Most of my athletic life – certainly since I picked up the
art of triathlon – I have had gut issues, mainly on the run part of a
triathlon. It’s so frustrating after putting
in so much time and effort training our body to race long and fast, only to get
to race day and have your tummy troubles hold you back. You know you can run faster. Your legs don’t hurt. Your joints don’t hurt. Your heart and lungs don’t hurt, but you’re afraid you just might…..you
know…..not make it to the next port-a-potty.
One of the things with becoming a fat-adapted athlete is
“you notice what you don’t notice”. It’s
hard to explain, and you just can’t really understand it until you are there,
but I never realized how much better I could feel on a day-to-day basis, let
alone have stellar workouts and feel great after, with very little
fatigue. Yes, my tummy troubles went
away, but I also gained so much more.
I’ve had a pretty healthy diet all my life – as far as
mainstream society would think. Not a
lot of junk, lots of home cooked meals, lots of salads, maybe a bit too much
candy. Every new approach I used to
overcome my tummy troubles, I couldn’t get concrete results. I tried no gluten, no caffeine, low carb,
nothing was tried and true.
Then a year ago, my DH found a triathlon website that had
him intrigued. It was a diet based on
the idea that our bodies have a TON of fat that we can use for fuel, but we need
to teach our body to use it. With the
standard recommended diet, our bodies can’t access that fat because we’ve lost
the ability to process fat efficiently.
We simply don’t feed it enough fat, and feed it too much processed stuff
– aka refined carbs/sugar.
I’m not a nutritionist, and there are a ton of resources
that are much better at describing this than me – I’ve included many of my favs
in links below – but here’s my quick stab at describing our diet. You’ve heard this before – Even the skinniest
athlete has enough fat on them to run a marathon – but why can’t we USE that
fat for fuel??? Our bodies have 2,000 calories at
most in carbs (glycogen stores) available to use as fuel. But we have almost unlimited fat stores. When I was training for my first Ironman, I
definitely upped the fat intake realizing that my body would use what I gave it
for fuel. Eating more fat helped my body learn how to use fat as fuel. We now
take that to a whole new level.
A ketogenic diet is a high fat diet. 75% fat, 20% proten, 5% carbs. Because I am in the midst of training for an
Ironman, I include more carbs into my diet – strategically. Strategically being the key word here. Think of your body as a fuel tanker. You have fuel in the cab to keep the truck
running and a WHOLE LOT of fuel in the tankers you are pulling. If you follow the standard American diet, you
can end up on the side of the road with no fuel left to drive the truck – but
you have this enormous amount of fuel in the tankers you are pulling that you
have no access to. When you are fat adapted
you can tap into that extra fuel and not end up sidelined in the middle of the
race.
I often miss meals. I
race in a fasted state for all workouts that are less than 90 minutes. I use strategic carbs for longer
workouts. I put butter and heavy cream in my coffee
(seriously, it’s freaking delicious). I
don’t get hungry. I don’t crash during
workouts. And the best part is, I have
yet to get tummy troubles during any of my runs, short, long, easy, hard.
Here are some links to some good resources. If you look to the very first Friday Fat
Black episodes, (#1, #3) they have some good basic explanation of the #JERF
Just Eat Real Food Movement and the benefits of being a fat-adapted athlete.
The Natural Nutritionist http://www.thenaturalnutritionist.com.au
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