practice and, you know, forcing really low body weights and kind of just inappropriate things, and so before we talk about that, I want to rip the Band-Aid off on that, because there is a time and a place, in a way, to, first off, talk about body composition with athletes and second off, actually kind of like do it. So I'll turn the mic over to you as the practitioner. Right, you've seen this whole arc of some of the things that have like been going on within the mainly the endurance athletic sphere, but also other athletic spheres. I wanted to get your thoughts on that first, so that we can just wipe the slate clean before we start talking about some of the practical elements of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there and it kind of comes from both sides of the spectrum, right. So having athletes or telling athletes to lose weight for performance in an inappropriate way, but then also the other end of the spectrum of like pushing like burgers, pizza, like just pushing food, that's also not appropriate and I see both right now and you need to be somewhere in the middle and to approach that. I think I come at it of like, first of all, read the person. Who are you dealing with. Are you working with someone who has a disordered eating past, because you're going to treat them a lot different than someone who just maybe hasn't thought a lot about food and actually needs to learn about, like, what different types of foods are and how to eat appropriately for health or maybe weight loss and for performance? So I think that's the first part of like knowing your audience and then knowing how to talk about it.
Speaker 2:We know that there's not always a direct correlation with weight loss and performance. Sure, there is some relationship there, but it's not necessarily that if you're going to, if you lose weight, you're going to perform better, and that's a big problem that we're kind of undoing right now, especially with, like, younger athletes, college-age athletes. They've been conditioned to think that's a true narrative and it's not true, and so you have to kind of decide where the athlete falls on that spectrum of you know, how do you talk to them about it? And I go back to science and just really talking about food, we'll get into it more, but not just about pure numbers, because the body is so complex and if we oversimplify it to just calories in, calories out, and that equates to performance, that's doing a big disservice.
Speaker 1:I'm glad that you mentioned like both sides of the equation there, because and this is something that I've noticed just in coaching as well is that we do have to be mindful that the solution to kind of managing people with disordered eatings or with eating disorders is not simply to go say, hey, go eat this, go eat that pizza, burgers, french fries, you know fuel for, you know kind of fuel for.
Speaker 1:This is a tactful way to go about it and this is why I always bring in the experts, because I have had athletes with disordered eating and eating disorders and it's not something that is kind of like native to my coaching skill set, and so whenever I get like a whiff of any of that, my first, my first inclination is to go to the experts in that arena and say, hey, help me, like help me, help this athlete, right, because I don't. I want to make sure that I don't screw it up first and foremost. That's like my MO is just making sure that I don't screw things up, and I realized that in this arena, especially for high performance athletes who absolutely need to do the right things on the in the nutrition world, it's something that just needs to be kind of more carefully managed. I guess is the vocabulary that I'm looking for more carefully managed than just throwing things out to eat or not eat?
Speaker 2:Right, right. And I go back to thinking about a different area of expertise. You should, you should definitely use the expert. Like I don't know how to fix my car, just because I have a car and I drive one doesn't mean that I can tell someone how to fix it. So I go to the mechanic and they're going to tell me how to, how to do it, because that's that's their area of expertise.
Speaker 2:So same thing with nutrition, and it's even more nuanced because you make so many decisions every single day about eating. You know it's not just the actual physical part of eating, but you think about it a lot. We are marketed to, even when you don't know it, about food and nutrition and weight loss and diets and all of that. So, yeah, it's, it's really complicated and you can hide behind a disguise of like, yeah, look at me, I'm eating pizza, but that doesn't mean you're eating healthy, right? That doesn't mean you're eating enough. And I think when we oversimplified of like, yeah, just eat burgers and pizza, that still doesn't mean that somebody is eating appropriately for their health. For one, that's always the first line that we care about. And then two, her performance.
Speaker 1:Right, 100%, okay.
Speaker 1:So let's start to peel back some of the practical pieces of it.
Speaker 1:I think first off, let's put a like a layer of I hate to always I hate to start podcasts out like this because it seems so boring and dry, but we've got to have a basis for conversation in terms of some of the terms that we're going to talk about and that when we talk about. When we talk about weight loss with athletes, we tend to lump weight loss into kind of a big, broad category that we can more we can slice up a little bit more precisely based on the situation. That's kind of in front of you. So weight loss could could constitute of fat loss and or body recomposition, which could be a combination of both fat loss and muscle gain, which sometimes doesn't actually result in total body weight loss, but then you have a higher performance athlete because of that body recomposition. I want you to kind of elaborate a lot better than I'm stumbling through it on on those pieces, just so the audience will have a kind of a frame of reference and we start to bring these, this terminology, back up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so weight loss is just like the scale, right, the number on the scale, and that can change based on a variety of things that are maybe not actually real weight versus, like water weight or you know various, various different things but it's just the amount of gravitational pull on you. I like to remind athletes that, because then it doesn't seem like this big scary number. Body composition or fat loss is totally different. So your body is made up of lots of different things. We lump it into fat and fat free mass and when you're actually changing your body composition you can lose fat and gain muscle and that's going to change your percent body fat and that's actually advantageous usually for performance.
Speaker 2:But that scale, that weight loss, may not change. When we are losing weight we can't really spot, train or pick. It's not like you can reduce your fat loss without doing some sort of strength training or changing your nutrition to maintain lean muscle mass. So it's it's kind of like they're two. They're the same thing but they're two totally different things and it's kind of a weird way to say it. But one is just a number, the other one is what your body is made up of.
Speaker 1:Okay, perfect. I think that's the best way to kind of like bifurcate those. So the next thing I want to go over is something that you've already mentioned earlier in this podcast, and that's kyco, or calories and calories out. And you're absolutely correct that a lot of times we tend to oversimplify this process of body recomposition and or fat loss and or weight loss to well, all you need to do is intake less than you output, and while from a pure thermodynamic standpoint that is absolutely true you kind of like can't get around it, the, the, what goes in to both sides of those equations, and then, more importantly, how people approach it from a from a practitioners perspective, and then how the athletes actually actually kind of like implement. This has a whole lot more nuance than just simply counting numbers on either side of the equation. So first off, let's like go over this, this kind of kyco rule or kyco law, and then we can get into some of the more practical elements of how athletes might actually start to execute this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sounds really simple to treat your body like a checkbook, but it doesn't actually work like that because there's so many variables, like you mentioned, on either side that impact our metabolism basically, and each person is a little bit different. So our bodies are really good at at maintaining homeostasis, so they want to preserve where they're at. So they're going to fight in either direction, which is a good thing, to some extent of, like you know, if you have a surplus of intake, it's going to try to increase metabolism so that you're you maintain. The same thing happens when you decrease intake. It's going to try to change things so that it maintains, and so that can that can work in your favor or to your I guess, against you if you're trying to change your body composition or weight loss.
Speaker 2:But things that affect energy intake are your diet composition. So what are you eating? Macronutrients and micronutrients, high fat diets they can increase your energy intake. So that's that's definitely going to impact that side of the equation. A high fiber diet fiber is going to be non digestible, so you're going to take in more than you're actually going to be able to absorb physical activity. So just the duration of time that you're active, that's going to limit the eating windows, so that can impact intake as well. Hormonal control, that's a big one, and I'm talking both reproductive hormones and appetite hormones, kind of totally different mechanisms, but they also can impact appetite and intake. Body mass mostly body size, muscle mass is going to impact your, what you take in and energy expenditure, and that includes not just physical activity but also fissioning activities of daily living. Those are all going to impact that side of the equation.
Speaker 1:Well, and this is oh, sorry, sorry, keep going step, keep going One side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one side, one side. The other side and I've got a great figure that I'll send you if you want to attach here that kind of displays this really well.
Speaker 2:The expenditure energy expenditure side can be affected by your resting metabolic rate. So what we call metabolism, and that can be genetic, that can be different between sex, it can be different between age. Physical activity level it's not like a constant, it can kind of go up and down. The thermic effect of food that's one that isn't really well known. But foods different foods take more to digest and actually use some energy to digest, so that can impact our energy expenditure as well. Physical activity that's kind of an obvious one. Being sedentary again a little bit obvious. Body composition so more muscle and bone is going to increase your energy expenditure and your total energy intake and composition of diet. So that's a lot of words I just threw out. But just to show you that it's not just in and out, there's a lot of different things and they work together. So it's just so intricate. And when somebody just looks at this is how many calories I took in, this is how many calories I burned. It's really not accurate at all.
Speaker 1:Well, the best way that I like to demonstrate that step is something that you are quite familiar with, having worked with athletes, and that is let's just try to count the calories going in. And by doing that I don't mean have the athlete actually try, I mean look at the research where they actually try to do that. And it is not like counting the amount of dollars coming into your checkbook, to use your analogy, or counting the amount of miles that you have just run, which are kind of like more easily quantifiable with the GPS watch, or if you run around a track, you can easily count the laps on a track or anything like that. Whenever they've done that in a research setting, it's kind of horrifically inaccurate. I'd like to use that description because, I mean, the precision and the accuracy are just so far off that it makes using any of those numbers like wholly impractical.
Speaker 1:Just for one side of the equation, where all you are doing is counting. That's all you're doing. You're not taking into consideration any of the metabolic processes or anything like that. They're way, way, way more complicated than you just mentioned. All you're doing is counting. You're looking at the size, the weight of the food and you're trying to count the number of calories. And even that, even that, when you try to boil it down to the most simple part of the process, it's still horrifically inaccurate. And so when you get down to trying to count both sides of it right, that's when it just becomes a whole ball of wax. That is just enormously difficult to unwind unless you're in a highly controlled setting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And just to expand on that, like a banana that can range anywhere from 90 to 105 calories. Like same food right and food labeling. We know that there is a plus or minus like five to 10% error on most food labeling, and so you could be getting an 80 calorie package of pretzels, but it could be actually 100 calories and you just don't know that. So it becomes even more of a guessing game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that doesn't sound like a lot until you extrapolate it to the entire, all of the calories that you would be taking in for a day, right, that amount of air once you get it on the order of two or three or 4,000, which is kind of what we're the scale of what a lot of athletes would count, depending upon how much they were actually taking in that day. That's when that five to 10% or maybe even 30% error starts to kind of like magnify and look like a really just a whole different, just a whole different ballpark.
Speaker 2:At that point, yeah, yeah for sure, and that's why I like to use it as a ballpark of like you don't rely on it as an absolute right. So you, if you know you're getting around this many calories, that's an okay framework to use. But if you think you're getting 2,314 calories, you're not. And so I think, just knowing that, these are like kind of gray areas and you can know, like you can't know absolute amounts, but you can know relatively close to what you're getting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So now that we've got that out of the way, it's complicated I want I kind of want to take the listeners through your experience, right, your experience as a practitioner, because you do this all the time. You have athletes come to you. You're probably going to have a lot of them. Now it's we're recording this on January 9th.
Speaker 2:That's that time of year.
Speaker 1:Is that time of year I had Christmas cookies for breakfast. I'll wholly admit that I woke up at five in the morning, had a couple of Christmas cookies and a cup of coffee before I started this recording, and there's going to be a lot of people in that situation, but there's also a lot of then you combine that you come on this holiday season with what we experience in the ultra running world, where everybody sets up their season in this December, january, maybe even into February type of timeframe, the lotteries have transpired and the combination of both of those two leads a lot of people to say, hey, one of the things I want to do this year is I want to lose weight, lose fat, do go through some body recon or something like that. So it's going to be topical and at the top of mind for a lot of people. And I think if people are going to try to a lot of people listening to this podcast, they're going to go and try to find a nutritionist.
Speaker 1:A lot of people listening to this podcast are going to try to DIY it themselves and, irrespective of where they kind of lie on that spectrum, I want them to kind of experience from an expert's point of view of how they would go through this process if somebody approaches them with those exact same goals I had too many Christmas cookies, or I want to body recomp, or I want to get ready for this race, whatever basket of goals that they actually have what the expert practitioner would actually go through when they are faced with that kind of day in and day out.
Speaker 1:So what's the first thing Like I always kind of go back to it you know this about me, steph like when we go, when we do any of our coaching reviews, what's the first thing that you do when you have an athlete approach you and they have one of these types of goals kind of in front of them, how do you start to unwind what you are eventually going to do from a practical standpoint, starting with the philosophical piece of it that you're going to try to get a fix on first?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think the first thing is trying to understand why do they want to lose weight? You know, is it five to 10 pounds of weight? Because that seems to be like most people seem unsatisfied with their weight and want to lose about five pounds, Regardless of if they need to or if it's healthy or not. So I go back to what's the reason behind this and then trying for me to read between the lines of like is this a healthy goal or is this something that is maybe down the road of disordered eating? And that can be both subjective.
Speaker 2:So just asking a lot of questions, open-ended questions, getting to know them a little bit, and this can be done in. You know, it's not like several sessions, it's like this can be done on a phone call of like understanding someone's background a little bit, and then we can also calculate it so we can get some numbers too, and we can obviously use weight, we can use BMI, but those are really not that accurate in terms of health and if somebody is a candidate for weight loss. So I like to use body composition if possible. That requires that they get some sort of. They go in and get either a DEXA scan or the easiest one is a skin fold, or they use a calipers to calculate out the percent body fat, Just to get an idea of like where is this person?
Speaker 2:And then we can also calculate something called energy availability, and that we can get into that more a little later. But that just tells us is this person eating enough for their activity that they can actually afford to lose weight? Because if you have very low energy availability, even if you feel like you need to lose weight, you have to change your food and your eating habits first. So, as a long way to say, the first thing I do is get to know someone and ask them about their goals and make sure they are a good candidate.
Speaker 1:I mean I kind of boil that down into like three prongs. Right, you're figuring out. First off, why, why, what's their motivation? Is it performance motivated? Is it health and lifestyle motivated? Can they even articulate that?
Speaker 1:And we see a lot of people come into consultations with us that have a hard time articulating why they want to train for an ultramarathon and, I think, articulating why I want to go through a body recomposition process or a fat loss process or whatever that's a, because it's so inevitably more complex that articulation takes a little bit more time to kind of craft. And the second piece of it is scope. Are you talking about a little bit of weight or a lot of weight? I'm just going to kind of put it into those buckets from a gross perspective. And that starts to set and if I'm doing any of your words to service stuff, please stop me but that starts to set the timeframe and maybe even some of the practical tools that you start to use with that athlete. Do we need four weeks, six weeks, do we need two years to actually do this? Not dissimilar to an athlete that comes to us and say, hey, listen, I want to run under 24 hours in Western States and last year I ran 28 hours and it was the best performance of my life. That might be a two or three year process, right, versus, I was right on the cusp and I need to take 5% of my performance kind of like off the table. I need to improve by 5%.
Speaker 1:And the third part of it is just what is their overall background, right? What's their current composition? Right, like we would take in a fitness I'm making the analogies to coaching because that's what I know the best, but that would be analogous to looking at their training right? What training background are they coming from? Are they running 10 hours per week or 80 miles per week? Have they been running for three years or five years? You're taking in some sort of physical background or physical inventory of what they're bringing to the table, all in an effort to set up what you're going to do next. Right, like, all in an effort, what are you practically going to deploy based on the situation that's in front of you?
Speaker 2:Yep, context really matters and every person is different In all three of those goals and so you have to know that baseline. That's why I just want to hit my head on a wall when I see like these, you know, like the bullet points, like five things to do to like lose five pounds or whatever it's like, oh, that's just, that's not how it works.
Speaker 1:Well, gypsy, like okay, if you want to train for a marathon or an ultra marathon, run more Well, it's like no shit, Like to an extent, like it's the same thing. Okay, I had set up this outline and once again me being the naive Neanderthal in the room I had I wanted to start a construction where we talked about a couple of different scenarios that I would imagine you go, that you go through routinely. I don't know if that's the right construction, so you can feel free to like reorient this, but the construction that I came up with is is you have an athlete that kind of wants to optimize their body composition for a performance down the road. We tend to think about that in mainly an elite level context, but that doesn't have to be the case. There's a lot of athletes that have that, that, have that, have their that, have their that, have that as a goal, but they're aiming at something.
Speaker 1:I guess the point that I'm trying to drive through is they're aiming at a particular point in time for a performance perspective, and then we have a group of, and then we have a group of athletes that I guess is more generalized and they want to get into kind of the right body composition, like category, so to speak. Right, they realize that they're not in, for whatever reason. They're not in the category that they want to be in and they want to. You know, get themselves healthier would lose a little bit of weight, lose a little body fat and get them into the kind of the right range. I had initially thought that that might be the right orientation, but I want to, like, leave it up to you, like, what is this? Typical scenarios that you might see, so then we can go how you would actually do it, based on each one of those scenarios.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we can kind of go through it like that, starting with the the first scenario of somebody who has a race, let's say in the spring or summer, and they are a trained athlete, so they have been aware of nutrition, they've been training, they're maybe not overweight but they maybe want to optimize their body composition for to get the best performance that they can. So they're leave no stern. So, with that athlete starting soon, like start right, let's start now. This is great timing. We want to start as far away from the race as possible, because nutrition for performance and nutrition for weight loss are kind of like different ends of the spectrum, and one is actually depriving your body basically of energy and so that you change how your body is basically what it's made of, you're losing fat, you're hopefully gaining a little bit of muscle. And the other one is you're giving your body the fuel it needs to adequately train and to recover and to not be under any extra stress, and so those happen at. They're very different in how you eat and how you train for those. The other reason to do it away from a race is it's helpful to keep training volume a little bit lower when you're working on weight loss. And that's for a couple reasons. One, if you're really focused on food, you want to keep the activity a little bit lower. So you don't want to keep activity high and decrease food, because that kind of throws your metabolism the opposite direction. So it'll be like, oh, something's happening, like I'm like expending all this energy, I'm not getting food intake, and it'll kind of shut it down. We don't want to do that, we want to maintain metabolism. And then the second reason is that actually an increase in exercise or maintaining exercise and decreasing your energy intake can have a rebound effect on appetite hormones, more so in females than males. They have. Females have a more robust response, hormonal response, to a decrease in energy intake, so appetite can actually increase. And we don't want to do that necessarily when we're trying to lose weight. Don't want people walking around being hangry, so we want to keep training volume low. So doing it away from a race is a good idea.
Speaker 2:So with that first athlete we've gone through the initial of like, why do you want to lose weight? Ok, yeah, it seems like maybe we could optimize body composition. I do like to get some sort of numbers if we're talking about small changes. I think that's important because we don't want to go too far and preferably getting some sort of body composition. It's important to have someone. I think skin bold is great because it's cheap and it's easy to do. But to have a trained professional you can't have like your cousin, do it, or your undergraduate who's in a kinesiology program, do it. You want to have someone who has done hundreds of them before so that you know you're getting an accurate measure.
Speaker 1:And most labs will have something like that. Can you expand upon what like a skin fold analysis is, because a lot of people won't be familiar with it, nor how do they kind of go about finding the right lab or the right person to actually get it from?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so skin fold is measuring the thickness of the skin, of the fat in. Let's say there's three, five and seven, seven different areas. A, five or seven is generally used because it's a little more accurate. So what that test does is it takes this thing called a calipers and it'll actually just kind of like hinge the skin and measure the thickness and then each of those goes into an equation. The sites are like the back of the tricep, the iliac crest, the thigh.
Speaker 2:There's kind of like different areas where we have different amounts of fat stored and that goes into an equation and it'll predict your body fat percentage. And it's pretty accurate against a gold standard which is dexa scan. Or hydrostatic wane used to be the gold standard, where you go underwater and measure the water displacement, but it's kind of cumbersome to do because you have to exhale all of your air and then go underwater and fold it. That's kind of uncomfortable to do. So we also do the bod pod, which is air displacement similar idea. And then dexa scan, which is that's measuring the density of your bones, of your fat, of your fat free mass, and so that's the gold standard. So a skin fold can be done, but the technician has to know what they're doing in terms of getting those right skin folds, so that it's actually accurate.
Speaker 1:And what about any of the smart scales that people want to use for the same process? That'll just you stand on it. It uses the electrical impedance that's flowing through your body and then it'll spit out a number. It seems like a very low friction way to get at the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I wish those worked. They're just really highly inaccurate. Sometimes they're reliable in terms of like you can step on it three times and it'll give you the same number, but they're usually not valid, so it's gonna be really off from what you're looking for. An example in college we were playing around with these and I did two in a row and it had like plus 20% differences between.
Speaker 2:And like I mean, if you were just doing it you wouldn't know that that was off. So they're just measuring how fast the current moves through the tissues, because it goes through fat and muscle at different times because of the water content, and they're just not an accurate way to actually assess the amount of fat composition.
Speaker 1:Basically, I've stood on one before with a liter of water and consumed, so I weigh the same right and consume that liter of water, while I was standing on it for five or 10 minutes and watch the numbers move as that process takes place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's unfortunate because they're very common, they're an easy tool to use, but they're not accurate.
Speaker 1:Okay, you've got this kind of I keep calling it an inventory right of things that you're taking in with a particular athlete. At what points will you then kind of reassess those pieces? Right, because you have weight which you can take all the time, you can choose when you actually want to take it. And then you've got this body composition piece. When are you setting the framework to like eventually reevaluate that? And then how are you help setting up the either the goals or the steps to get to the end goal?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. So the first thing is, again, it goes back to the athlete and how they, what their relationship with, is with their body and with food, because that's going to change how many check-ins with numbers we use, because for some people that's not appropriate. But for this example, if we've decided that, yes, some weight loss or some body recomposition is a good idea, then generally they're probably in a place where they're able to talk about it. They're able to talk about food and weight and not have that be triggering. The first thing I do talk about with these athletes is food right, because you're not eating grams. You're not eating calories, necessarily you are, but you're actually eating the food right. You're eating an apple, you're eating a burrito. You're not eating, you know, like the macronutrient distribution that I prescribed for you. So that's an important piece.
Speaker 2:I think that gets overlooked of. Like we just focus on numbers too much and, as we described earlier, if that's a, you know, that can be wildly inaccurate, and so thinking about food itself is the most important thing. So when I start with a person or an athlete, I have them log their food. This is probably the least fun part of it. I have them log for five to seven days. They write down everything that they eat and that's really a cumbersome process. It gives so much good information and from there I analyze what are? What's their average intake, their caloric intake, what are their macronutrients? So how many carbohydrates, fat, protein? Sometimes I look at some of the micronutrients, but primarily we're just looking at the macronutrients, the energy yielding nutrients, and from there we look at what foods are making up that distribution. And because we do care about the numbers, but we do care about where those numbers are coming from as well. So we look at food, we talk about food and then I kind of give them a week or two to try to change some things.
Speaker 2:And then when I check in with someone, usually the first thing I ask is how is your energy? Because that's a really good indicator of where they are on the scale of you know. Are they getting enough? Are they getting enough carbohydrate, enough protein? If their energy is kind of wavering throughout the day, when are you crashing? Is it in the afternoon? That might mean that you need more protein. Are you feeling like really heavy legs when you're out for a run or just really fatigued? That might mean you're low in carbohydrate. So I start with the subjective, like kind of get a gauge on how each person or how they're feeling with some of these changes and then talk about numbers. Okay, so let's see what you're getting and usually from there it's like we'll have a recheck in usually three to four weeks, of like a body composition or a weigh-in, because it takes some time for those changes to actually translate into weight loss or into changes in body composition. They don't happen on the scale of days, they happen on the scale of weeks to months.
Speaker 1:Okay, Okay, hold on, though. Sorry, I don't want to.
Speaker 2:I'm just going.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to bring up the questions that I have because I think that'll be a good surrogate for the listeners. So you go through this initial process log everything, eat five to seven days. You look at it and you're telling them to change something or keep everything the same. If you actually see that, I want to get more detail on that process because that's ultimately what people are trying to DIY it themselves. They're like I know what I eat every day, I can go and log it, but then I don't know what to do with it. It's like they're training, right. I can look at all my stuff in Strava, but I don't know how to manipulate it to make myself a better athlete. So what are some of the things that you go through initially when you're looking at that food log, based on this athlete who's got a performance goal right, that are kind of that kind of come top of mind or some of the more frequent themes, and then how are you determining what they actually change or manipulate for this first part of the process?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. So I calculate out their energy needs based on their demographics, based on their goals, based on a lot of different things about this person, to get an idea of how many calories do they need. Because if you put it into my fitness pal or you Google it, it's going to be again really inaccurate. The 2,000 calories per day, that's just a generic number, right. So people are going to need different amounts and we can kind of decipher how much they need based on their individual characteristics. That's not something that's easy to calculate on your own. You could use the Harris Benedict equation, which we could link to, and that gives kind of a better idea, but it's again there's so many factors that go into it. So that's an important piece to calculate out and to maybe work with a dietitian or a sports nutritionist to actually find out what are your needs.
Speaker 2:And we know the overall calorie amount. Then we can break it into how many carbohydrates, how many grams of protein and how much fat do you need? And that breakdown is kind of determined by the goal. So we know generally how much of each you need to be healthy or for an endurance athlete, how much you need to train and recover. But when you're talking about weight loss, those numbers shift a little bit because you want to make sure that you're maintaining lean muscle mass, so again getting enough protein and then also still keeping enough carbohydrate in there, but dialing it down enough that you're actually able to accomplish weight loss.
Speaker 2:That's probably the biggest change is the shift up in protein and the shift down in carbohydrates. So we're talking about like 25 to 30% of total calories coming from protein and about 40 to 50 probably closer to 40 coming from carbohydrate, and then the rest is going to be like 20 to 30% from fat. And that's different from an endurance athlete where we're going to say 50 to 65% is going to be carbohydrate, 10 to 20 protein and then fat is usually around 20%. So really dialing up those protein needs and that is for someone who's used to eating for performance that is a pretty big change. But that's something you can calculate on your own. If you use my Fitness Pal, you can track your intake pretty well and then it will break down for you your carbohydrates, protein and fat. So that's an important piece as well, if knowing not just your overall energy but what are the different components.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you this we went over earlier just how difficult it is in a research setting to get an accurate calorie count and macronutrient composition for even people who do it for a living. So when you're looking at this and making suggestions, hey, we're going to titrate this up or titrate this down how do you calibrate that for the athlete, knowing that at the end of the day, you don't know if you're really getting 20 grams of protein or 18 grams of protein, or 1,000 calories out of this or 1,800 calories out of that? How do you start to manage that with the athlete?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's why we take the average to get more of a global idea of what's their intake. And then we don't just say exactly 2,500. This is the shoot for this or around this amount For me.
Speaker 2:I know it's probably going to be a little bit up or down from what they actually wrote in there, so we just try to use the trend. Let's say you're getting I'm just going to make up numbers let's say you're getting 350 grams of carbohydrate, so we know that needs to be a little bit less. So on your next log I'm going to look for something like 275 or 300. And we know those absolute numbers might not be exactly correct because there's error in logging, but we know that they're trending different, so it's lower. But that's also why I talk about food and food quantity and what are you eating and getting to know the person you're working with, because there are people who tend to overestimate, people who tend to underestimate, and if you can read between the lines and you know who you're working with, you can usually kind of use that. You don't even have to tell them like, oh, I know you're an underreporter, you can just use that information to help you give them better recommendations Do you ever have people who actually weigh everything out?
Speaker 1:Because there's like a group. I mean, I know people who do this right, they weigh apps, they have a scale in their kitchen, they make all of their own or most of their own food, the best majority of their own food, in order to get an accurate representation of everything. They just put everything in that scale before it goes in the pot or in the skillet or anything like that. Is that something that you help athletes through as well, and where might that be appropriate versus inappropriate or impractical? That's what I always think is just impractical to do that.
Speaker 2:I have people that do that. It's very time consuming. It kind of is like a part-time job of measuring out every single thing you're going to put in your body and then writing it down. So I do work with people who like that precision. I don't think it's necessary, nor do I think it's a healthy focus, because you don't want to have that be your reliance for indefinitely.
Speaker 2:If you need to figure it out, if you're having trouble with learning portion sizes or have no idea about food, then starting like that and getting an idea of like oh, this is what 100 grams of oatmeal looks like, that's a great way to start. But to not be reliant on it because that limits not just like the physiological part, but like the social part, the psychological part, and that's an important part of eating too. You want to be able to go out and have pizza with your friends or to not have to bring your food scale with you if you're traveling. And I go back to the original point that even using that, there is some room for error. So if you're treating it so precise like that, you're not actually that's not actually how it's happening in your body. So I caution people against using like really, really precise and detailed measurements, because food and energy expenditure is so much more dynamic than that.
Speaker 1:Right, you can be precise on the weighing piece of it, but that's a far cry from Because that's essentially what you're doing with a scale. You're weighing something. You can be very precise on that, but that's a far cry from being precise across the entirety of the process, which includes all these different inflection points of which metabolism in your body can have an influence on. That you can't measure.
Speaker 2:Right, right. And, like I said, sometimes it's a great tool to use for the first week or even if you don't have a scale, just using the same bowl to measure things out to get an idea of how much you're actually eating.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you've gone through this initial process five to seven day log. They go through some changes that you have instructed them to take for about four to six weeks and then they have a check-in Right, we can make this analogous and I'm going to use my training analogies again to a field tester or a race, or if you start to scrutinize the workouts. To a great extent, a lot of people will do this. I know I always run this hill at 23 minutes or whatever, and I'm going to go try to run it faster than that. You have this check-in At that point. What are you taking into consideration and what are you doing with that check-in process and what follows it from a prescription standpoint?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we hope to see some changes, hopefully in body composition, and not big changes though, because that usually with nutrition and body composition they're slow, slow changes and that means they're sustainable. So, yeah, you could lose weight in a week, but it's gonna come back on because that's not a sustainable way to do it. And so, yeah, we look for some changes, but also being very aware of like how do you feel? Are you able to complete your training? Are you getting through your days or do you feel like a human, like that's all important context too and then from there reevaluate the goals of like okay, this is working, we see some changes. We're gonna have to re-change how you're eating now, because your body adjusts to that amount, right. So if you dial it down to like 300 calories less, you might have to dial it down a bit more, maybe bump up protein even a little bit more, to then get over the next hurdle, because it's not like a linear relationship where you just will keep declining, right, you have to change things up. So the check-ins four to six weeks, that's a good kind of timeframe, but it's also helpful to have like weekly. So if you are working with a dietitian, the weekly just check in of like hey, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Because nutrition changes, as I mentioned earlier, they're a lifestyle change. There's so many decisions you need to make every single day. It's not like training, where you just complete the training, right, you check the box, like I did it today. I did my hour run. It's like you actually have to think about your breakfast and you have to make your breakfast and eat it. And then, oh, maybe you're hungry at 10 am and like have a snack. So it's like all of these things. So getting the benchmark measurements numbers four to six weeks, I think, is a really good timeframe and then kind of going from there of like, okay, set some new goals, work on those new goals and then have another check-in.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that the progress is not linear, but that doesn't actually describe what it typically looks like. Is it really? Is it stochastic, like, in terms of it, you know the start point, you know the end point and then it kind of has this wavy line in between. Or does it follow a like a prototypical pattern, because we kind of like run into this in fitness and people run into this in nutrition all the time where they want to extrapolate whatever happens in the first part of the timeframe for the rest of the timeframe? I improved by 2% in the first four weeks, so 12 weeks from now I'm going to improve by 6%.
Speaker 1:I did the math on that correct, right, 2%, 4%, 6%, right. Okay, there we go. I got that easy math correct. But so how does it? I mean, how does it actually happen? How do you like counsel people through that? Because you know you mentioned it's not linear, but what should like? Should they expect more in the beginning, more in the end from a performance perspective? How are you actually trying to like taper that in and take that into consideration?
Speaker 2:Yeah, oftentimes it's more at the beginning, and at the beginning meaning after two weeks, we usually don't see changes in the first couple of weeks, just because the body is trying to maintain homeostasis. So after that initial, we get past that initial block. Yeah, it's usually fairly quick and that can be really exciting. But then it'll sometimes plateau, it can even go back up. That's and that again depends on a lot of different factors.
Speaker 2:With females, with the menstrual cycle, if you're eating more fiber, if you, you know, have more water retention, there's a lot of different reasons. So we can see it kind of go up and down, oscillate a little bit, and then it can start to decline, but it's usually at a shallower rate than that initial starting period. So that's a really challenging time because the initial, like I guess, novelty of the weight loss and feeling seeing that progress has worn off. And then you're also, like you know, I've been doing this for so long. So it's like a hard thing to keep going. And that's where, again, it's good to have just some touch points of like you know you have a check-in coming up or you have a call coming up, just for that accountability, because it can continue to go down, but it's probably going to oscillate a little bit and it's not going to be as quick as the initial weight loss.
Speaker 1:Okay, we've been on this scenario just to reorient the listeners and to reorient myself where it's the performance part of the equation is a high priority, right? I want to get my body composition into a high performance scenario based on I'm starting here, I'm going to go there and then, once that peak has occurred, most likely that high performance scenario has kind of like gone away. But there's another category that we mentioned earlier that people just want more of what I'm going to call a general recomposition. They just realize that they need to lose body fat, lose weight and or recomposition and just get them into what they would consider like I'm more I'm going to use kind of a callous term for this, but I don't know how else to describe it a more acceptable range, right? However, they're determining that a more acceptable body composition for them. So it's almost like a phase shift, right? I want to do some work and I want to get here and I want to have that be my new body composition for forever. I don't need to optimize it. That's the word I was really trying to look for.
Speaker 1:What makes, or does anything make, that situation different from how you would approach it based on what we just went through, where you're doing these four to six weeks check-ins, you're doing an inventory and there's this like sorts, you know, kind of like not linear progression part of it. Does any of it change when that is the case? And this and the reason I bring this up now just to just to reframe it, even just to reframe it again is we are coming off the Christmas season, the holiday season, where people go through just to. There's a lot of people that are going to go through a period of weight gain just because of everything that kind of goes around to it, and I imagine there's a lot of people that are in that situation that are just like I need to take January, february, march and just get myself reset, get into a different body comp and then just let the rest of the year take care of, take care of itself. So what would you do differently or how would you set it up based on that being a goal?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so some of the training and the weight loss can happen concurrently with that scenario, because just the fact of starting to train a little bit more like not that they weren't training over the holidays, but maybe a little more focused and then just bringing some just acknowledgement to the diet itself to actually eating better, that can actually help them to lose weight just by doing things, just by eating a little bit better and training a little bit more.
Speaker 2:So we don't have to worry about really reducing caloric intake and keeping training volume lower. They're just going to actually lose weight because they are being more active and they're actually eating a little bit better. And usually, with that population that you just described, there is room for improvement with diet. So we're not talking about like one to 2% changes. We're talking like okay, so let's have you eat breakfast and then Christmas cookies aren't going to be your lunch or there's a lot of low hanging fruit that can cause some big changes. And so in that group I think it's a little bit easier to do it over the, let's say, 2 to 3 months without really changing, being so meticulous about day to day, of like getting you know your macronutrients set perfectly. It's just like let's eat a little bit better. Think about what you're eating, and then usually some of that weight loss is going to happen, naturally.
Speaker 1:I mean okay. So I think that's kind of a little bit of a stark difference, because in the first scenario and the high performance scenario it just seems like you're being more meticulous about the macronutrient composition and altering components of that in order to make sure that the training can kind of continue at a really high level, essentially because they're training really hard. Even if they're in a period of lower training, they're still training hard. But in the second scenario you mentioned the term low hanging fruit. I mean, you're literally like picking things out of the inventory that they're giving you, out of the out of the nutrition recall that they're giving you, and say let's just alter these few things and let that run its course. Am I encapsulating that correctly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for the most part and mostly because with the high performance athlete, they have such small margins to really make a difference. So those small changes in the macronutrient composition are all we can really tweak right. We can't really just say like, just focus on eating a little bit better, because that's not going to do a lot, because they probably are already eating pretty well, whereas in the second scenario, just bringing some attention to what they're eating can help them to eat better. And I do care about the macronutrient composition, but not as much where we need to be so meticulous about it. We'll talk about like, yeah, make sure you're getting high quality protein, make sure you're getting some vegetables, but not to the point of like, okay, we need to make sure you're getting 70 grams of carbohydrate here or 30 grams of protein here.
Speaker 2:Because if we go to the training analogy, it's like somebody who comes to you and hasn't been running and they want to run a 10K. It's like, okay, well, let's start with getting you running right. We could have them do like a really specific training program, but just running every single day is going to kind of get them closer to that goal and then, as they get more fit, they have a base, then we'll add in the specific intervals or the long runs, whereas the highly trained athlete they're already doing a lot of that. So we're just kind of like dialing things up and down, because they already have maximized a lot of it.
Speaker 1:You mentioned when you're talking about the high performance athletes, one of the things that you focused on a lot is how do you feel how your workouts going? Do you have a lot of energy? Can you complete your workouts to the same extent that you used to before we made this change? Does that change or does that strategy change at all? In the second scenario, do you put as much emphasis on did you do your intervals? How do you feel you know during your during your run, that subjective component to it? Does that lens change a little bit in that second scenario?
Speaker 2:a little bit because they are going to feel generally, and more so with hunger and appetite, because they may actually have some changes in that they may feel a little bit hungry because we are trying to change over their eating habits and that there is going to be a response to that. But I always do care about how someone's energy is, especially day to day, because we care about performance but we care about health and being a person who is able to function, first and foremost. I think. So yeah, if you dial down your intake but you're just barely getting through the days, that's not sustainable.
Speaker 1:It's also an enjoyment piece of it, right? If you want to talk about sustainability and you want to talk about making changes that last for years, not just weeks, they have to. Actually, we certainly can't resent the process, right? You have to remove the negative part of it, and if they're constantly feeling poor or out of whatever, then you're typically setting yourself up for a short-term adaptation. That is normally reversed at the end of whatever intervention that you're doing and it just kind of goes against that sustainability concept.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, eating is more than just physiological right, it's a very social thing and we get a lot of enjoyment out of it. And that's why diets that cut out a certain food group or really limit what you can take in aren't sustainable for the long run. And we didn't even go into diets here. But sometimes those work because they just restrict the amount of food you're able to eat. So on a, let's say, low carbohydrate diet, there's just so few foods that you can eat, or on a low FODMAP diet, there's just a lot less available. So some weight loss is going to happen, but it's usually not sustainable to eat like that forever. And so, yeah, then it's gonna reverse and usually rebound, and it usually rebounds a little bit higher than where you started from. So it's not a good cycle to be in.
Speaker 2:So anytime I see like your diet is the foods you choose to eat. There's no perfect diet that's gonna optimize your body composition. A lot of different foods can compromise or can make a, I guess, a healthy body composition, good foods for performance and also for weight loss. And there's no like eat these five foods and don't eat these foods and then you're gonna be perfect. And I think we look for that sometimes because it's an easy way to conceptualize it of like I just need to follow XYZ. It's very easy, but it's much more complex than that. In a good way, food should be fun.
Speaker 1:There you go. I appreciate that. There's that landmark study that was it's probably over a decade old right now where they longitudinally tracked that thousands of people that were on various diets and the ones that were able to sustain those diets for the longest period of time ended up having the best outcomes. So it didn't matter what the diet was Mediterranean diet, a vegan diet, vegetarian diet, whatever If they identified with it and they stuck with it for a long periods of time, focusing on the sustainability aspect of it, those were the ones that produced the best health outcomes over long periods of time.
Speaker 1:We say the same thing about training You're more consistent over long periods of time, over years. It's gonna produce the same outcomes. It's the same thing here. So well, you might get the one trick pony of I'm gonna cut out Christmas cookies. We're gonna pick on Christmas cookies. Since it's past Christmas, I'm gonna cut out Christmas cookies. Or cut out this one food group, which is really typical. Well, you might get that one trick pony in that initial part of the weight loss. What most people fail to realize is that might not be sustainable for them in the long term. Once you've brought in, that lens out to years, not just the initial several weeks where they're the effect of eliminating that one food group or food type or whatever is actually having an impact on them 100%.
Speaker 1:I wanna kind of turn the tables a little bit and talk about some of the common pitfalls that you see. Could you've run through this process with any number of different athletes and I imagine there are a few categories of things that typically, like trip people up. We've talked about the big ones. Right, make sure that you have like, sustained like, make sure that you know the diet that you choose of the things that you're choosing to eat are sustainable for you to walk in the long run and things like that.
Speaker 1:But when you're running through this and when athletes have you know specific goals that they wanna get to and you're evaluating this as the practitioner on the other end of the spreadsheet or on the other end of the consultation, what are some of the common themes that like trip people up to where they're either getting like a false positive or a false negative? Right, they're either get. They either think that they're making progress and they're really not, or they are making progress and it might not appear that they're actually making that progress. Can we give the listeners some like pieces of advice to help navigate that, since it is so inherently? Since it is so inherently complex?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the biggest ones, especially with, let's say, athletes who know a bit about nutrition and who are, you know, reading about it, maybe being marketed to, they often will fall into the camp that they think if they eat all of these super foods, or if they eat all of these foods that are super nutrient dense, they're gonna be healthy and that's gonna be the best way to eat. And that can be a big pitfall, because that isn't necessarily true. Eating whole wheat flour over white flour isn't gonna be healthier. Shoving a bunch of things into like an oatmeal bowl of, like chia seeds and flax seeds and beetroot powder and like you know, all the whatever, whatever Instagram is telling you is the super food or supplement of the moment, Like all of those things aren't inherently bad.
Speaker 2:But putting them all together doesn't mean it's gonna be a better meal for you. It doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna help you to change your body composition. It might actually mean it's gonna overwhelm your gut with fiber and you're gonna have more GI issues and then kind of like, hmm, why am I having GI issues? Maybe I need to eat more of these things. So that's a common one. I see a lot of just thinking that you have to eat really clean foods, like almost orthorexic of, like eating foods that we deem are healthy and not eating anything that's, you know, an unhealthy source. I'm using air quotes unhealthy because I think most foods can fit into a healthy way of eating. So that's one I think can really derail progress when it's too focused on making sure there's like these very restrictive foods or only eating foods that are have some sort of health benefit associated with them.
Speaker 1:I also feel that that takes the eye off the ball, because when you're focused on I need to get you know this type of supplement and or these types of micro, micro nutrients, or I need my greens powder, or whatever it is, you're taking the eye off the ball of the things that are more, that are more important, which typically are calories and micro nutrient composition, like in hydration, like I went through this with with a friend of mine the other day where we were talking about some of the green powders and things like that that are getting more popular. A lot of the benefit that people see with that is you're just drinking water at the first part of the day. You're waking up and instead, and instead of having coffee, which is what I did this morning I woke up and I had coffee and Christmas cookies You're substituting it with with, with with primarily water that has something else in it. If you were to wake up and just have water, it would have almost entirely the same effect, if not entirely the same effect, and that once again to your point.
Speaker 1:It's not inherently bad to do that, unless it's having some sort of downstream effect in any number of different ways. It's taking your eye off the ball. You're too over focused on it. All of these other things that can, that can kind of impact it, and so when I look at it, I look at it as a focus thing, like if you really wanted to have the impact. Instead of making sure that you had this supplement or whatever it is just hydrates yourself better at the beginning of the day and then realize that that's the effect that you're going to get.
Speaker 2:Right and save some money along the way.
Speaker 1:No, they're going to save some money along the way. Okay, we'll stop, we'll still pick it on the supplement companies. Let's get into some. Let's get in an area that I want to get your opinion on and how it might trip people up, and that's the mental cycle with with with female athletes. So if you're going through this process of monitoring their body composition and perhaps monitoring their weight along that process, how might that trip some athletes up in terms of what they're either seeing with any of those numbers or how they're actually viewing their progress?
Speaker 2:Yeah, with how the menstrual cycle will change that specifically. Yeah, so we know that fluctuations in hormones can change body weight. Basically, throughout the month there's different fluctuations, and so you may not change anything actual fat or body composition but you may. Your body may have more water retention and that could look like you're not making progress or you're going the opposite direction, when in fact it is just a byproduct of changes in hormones. Maybe you're ovulating or maybe you're on your period and that does change. That's a very cyclical change for females and also why we don't track weight day to day right, because there are so many fluctuations. We look more at trends, because within the month it's gonna fluctuate, and so that's one end of the spectrum. The other end is when maybe this is more in like when you're very, you're tweaking your energy and take on a very small scale.
Speaker 2:We need to make sure that there is enough energy availability so that females don't lose the menstrual cycle, and that's really tricky because everybody has a different point at which their body is gonna function physiologically and we can estimate where that's gonna fall based on a few numbers, mainly body fat percentage and, even better, energy availability, which includes body fat percentage, fat free mass energy intake and the exercise energy output.
Speaker 2:So all of those factors go in and we can come up with a constant of how much extra energy is left over. But even that is just an estimate. So I think it is important, when you are trying to change body composition, to track your menstrual cycle, to track how you feel over the month that's just good, anyways to know how the different hormones are gonna affect you, both appetite, energy-wise and training-wise, but then also to make sure that you actually are still having a cycle. I think that's something that we overlook sometimes, and that's not just in the elite athlete, that's in any person, because if you're changing your intake to quite a bit, that can impact your menstrual cycle. And even if you are carrying more weight than you'd like and maybe you are still in the healthy range based on what numbers say, that doesn't mean that you're healthy if you're not having a cycle.
Speaker 1:What so if you have an athlete that let's just say they have a regular menstrual cycle, coming into the process, right, you start to introduce an energy deficit. Are there any red flags that they can look for to whether that energy deficit might be too much or be causing too many downstream effects in terms of how their menstrual cycle gets affected from the time that they start the energy deficit to their next cycle? Meaning, is it longer, is it shorter, is it? Do you feel differently during it? Are there any things that they can take kind of like cues from to tell them that whatever they did during that intervention period, from you know they started an energy deficit or they did some sort of macronutrient recomposition or whatever to where they should look at that and say I need to do this a little bit differently. It's not sustainable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, any changes in the number of days between cycles. Sometimes they lengthen, that's the most common, but sometimes they actually shorten. So any big changes like that could be a sign like that's a yellow flag. Let's see what happens next month. If I think a good rule of thumb is three months. If there's changes for three months or an absence of menstrual cycle for three months, that to me is a red flag of like okay, we've gone too far, or maybe it's not enough carbohydrate or something along those lines. It's like that push that was too much of a stress in your body. Not that you can't handle it, I think that's like. It's not like you're not tough enough, it's just that was too much for your body to function in a healthy way. So let's dial it back a little bit. So that's something that I'm definitely aware of and why it's important to have those conversations with athletes from, like, a training perspective and from a nutrition perspective.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you mentioned that. You can probably handle it piece, because even we're talking specifically about female physiology and that's absolutely true. You can handle not having quote handle. For those of you that are not watching, the YouTube version is an air quotes there. You can handle that. You will survive. If you lose your period for three months or even a year, you'll survive. You might not survive very well or you might have impaired function or it might have downstream effects, but don't look at that as something that you should necessarily just kind of grunt through.
Speaker 1:The same thing is true when we're talking about energy deficits as a whole. You can absolutely have massive energy deficits and lose tons of weights for tons of weight for three months, four months, even six months. I mean, everybody remembers the biggest loser, which is a really popular TV show about a decade ago where they had these contestants lose hundreds, a few hundreds worth of pounds over the course of a few months and people liked that because the transformation was so radical. Very few of those people ended up sustaining that weight loss. In fact, most of them put there's a lot of articles and research that's been done on this since then end up putting on that weight and then some afterwards because that thing that you could tolerate, that you could sustain for that short period of time was not sustainable over long periods of time.
Speaker 1:So I'm glad you brought that aspect up, because it's true across the entirety of what we're just talking about and, if anything, I hope the listeners can kind of peel apart some of the framework that Stephanie mentioned. Everything that she went through is through this lens of sustainability. It's not just what you can do while she's working with an athlete for six or 12 or 18 months, which I can imagine is probably a typical timeframe that you're working with an athlete. It's something that they have, kind of a working framework that they can take away, that they can deploy for years, if not a lifetime.
Speaker 2:Right, right, absolutely yeah. And like you said, I mean we care about, like their health, their overall health too, not just their performance. And it goes back to the original question of why do you want to lose this weight? Because that is the key question. Because not everybody. But if you talk to most people, they are dissatisfied with their body, for whatever reason, and they want to lose weight. But that doesn't always mean it's appropriate or a good idea.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I'm gonna take a little bit of a shred of that and use it as the kind of the final part of this dialogue. Are there any situations or any part of the process of you working with an athlete where you're intentionally saying the opposite might actually be true. We want you to come into this period of time heavier or with a different body composition, where you're carrying around a little bit more body fat because you have a goal downstream that's gonna require X. When is that part of the equation? As you were just talking about, you have an athlete that, hey, I wanna have an optimized body composition for XYZ type of competition. When does it enter in the equation where you actually want to increase their body mass or increase their body fat or even increase their muscular mass right, the amount of muscle mass that they have throughout a period of time? When does that situation actually come up?
Speaker 2:So any time that you're gonna put your body through a really stressful event and that can be a training intervention, so like a training camp, an altitude camp, that's gonna be something that puts your body a lot of stress.
Speaker 2:Or let's say, like a project that's gonna require multiple days of running or hiking or moving your body, Even like some of the longer, like 200 mile plus races, like that's a pretty stressful event on your body and going into those under fueled or underweight is gonna really set your body, set you up for a poor performance or a poor outcome after the event of just too much stress in your body.
Speaker 2:So I think, particularly in order of importance, like if you were gonna go into a training camp to really try to get an adaptation, you wanna go into it in a good place. You're able to handle that extra stress. So I think of altitude a lot because that's typically something that we see, like you know, marathon and shorter runners doing of, like you know, going to altitude to put all that stress on the body to get the training adaptation. But you have to make sure that your body can handle that stress because if it doesn't, it's just gonna kind of eat away, if you will at what you have and you're not gonna get the whole benefit of it to start with. And I think the same thing for these longer ultras you don't wanna go into them under fueled or underweight because they are such a stress and strain on the body.
Speaker 1:Well, and that's the typical juxtaposition that most people are in is they're trying to optimize for a particular competition. But because the competition is so stressful, especially in an ultra and I would say this, even in a 100-miler, going into it, going into it with a little bit underweight and in an energy deficit, although your body weight might be lighter, is probably going to produce a worse performance than going into it a little bit overweight with an energy surplus. Because you have, because your body is just in a better position to perform and weight is not such a huge consideration as it is in other types of running events. Because we have to realize that a lot of the you mentioned this at the very beginning of the podcast a lot of the misconceptions about how weight impacts performance and what I mean by that is, a heavier weight negatively impacts performance and endurance events comes from this legacy of analyzing the 5,000 meters, the 10,000 meters, the marathon and how that impacts running economy and all these physiological variables that we can very tightly correlate with performance. Those things start to break down even more than they do in the marathon type of distance once you, kind of like, move up to ultra marathon.
Speaker 1:What that means from a practical standpoint is, while we might say, oh well, if somebody's one kilo less going into a marathon, that impacts the running economy by this and then therefore they can run faster, those correlations start to break down pretty wildly as you go up in duration and so the penalty that you might pay for going into something a little bit quote unquote overweight is really so negligible because the performance is so more multifactorial in an ultra marathon situation that you're better off hedging on the side of having better energy availability and just having better you know all like overall physiological capacity than trying to optimize for body weight.
Speaker 1:There's this book and Matt wouldn't mind me mentioning this because I like Matt a lot that Matt Fitzgerald wrote. He wrote a book several years ago called Racing Weight and the whole, the whole, and there's tons of dialogue that we can have about that. But the whole orientation was optimizing your body composition, your body weight, for a particular race and how you can actually get to that. That strategy of doing that in an ultra marathon situation is really hard to, is probably inappropriate for the duration because the quote unquote racing weight does not have as big of an impact on the performance side of things.
Speaker 2:Right, right, you nailed it. That's exactly how I think about it too. And instead of focusing on the weight itself, I think focusing on, like, what you're eating and maybe even staying away from the scale as it gets closer to a race because there isn't a race weight in ultra running I think if you're well fueled, you have the energy to train well and to recover well. That's a good sign that your body is in balance and you can almost use that and keep the scale away, because I think that can give a lot of anxiety for some people of like, oh, I'm two pounds heavier than I was last year at this time for this race, just like, let that go and think about how you feel and make sure that you're eating right, and those are two things that you have control over that can really impact your performance in a positive way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. All right, Steph, is there anything you wanna leave the listeners with before we break here and you get to go take your son to school?
Speaker 2:I think you know we kind of talked about like the being careful with weight loss, but there is a healthy way to do it. You can definitely do it if it is a goal. Just be mindful of the timing, of doing it away from a race and working with somebody, or doing it in a way where you know it's gonna be a long-term project. It's not gonna be something that happens overnight and it should be slow progress for it to be sustainable.
Speaker 1:That is a brilliant way to leave it. You can always focus on the long game. You're never gonna go wrong when you have long time frames to work with Steph. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I know this is top of mind for a lot of athletes right now and I imagine come January of 2025, I'm getting my years right now, 2025, we'll probably revisit the exact same thing because it's gonna go over and over and over and over.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Steph for coming on the podcast today and taking us through her framework on how she works with athletes that are in a similar situation to a lot of you out there that are looking to lose a few pounds, either from the onset of the season or throughout the course of the season. I've always appreciated her insight and her guidance and her counsel in this area. If you would like to bring Stephanie on in this capacity, I have a link in the show notes for how you can actually get in touch with her because, let's face it, you can DIY this stuff yourself, but it's not the easiest thing to do, and a lot of the things that we mentioned during this podcast, I think, illuminate that quite well. With a similar tact.
Speaker 1:Those of you that are paying attention, you probably noticed that I have been featuring a lot of our coaches in my most recent podcasts, and that is very deliberate. I'm not gonna lie to you guys. I know that a lot of you are thinking about bringing on a coach to help you with this process of training for ultras for 2024 and beyond, and we would love to bring you on as a CTS athlete. So if that is something that you are considering, hit me up on social media or you can visit the link in the show notes which is trainrightcom for slash ultra writing and you can learn all about the various coaching options that are there, as well as the coaches that are available for you and that might suit your needs the best.
Speaker 1:We are always happy to take athletes through the process by matching them up with one of our coaches for an initial interview, because, let's face it, coaching goes beyond knowing the demands of an event or even having raced that event themselves. You need to be able to have the right personality match with the coach and they need to have the right skill set that is going to be required to work with you as an athlete. And we try to line all those things up with an initial free coaching consultation that you can take advantage of right here, right now. I can either set you up with that or just go directly to trainrightcom and we can have our athlete services team set you up with a coach that is going to be absolutely perfect for you. That is it for today, folks, and, as always, we will see you out on the trails. Thank you.