Barbell Shrugged - Episode 29 - Why Paleo Isn't Always the Best for CrossFit Performance and What to Do About It

Episode Date: October 10, 2012

Why Paleo Isn't Always the Best for CrossFit Performance and What to Do About It

This week on Barbell Shrug, we're going to talk about performance nutrition, whether you're a CrossFit elite athlete. We're going to talk about performance nutrition, whether you're an elite athlete or a regular Joe, we're going to show you exactly what to eat and why. What's up guys, it's CTP and you're listening to Barbell Shrug. Make sure you check out our video versions of all these podcasts on our website, fitter.tv. And all of our video versions, we include TechniqueWOD, which is our series of technique instruction videos for CrossFitters, free previews of some of the seminars we put out, and then sometimes come out of the studio and have special video segments such as cooking in the kitchen with Brandy that one time

and out in the pool with Lucas, and who knows what the next thing will do. So make sure you check out our website, fitter.tv, and watch the videos as well. Inside of the kennel. The door? I don't know how she did it. It's bent. She must have just yanked the shit out of it.

She panicked, huh? Oh, yeah. She had diarrhea. She did not want to be in the cage when it hit. Yeah. And then she left it upstairs. So she's had diarrhea lately. I don't know what's going on.

Don't put that on Barbell's rug. You have dogs too? I do. We have a paleo dog now, man. Oh, yeah? Yeah, we put our dog on paleo about six months ago. It's changed her life. I'm not even kidding.

Are you using a paleo type dog food or you feeding the dog meat? Feeding it meat. Okay. Yeah. Well, how's that benefited your dog? What's it, what changes happen? Jeez. Well, for one, she dropped down to what her regular weight should be.

She's rarely hungry. Her mood is better. She doesn't limp, you know, loss of pain in the joints. It's all the stuff you would expect from getting a dog off of freaking nasty dog food. Right. I mean, once you do it, it's like, well, crap, that was obvious. Expense-wise, is it a lot more expensive or how's that even out for you? It's hard to say because a lot of it, what we started was we had a freezer full of pork fat

that we thought we were going to use with the deer I was going to kill last year to make pork fat, to make deer sausage. The distinct absence of deer in my fridge has kind of stopped that. But so when we realized Chloe, Chloe had a real bad UTI. So we just decided it was time to give her better food. So we started her out on liver and pork fat and it was pork liver that we didn't want to eat it, but we had a lot of it. Cause, uh, my, cause Janet's parents killed a cat, killed a pig and it went from there. So the expense so far has been almost zero. And what I really want to do is get enough deer this year that I feed her deer all year.

That's brilliant. You know, I've been trying to think, yeah, I try to, I buy my dogs expensive, like Evo, the ancestral blend dog food. Right.

I think I'm doing them a favor, which I probably am to a degree, but just go kill some deer this winter. You're set. You could do that. And you could also, uh, you could also look at pork.

I mean, a beef liver at the grocery store. I mean, obviously, grocery store liver is not premier quality, but relatively low cost because nobody eats liver anymore. So you'd look at pricing that out. And the stunning thing is, A, how little they need when you're feeding them real food. Yeah. It's very small portions. stunning thing is a how little they need when you're feeding them real food yeah it's it's very small portions and then the other thing that will stun you is what comes out on the back end it's like they've it's like the volume of feces is just minuscule really yeah like they're all

sudden getting all their nutrients and their hunger just kind of goes away yeah exactly yeah it's pretty profound. Weird how that happens. Once you get all the nutrients you need, your body has to be hungry. Give me hunger signals. Funny thing, yeah. Are you on intro? Should we try that with people?

I've been trying that with people for years. What have you been doing? It only works on animals. That's way too radical. All right, I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Barbell Shrugged podcast, strength and conditioning for CrossFitters, mainly. And dogs. And dogs.

Here with Doug Larson and our guest, Paul Eich, owner of CrossFit Fire of the Gods. Morning, everybody. And he's done a couple of nutrition seminars for us at F and uh at another crossfit here in town wolf river crossfit you did that this past year yeah so yes uh so you we've invited you over because you know a good bit about nutrition and i really like the way you present things well i appreciate that mike i'm glad to be here glad i had today off so i could indulge yeah did you are you uh most days are off now right no i i'm back at work as of about Glad I had today off so I could indulge. Yeah. Most days are off now, right?

No, I'm back at work as of about two and a half weeks ago, which is good and bad. But today, Columbus Day, mandatory holiday. That's right. Yeah. I had no idea it was a holiday. The only reason I knew it was a holiday is because I logged into my bank this morning, and it goes, just to let you know, the branches are closed i go yeah oh wow okay you know if i was in school i would have definitely known it was columbus day yeah um today uh i want to talk a little bit first about uh the faction uh foods nutrition course doug is doing on uh starting next next Monday on the 15th, October 15th. It's a free online course. So if you make

the course live, it's free to you. I'll talk a little bit about that. Yeah, just like Mike said, it's a live course that I'm going to be hosting. It's gonna be eight sessions total. And it'll be starting this coming Monday, October 15th, from noon until 1 for the first session. And then it'll be Monday through Thursday for two weeks in a row, all sessions noon until 1. So if you would like to get the link sent to you, you can go to fitter.tv and right below the newsletter opt-in box, there'll be a little banner ad that has a free nutrition course written on it and a bunch of fruit and vegetables in the background. Just click on that banner ad and it'll take you

to a little opt-in form that has the schedule that I just laid out for you. And you can put your name and your email in the space provided. And then prior to each session, I'll send you a link so you can log in and watch the live webinar. Excellent. And if you're listening to this and those dates have passed, because people definitely go back and watch some of these things in the past, and I think they watch them in the future actually. In the future, they'll watch the show which was recorded in the past. Yes. That same nutrition course will be available to you in the Fitter store.

So just click on shop and you'll be able to purchase it there. It'll be under the seminars section for $197. If you watch it live, it'll be free. That's right. Get it afterwards won't be free. Sorry, we got more time than money. There you go. For you. There you go. If you got more money than time, it's for you too. It's crazy. So we'll get right into the topics today we're gonna be talking about performance nutrition uh and first thing we're gonna talk about is why performance nutrition uh and maybe who it's for and who it might not be for then we started talking about it before we started recording and paul was making a really

good point about uh most people probably don't need this. So I suppose it depends on how you define performance nutrition. If you eat well all the time, it's going to help your performance. But usually when people are discussing performance nutrition, they're talking about before, during, and after your workout or before, during, and after competition for things like recovery and what have you. But first things first, you've got to eat well all the time before you need to worry about what goes in your one workout drink per day. So why don't you elaborate on just eating in general outside of your workout drink first, and then we can dig into the workout drinks.

Well, one of the really tough things about nutrition is that because there's so much variation in the human animal, you know, age, gender, uh, your sort of the dietary history you've put yourself through, um, how much sleep you had the night before. I mean, there's a million of them. And so, you know, you get things like, uh, Jason Kalipa, the year he won the 2008 CrossFit games was rumored to have had fruity pebbles the morning before he did that incredible heavy squat grace. So it's really difficult in some cases to discern the impact of nutrition because to a certain point, it doesn't matter. I mean, you can eat like crap and still crush out some awesome workouts, which probably most of us that have ever done awesome workouts,

the majority of us, for the majority of our lives, we did it on really nasty food. I certainly did until I was probably well over 30. I probably never worked out on anything that approached a healthy diet up until then. I don't know about you guys. I did a lot of training on bad food. Heck yeah. Sure. I used to eat pasta and chicken breasts nightly for years. up until then i don't know about you guys i did a lot of training on bad food heck yeah yeah sure i see pasta and chicken breasts not nightly for years and i remember you i remember you telling

me at one point you you would get up at night do a protein drink and go back to sleep so you keep the weight on yeah it was i would powder raw oatmeal like uncooked oatmeal yeah in a coffee grinder put a bunch of that in a shaker bottle with a couple scoops protein i would powder flax seeds also yeah and then i would just shake it up with water and cinnamon and i would just set it next to my bed and i'd wake up in four hours and drink the whole thing put it back down and some mornings i would wake up and it would just be gone yeah i wouldn't even remember it was so fast i could put down like four or five hundred calories in the middle of night and go back to sleep. It's like just 80% grains in the middle of the night. Just chug it down and go back to sleep.

Wow. And it did. It helped keep weight on. I'll give it that. Yeah. And it worked, but it might not have been the best thing. Well, you know, your trade-off there is you get an effect you want, which is you're playing a super high mass. Well, you're playing a sport where mass is critical.

And back then I was in Division III college football. I was trying to be as big as possible as a linebacker. As big as possible, that's right. So your long-term trade-off of living like that is you probably cost yourself something. You cost your metabolism something by eating that way and living that way. But let's face it, high-end competitors do that. They're making those trade offs. So there's no evidence at all.

In fact, what evidence there is, is that being a high end competitor is not good for your health. So, so that's just part of the deal. But so I make that point just to say, performance nutrition is not only just for competitors, it's for those competitors who either a really found their limits with crappy nutrition, and realized that if they wanted to continue to compete, or if they wanted to continue to get better, they had to make a change. Or it's for athletes who just have that OCD thing like, holy crap, I might be leaving a few seconds on the table if I don't eat better. And I'm not might be leaving a few seconds on the table if I don't eat better. And I'm not willing to leave a few seconds on the table. So I'm going to eat better.

It's really for us, you know, in my view, it's, it's, it's something for a really small slice of the population. Um, and that's not either good or bad. It's just, it's just the way I see it. So, um, for most of the, of the people that, that you see in a CrossFit gym, I wouldn't encourage them, uh, to think of it in terms of performance nutrition. I would, as you said earlier, just encourage them to think of it in terms of what are my nutritional needs as a human being and how do I meet those best? And that's also going to serve probably to the 90th or 95th percent their, their performance goals. You know, if you're talking about people that are training three times a week hard doing CrossFit, they I don't think they should ever have to take it any farther than just eat, you know,

eat that paleo model, paleo template kind of meat and vegetables, nuts, seeds, no fruit, no little fruit, no sugar, no starch. I'm sorry, no sugar, no wheat., and apply that with skill. And that's probably as much thought as you need to give to it. You know, if you want to take it. Now, there are those folks who want to take it further than that. And for them, probably what I would see as the next step is weigh and measure your food so that you have some possibility of evaluating cause and effect. In other words, if you're, if you're eating some food and it's all good, uh, good in

terms of quality and you feel like your performance is suffering, you know, and you, you have some reason to think it's related to diet. Well, if you don't know how many grams of protein you're eating, you don't know what to change. If you don't know how many grams of protein you're eating, you don't know what to change. If you don't know how many grams of carbohydrate you're eating, you don't really know what to change. So, uh, if you want to have that, uh, option of observing the effect and modulating the inputs, then you need to weigh and measure. So you know where you're at. And, and, you know, there's a starting point of uh you know probably for for a youthful uh mid-sized athlete something like 100 grams of protein today uh per day i mean assuming you want to be a competitor is probably something like a minimum for a hard training athlete and

on the upside louis simmons says he's only eating 150 grams of protein a day so i would say that somewhere between 100 and 150 is going to meet your needs it's going to meet your requirement in terms of carbohydrate that one's a just a gigantic lot of variables in that because uh endurance athletes and probably even people that are doing crossfit endurance are going to have a completely different carbohydrate requirement than, for example, someone who is maybe was overweight for 10 years, lost it all, but has, you know, probably still retained some of that metabolic injury and their carbohydrate tolerance is going to be much lower

and they're doing CrossFit four days a week. So they're, you know, they're not experiencing a huge amount of time under load. They're not consuming, you know, they're not burning vast quantities of fuel in training and they probably have maybe some damage that makes them carbohydrate sensitive. Their carbohydrate needs are going to be really low. And I, you know, for example, I count myself in that category. I'm at about 75 grams per day. I train three or four days a week. One CrossFit workout out of four will be 20 minutes or longer. Most of them are short. And, you know, more carbohydrate than that, it may not hurt me, but I certainly don't need it. You know, there's no upside for me to go on to eating more unless I wanted to start, you know, there's no, there's no upside for me to go on to eating more unless I wanted to start,

you know, uh, riding a bike two or three times a week, something like that. Do some endurance thing. On the other hand, you might have somebody with a different body type. Well, I think, uh, John Berardi has been good about pointing out that, you know, the, uh, ectomorphs are, you know, you look at their bodies, they don't scroll, they don't store fat under their skin. You could almost look at the leanness of that body type and say that's a body that does not like fat. What's an ectomorph like for the audience here? It's a great question. Think of a basketball player first and foremost, you know, arms and legs everywhere, the torso, probably the hips and shoulders are going to be the same,

or maybe the shoulders a little bit more narrow than the hips. The string bean, the bean pole, the guys that think of themselves as the quote-unquote hard gainers, they don't put on muscle mass. They rarely, you know, they can usually eat anything they want. They don't put on fat mass that you can see. They're skinny people. Skinny people, yeah.

And skinny, but in a way that's probably, you could also say, length associated with that. Not just small, but sort of longer and leaner. Okay. And I think John Berardi makes the point that they have a lower tolerance for fat. And it makes sense when you look at their body as a body that doesn't like fat anyway. It doesn't really know what to do with it. So if you're dealing with an athlete with that shape, you're going to have to find ways to get them carbohydrates.

You can't make up calories just on a ton of fat. So you're going to have to find a kind of carbohydrate that they can tolerate pretty well. Maybe rice would be the first one I would think of for that kind of problem. So why rice over wheats or anything else? Well, rice is, A, just pragmatically, it's pretty well tolerated by most people. So there's the pragmatic side of it. And then in the theoretical side of it, rice has probably propagated as an agricultural food as long as wheat. It just came from the other hemisphere.

Instead of the Fertile Crescent, it came from the Pacific Rim, probably. And three, from what we know about wheat, the things that make it difficult for some people to tolerate, probably a lot of people to tolerate, have all been exacerbated by selective breeding over the years. So that now we have species of wheat that are short, they're, you know, the dwarf varieties, they're all seed head and no stalk. And they're, along with some of that genetic modification, they've, you know, they make it more drought tolerant. They make it, you know, you can plant it more densely. It thrives on ammonium nitrate rather than soil and a lot of modifications. But with that, you know, it's made it an agricultural dream in terms of putting out a lot of product and it's, you know, it doesn't take as much water and makes the, you know, allows you

to make a profit off this little spot of farmland, but it's not really, it's even more of an unnatural food probably than the original, uh, species of wheat were that, that, you know, that, you know, they, basically it was grass and it was grass in the right spot in the world that people could, uh, cultivate it. And from that came wheat, or that was wheat. But that plant is virtually not available now. So even if you came from a genetic heritage that was wheat-tolerant, you might not be tolerant to modern-day wheat because it's a significantly different species. Long way of saying

that, wheat is problematic for more people than rice is. So for everyone that just heard, he said I can eat as much rice as I want. You're saying for someone who might happen to be an ectomorph, a longer, leaner, naturally skinny person, you can probably

if you are that person, tolerate having a higher percentage of your diet as carbohydrates. Therefore, having some rice in your diet tends to be okay. But you didn't say it's a free-for-all for everybody, right? Thank you for saying what I meant. Yeah, that was good. Okay. I think that's important. I think you said that. I'm just not sure if they heard that. Yeah. It's an important distinction that if you're a young athlete without a history of metabolic derangement and you're competing, you know, your desired competitions run toward the endurance side or maybe you're just a super high volume CrossFitter and you've got to come up with some calories, that's going to be the first place to go to to get them.

Unless you find you can take olive oil shots and spoonfuls of coconut oil and get your calories that way. Yeah, if you train two or three times a day and you don't bump your carb intake, you're going to be tired all the time. And you're not going to perform that well. You've got to replace it somewhere. If you're burning it, you've got to get it back somehow. You don't want to overdo it. You don't want to have that stuff spill over and get fat as a result.

But you need to have some of it if you want to perform at a high level. Check. What about the other body types? If you're not a skinny person, then what do you do? Well, it just means you have other options. And you may not have the option of uh up in the carbs uh so for example uh if you're the endomorph the rounder person uh you know large bones lots of subcutaneous fat and uh pear shape um tend towards power sports uh i'm trying to think if we have endomorphs in uh elite crossfit

and it's it's uncommon it's not really a endomorph sport it's CrossFit and it's, it's uncommon. It's not really an endomorph sport. It's like a shot pudding would be more, more likely. I was trying to think if there's any of the gals that the super strong gals that might fit that profile, but there are at least some there, there,

you know, you might consider some of those really large, very strong females as endomorphs, but they're, they're probably a mix of endomorph, a mesomorph, you know, a mix of endomorph, uh, mesomorph, you know, or maybe just a straight, it, it's probably not worth burning up a lot of brain cells over. But if you are an endomorph, um, you're going to have probably less tolerance

for carbohydrate than any of the other body types. So, uh, if you're in that situation where you're, you're logging a lot of hours in training and you've got to replace calories, I would want that athlete to go to fat sources first, things they can eat in high volume that are not too expensive, which is a problem because fats are obviously going to be more expensive than rice and wheat and sugar. Coconut oil, olive oil, animal fats that you can get. This is where you're going to have to go if you're that athlete. So if you've been heavy your whole life,

you know, through no fault of your own, it might have been your fault in some cases, but some people have just been heavy their whole life. They can never remember being skinny. Yeah. Right. Those people more than likely just aren't going to tolerate

higher volumes of carbohydrate intake compared to other body types. So if you're naturally big, you probably want to keep your carbs pretty low. more than likely just aren't going to tolerate higher volumes of carbohydrate intake compared to other body types so if you're naturally big yes you probably want to keep your carbs pretty low and bump the amount of fat in your diet that's what i would try okay absolutely mike you still awake you over there oh oh sorry yeah you're the host of the show we cut you out for a little while it's because chris got in the middle and didn't point the camera at me i felt left out now um i don't know you guys are covering it pretty well i can just sit over here and enjoy the show you guys are doing good uh i

want to talk so why performance nutrition most people probably just have a hard time doing what you're talking about just yeah just talk about or just eating pale hard time doing what you're talking about. Just, just talk about just eating paleo period. Yeah. Like, you know, if you're not eating performance nutrition, you probably don't need to worry about like the, the,

the pre-workout during workout and post-workout shakes and all that. You know, do I need to get a bunch of carbs right after I train stuff like that? Unless you're already eating paleo like 90, 95% of the time. I think that if you're already eating paleo like 90 95 percent of time i think that if you're if you're drinking i know we we advocate a faction you know if you're if you're doing a decent amount of volume you're doing a lot of competitions it's going to be beneficial to drink a shake with whey protein and some kind of like starch sugar yeah you know a

waxing maze or gatorade or some some mix between the two right after you train. But that's only for the people who are keeping a pretty low carb the rest of the time. Yeah. And they're going to train the next day. Right. Or maybe twice a day. Yeah, that's all about recovery and getting calories and getting carbohydrates. But if they're not eating paleo like 90 95 percent

of time it's kind of pointless to even do a post-workout shake or the workout shakes just because you're probably not getting all the nutrients you need to use that stuff anyway so i hear people say that all the time and about recovery and if you know what that means then you go oh yeah for recovery absolutely but if you don't know what that means, then you go, oh, yeah, for recovery. Absolutely. But if you don't know what that means, then it sounds like this nonsensical recovery mystery, what's actually happening in the body. I have no idea. I'll just do what you say. So can you maybe elaborate on what recovery even means? Sure.

And why you would want a workout shake? CrossFit models specifically, you're burning up. You probably are running a good percentage of 1,000 calories worth of carbohydrate that your body has stored as glycogen or either muscle or liver glycogen. And you go out and hit a 15-minute CrossFit WOD, you're going to burn up a healthy proportion of that in that workout. So recovery, number one, in the context of doing your next workout is somewhere between the end of that workout, that 15 minute, you know, Cindy, you just did. And the one you're going to do tomorrow, you got to replace that glycogen, the fuel in the muscles and the sort of the sugar battery that your liver normally maintains. So that's why the significance of

what Mike just said, if you're a regular CrossFitter doing regular CrossFit workouts, three on one off, you probably don't have to do anything special to replace all that muscle glycogen because the food that you eat during the ensuing 24 hours is going to replace it. If you're a competitor and you're going to be competing, you're going to do a workout in the morning and the workout in the afternoon and another one the next morning, you have a different

problem. You know, you've really got a timeline. You've got to get enough carbohydrate down in a, in a short enough period of time to replace all that, that you, the glycogen and that you just burned. So primarily that's recovery. There's also obviously protein synthesis and muscle building and muscle teardown. uh you know that that comes along that you also have to deal with and so that's why it's fashionable to do you know a whey protein because the way is the more rapidly digestible form of protein after a workout and it's probably a good thing to do because if you follow the Paleolithic model or the Paleolithic template, you rapidly find out how difficult it is to knock back 100 or 125 grams of protein every day.

You know, you got to work at it. You got to plan it. It's not easy to do. So, for example, I'll do a post-workout shake with raw dairy just because I know otherwise I'm not going to get that 100 grams of protein that I want. And because my diet meets my needs in every other way, I'm not going to, I've just, basically I've taken the lazy man's way out. Instead of eating more meat during the day, I cheat and have a protein shake after a workout. But i don't have it yeah i don't call it cheating yeah no and then i drink raw milk after that on top of that for the fun of it because it's good

that's just me being lazy not want to eat 10 times in a day exactly calories well and that's that's the thing you know and i think that brings to me what that highlights and all this whole conversation highlights is there's we talk about it paleo for short but it's really just the pale the idea of the paleolithic model of nutrition is that we had ancestors who were healthy pretty impressive athletes high performance athletes and they weren't eating agricultural products all day long to get there. They were eating animal products to a very large extent, not exclusively, and certainly that varied by population and geography, but they limited, you know, they ate what they had to eat, which was

largely animal products. And you can look at that like an animal is just a way of refining nutrition. You know, you get an animal to run around and eat a bunch of crappy food like leaves and acorns and grass and whatever else they eat. Stuff you and I wouldn't want to spend all day eating ourselves. They eat it, refine it into nutrition. We kill it and get it through the animal instead of having to run around

munching on grass all day. And I kind of like that idea. I mean, let's face it. It took us millions of years to get to the top of the food chain. I don't want to screw it up now. But so from that, you know, the Paleolithic model, we probably don't. I mean, even if you're eating, quote unquote, 95% paleo, what you're saying is I'm staying away from those known agricultural products that make me prone to be sick.

But the real paleolithic people ate a whole bunch of stuff we don't eat, like liver, kidney, you know, the intestines, the brains, the eyes, the tongue. They had bone broths. They ate the bone marrow. I mean, they didn't leave, they didn't. I mean, once the animal went around and ate all that grass, they would eat, obviously, just pragmatically find a way to eat the whole thing. Because if they didn't, that just meant they had to go hunting again sooner. So, you know, it was, you know, that's what our body. The reason that is good nutrition is because that's what our genome was built around. So it's not that it's necessarily magic. It's just that, you know, supply and demand or survival of the fittest, whatever is there for you to thrive on, the genome adapts to it. And so that's the normal. That's what got passed on. That's normal nutrition.

You know, it's not magic. It's just that's what we're built for. So that's why it works. Now, I say, so this is another long-winded explanation for saying most of us don't eat paleo, even if we say we eat 95% paleo because we're not eating organ meats and we're not eating bone broths and so on and so forth. All right, what does that really mean for the consumer out there? One is the point of the paleolithic model is to, you know, try to meet your needs using things that were available to be eaten prior to the advent of agriculture.

And that's extremely challenging to actually do that. And it's just really tough. So, um, you're, I try not to get too, too much into that. That's a long way of saying, I don't want to get into the purism thing. You know, there are people who, uh, can take paleo to a level of purity that makes it unlivable and almost hostile for a normal person trying to live a normal life. You know, really you want to live a normal life you know really you want to boil it all down what do you what do you want to get from the Paleolithic model of nutrition don't kill yourself with carbohydrates you know that's about 80% of the solution if you get if you get carbohydrates under

control a lot of the nastiness of the modern diet will go away you get out of metabolic derangement just by doing that single thing. And then you make that, you know, 80% step that solves about 80% of the problems. And then say, next thing you do is start eliminating omega-6s from your diet. That will also help by, you know, eliminating the omega-6 and omega-3 imbalance, which tends to foster inflation. So you don't have to, you know, worship at the altar of paleoism to make those two big changes. But the whole paleo template really reinforces how significant those changes are, in my view. So what's an omega six for all those people that go to the grocery store, and then they don't walk around and see something that says omega six isn't right,

I was told not to buy those, right? So what's an omega-6 and how can people avoid them that's a great question doug because you can we always assume on the inside that everybody knows what the heck we're talking about but omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids the short version is they're they're essential fatty acids meaning we don't make them for ourselves very well and i always when i when i think of essential things like vitamin C or, uh, vitamin, um, drawn a, drawn a short stick here, creatine, there's, there's a few other things that, uh, we don't really make for ourselves. If we don't get it in our diet, we're going to be deficient. So I, I, in the pit, the perspective of the paleolithic model, what that means is those things were just always there. I mean,

a million years ago, nobody knew what vitamin C was, but we still got enough. Not because we tried. It just was always in the food that we ate in the right amount. And, and, you know, for example,

probably liver or seafoods or whatever it was. So. Only vitamins that we, once we figured out what they were, we figured out how to get rid of them. Yeah. Kind of ironic. I thought, yeah, got rid of them by accident oh wow figured out that there was a problem that we got rid of them so we synthetically tried to reintroduce them bingo and now we're probably missing out on stuff that we don't even know what it is yeah what's

the next what's the next wave it's going to be i'll tell you the first one is it's going to be all of the things that we get from the sun besides vitamin d that we're going to figure out we've been missing out on but that's my speculation anyway so just sunlight sunlight yeah yeah we're going to find that just supplementing vitamin d it keeps you from short-term chronic you know deficiency vitamin d deficiencies but it doesn't but just adding vitamin d and doesn't add back everything that's probably something else going on there I'd never heard anybody phrase it like that right when you said that in my head I was like oh shit he's right I never thought about

anything other than vitamin D like it didn't cross my mind there there was another possibility yeah yeah okay I stole the idea from mike eads so i can't claim any credit for it but um i'm so disappointed now yeah that's right i know my status just went away what a bummer i should have kicked yourself down well so so omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are essential meaning meaning we only get them because we eat them and consume them. So the short version of them is all you need to really know is paleo man probably got them in a certain ratio, one to two or one to three. And with the advent of industrial seed oils, you know, quote unquote, corn oil or vegetable oils, which I've learned to say with contempt on my face, we get a wildly imbalanced ratio of omega-6s compared to the amount of omega-3s.

And it's possible we're omega-3 deficient, but we're at least way over consuming omega-6s. And what that leads to is a high state of chronic inflammation, which just about everybody agrees is an essential element of chronic inflammation, which just about everybody agrees is the root, is an essential element of the diseases of civilization. So if you can cut back on your omega-6s to get it closer to the optimal ratio, that's a step towards greater health and probably the most significant one you can make aside from not killing yourself with too much carbohydrate. Yeah, a lot of people call omega-6s like white oils just like white flour or white sugar like it's the great it's the processed food of the oil world so it's white oils white oil devil that's

right like the corn oil and the soybean oil the vegetable oil like you mentioned those are white oils yeah all bleached and de-gummed and deodorized and soaked in solvents and good for you. And invented essentially in the last 50 or 60 years. Pretty much. Yeah. Makes sense. Okay. Let's back away from the science for the moment. What's your typical day look like? If you go kind of breakfast, snack, lunch, dinner, like what do you normally eat? Well, I started about a year and a half ago not eating breakfast as an experiment to see what would happen. You know, Martin Burkhan was hot at the time.

And Rob Wolf was talking about intermittent fasting. And it was a hot topic. And it was before John Berardi published his intermittent fasting guide. And what I found was that Burkhan was right, that it really is a lot of significant benefits to skipping breakfast. You know, you can call it intermittent fasting or you can call it being too lazy to eat breakfast. It doesn't matter. It's the same, you know, basically it just means you don't eat till lunchtime. And, you know, you could delve deeply into the science of why that might be a good thing, you know, in terms of, um, gosh, there's a whole bunch of stuff, which, which I could

delve into, but it's a deep, it's a deep rabbit hole once you get started talking about it. But the short version is there's a lot, there seem to be a lot of maintenance functions that your body does when it's not, when it's not, uh, occupied digesting food and transporting it around the body. And there also seems to be that whole benefit of running longer on fat and sustain, you know, sort of demanding that your body oxidize fat for fuel, since you're not giving yourself any, either sugar or carbohydrate, nor are you providing protein to,

to make gluconeogenesis easy. And so, you know, in effect, what you do is set yourself up to, to run the brain on ketones and a little bit of sugar, trickle feeding it sugar, so to speak. And then you run the rest of your body on fat, which is in, you know, in my view, if you want to talk about the paleolithic

model, that's the paleolithic template for a healthy metabolism is that you, you feel say 98% of your body on fat, which, which, Oh, by the way, you've got enough fat in your body to run probably a month. Whereas you've got enough sugar in your body right now to run, say, probably 1,000 calories. If all you were running on was sugar, you'd be about a half day's fuel. In the afternoon. Yeah, exactly. So just by that fact alone, you can say, well, really we're made to store and operate based on fat, which so, so the fasting, that intermittent fasting or skipping breakfast, uh, allows you to do that. And it demands that your body get good at doing it. So I see a lot of benefits from doing

that. So I'll eat, I'll eat. Usually I eat at my desk at work where our, so sandwich meat, uh, two squares of dark chocolate, a lot of coconut oil, and usually some kind of, you know, macadamia nuts, sunflower seeds, occasionally walnuts, pecans, some kind of fat source that way. So to break it down, you know, I got this from years of doing The Zone, which I think is a great way to eat if it works for you. But the nicest thing that I took away from it is to just look at your food like it's a protein, it's a fat, it's a carbohydrate. You want some of each one at every meal. And so you pick out a protein, pick out a carb to go with it, and then eat fat to satiety as the basic template.

I'd like to give you a more technical answer for what I eat for evening meal, except I eat what my wife cooks. Hey, me too. Thank goodness. Thank goodness for that. Yeah. I appreciate you pointing that out. And before you get home, I agree with what your wife cooks. But, but the short answer for what she's going to make is it's going to be a protein source, you know, fish, fowl or beef or pork or something and a vegetable. And usually there's something else like a salad, you know, so it could be sweet potato, green beans in a salad. And really she is, see, I'm not a novelty person at all. I can eat the same thing every day. It still tastes as good as, as, as every single day. It's fine.

I don't, I don't have to have a variety. Janet, on the other hand, requires it. So the beneficiary to me and my family is we probably get a lot better nutrition because the variety in itself is probably has some, we have some reason to think that not eating the same thing all the time is probably good for you. You know, it follows the model of, uh, you know, if you think of the paleolithic template, paleolithic people didn't eat the same thing in the spring as they ate in the fall as they ate in the winter, in most cases, not all. So that's probably good for us. And so I could, I could give you, I could give you a lot more detail on what Janet's going to make every night, but it's going to be a meat, a protein and a vegetable. And that's, it's pretty much that simple for me. And I would say as simple as it is right now. And I, you know, when I started doing intermittent fasting, I was, I had weighed between 210 and 213 for probably two years since then. And I didn't, I didn't consciously reduce my intake at all. But since then, I've been at between 200 and 205 for the last year and a half, literally effortlessly. And probably most

important for me, the biggest change is the flexibility. Because if you get up in the morning and every day you feel like and this is what I got, this is the bad side I got from the zone, although it was probably helpful in the beginning. If you get up in the morning, and the first thing you think every day is, man, I got to get some food down, or I'm going to have a sugar crash. It, it adds a hurdle to your morning that, you know, if you're not a morning person, you really don't need. I'd much rather, I like getting up now where I think my first thought is to not even think about food. You know, I still got the thing with the coffee.

Like, if I don't get some coffee, my head's going to hurt, which, you know, presumably sometime in my future I'll unfrock that too. But since I haven't done that yet, at least I don't have to worry about eating food. And I don't recommend intermittent fasting for people who are starting out following the paleolithic model because they don't have the ability to burn fat all day. Right. Uh, so what I would recommend for them is to pick a fat and a protein to eat for their breakfast and maybe just a touch of carbohydrate. But all night long, however long you've been sleeping, you've got a great thing going.

You've got your body running on stored fuels. So probably some sugar, but a fair amount of fat and probably turning some protein into sugar and some fat into ketones. So that's all good. That's all to your benefit. And not interrupting that is good. So if you have protein and fat for breakfast, and this is assuming, by the way, that you have some interest in having a lower body fat percentage. If you've got that going and you continue that by starting your day with a protein and a fat

and not eating any carbohydrate, you're going to continue that process of burning fat, oxidizing fat, demanding that your body liberate fat and use it for fuel. And that's going to help you in your weight loss goals and your body composition goals. And generally in your appetite reduction, which is really the reason why low carb is successful. Carb restriction, the paleo model, whatever it is, it's not, you know, there's probably some metabolic advantage at some point in that process where your body's so efficient at burning fat and protein that you have to burn more of it to get useful calories out of it. But in the long term, your body's perfectly efficient on that model. I don't, not a big advocate of metabolic advantage of as why carb restriction works well. Carb restriction works well because it allows you to get a stable blood glucose using

burning protein and fat. And with stable blood glucose, you gradually reduce your positive association to sweet sugary foods because you don't need them anymore to maintain a stable blood sugar. And so, you know, going with the low carb, higher fat approach, you know, as appropriate to your body type is successful because it, it breaks the pattern of hunger associated with crashing blood sugar, which is a result of eating too much carbohydrate for a long period of time. And in that process, you know, sort of interrupting your ability to run on fat. So that's kind of a long winded explanation. But the short version is you want to start your day with as little carbohydrate as you can stand, because it'll help you build that capacity to oxidize fat and feel yourself that way through the day.

We'll take a quick break? Yes. About that time. When we come back, we will talk about performance nutrition a little bit more and a little less about basics of paleo. Yes. All right. Enjoy your banded push press.

Banded push press. All right. Welcome back. Barbell Shrug. Mike Blitzer here with Doug Larson and Paul Eich. Talking a little bit about nutrition. Yay. Which is a narrow topic and easy to cover in a one-hour podcast. Yes, easily. We're going to cover it all.

We've almost covered the whole thing. Yeah. We're trying to steer this ship a little bit more towards the performance side of things for CrossFit athletes, people who are wanting to be competitive um and even um even people who just maybe are already eating extremely paleo extreme being extremely extremely paleo that's my new book that's coming out extremely paleo why not for it nowhere why 95 of paleo is not good enough that's right uh so if you're already in paleo you're training um you know you're getting in you're getting in more than five training sessions a week uh start looking at at uh getting more cal maybe some liquid calories

post-workout shakes stuff like that um And I think we want to take this. What's the difference between, I guess, between performance and paleo? And one thing we were talking about on the first half of the show is, for most people, eating paleo is eating for performance. But you take that athlete who's high-volume training, the endurance athlete, the CrossFit athlete, they're burning a large amount of glycogen during their workouts uh and if they don't replenish that glycogen and they're

they're also they're also tearing down a lot of muscle too yeah if they don't if they don't replace that glycogen they don't get the amino acids they need to rebuild that muscle then their next workout's just going to be not as good and they're not going to get the same power output. They're not going to get the adaptations they're looking for. So for most people, paleo is performance. But for that athlete who needs to get more glycogen in their muscles and really push it in. Yeah.

You know what I'm saying. The athletes that are either competing on a stage somewhere against other athletes or they're just trying to totally maximize the amount of training they can get in a week. Right. This is who we're talking about now. Some people, they may not be interested in competing, but that doesn't mean they can't train. Like a competitor. Like a competitor, right.

One of the things, before we get into like post workout shakes and stuff you were talking a little bit about uh and during the break we started talking about a study that you saw yeah uh in regard to what they were overfeeding people right um and just go ahead and tell us a little bit about that well the the concept of the study is uh that you know bodybuilders power athletes all have always have long since been into the concept of the study is that, you know, bodybuilders, power athletes have long since been into the idea of eating a lot of protein. And, of course, some people say you don't need it, it's bad for you, et cetera. But this study was by a guy who's not an advocate for low-carb as a way for weight loss. He's really stuck on the calorie is a calorie idea.

And it's not that he's wrong. He just doesn't understand the causality. Different story. He's in this, in this particular study, he overfeeds people by a massive amount and I'm going by memory, but it's about, it seems like it was about 10,000 calories a day. These people were eating. So it was a lot, you know, it's probably seven or 8,000 more than most people need. So that's three times as much as I eat in a day. Right. And they kept the ratio of macronutrients for carbohydrate constant at 40%, which even 40% isn't a huge number of carbohydrate if you're trying to go isocaloric,

but if you're going 10,000 calories a day, that's about 4,000 calories of carbohydrate every day. And most of us can do just fine on probably 100 calories of carbohydrate. And if you're eating paleo, you're not eating 40% carbohydrate. It's hard to do. Unless you're John Wellborn and you're slamming sweet potatoes. Right. Right.

And you said earlier that you get about 75 grams of carbohydrate per day. Right. And 4,000 calories of carbohydrate it's a thousand grams so it's over 10 times as many carbohydrates as you eat in a day exactly 40 it's a lot so to give you an idea i mean i really like the guy uh supersized me that movie that poked for that took a stab at mcdonald's that guy was eating about 5 000 calories a day and you saw how sick it made him or at least he portrayed how sick day and you saw how sick it made him, or at least he portrayed how sick, tried to portray how sick that it made him. Uh, so these guys were eating double that.

Okay. Um, so what, what was the point of the study? What were they trying to figure out? When I look at the study now, I don't even know what they were trying to figure out because when you're overfeeding by that amount, uh, it just confuses so many variables. It's really hard to say what they, what it, what the results were showing, but the findings were interesting because what they varied was the fat and protein content. So there was a really high fat, really low protein group that had one result. And there's a group in the middle and there's a group with really high protein, really low fat. And so they all gained all of the subjects in the three different protocols. The average weight gain was similar. Even the average fat game was similar. But the interesting thing was that

the low protein folks actually lost muscle mass and gained more fat and the super high protein folks actually gained muscle mass and didn't gain as much fat. The, this, the only takeaway I can think of from the study, and I sincerely doubt the authors of the study were trying to figure this out when they started it, is that if you feed yourself enough protein, your body will dispose of it in, in the muscle cells. It'll produce more muscle. It'll exactly right. It'll produce more muscle. Exactly right. It'll look around and say, you know what?

I got way too much nitrogen here. What the heck am I going to do with it? And it'll shuttle it into your muscles one way or the other. Now, the confounder there is it may only work when you're also overfeeding carbohydrate and therefore have a lot of insulin floating around too.

And all that carbohydrate is going to be anabolic. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that means it makes you grow. That's right. So,

so that, so if there's a takeaway for power athletes for performance nutrition, it's that probably over in over intake of protein, it can have the benefit of helping you add muscle mass. And there there's, it's difficult to find any research that shows that quote unquote, it's bad for you. Although some folks will say that it is, um, to whatever degree it might be bad for you, guarantee you, it's not as bad for you as overstuffing yourself on carbohydrate, which, right. You know, you can pretty easily measure how bad that is for you. Yeah. So one of carbohydrate, which, right. You know, you can pretty easily

measure how bad that is for you. Yeah. So one of the things we were talking about with the, with the protein was, uh, I have a lot of athletes, a lot of times it couldn't mean they go, well, I'm not, I'm not able to train. Um, I'm not, I don't feel like I'm recovering very fast. I can't get in the gym more than three or four times a week. I just feel beat down. So I asked him what their typical day looks like and they may be eating paleo but they're not getting even 100 grams of protein in a day and they might be a 200 pound person so being a 200 pound person trying to train like an athlete and then not even consuming 100 grams of protein what i generally tell them is the first step is to get one gram of protein

for every pound of body weight for most people who aren't getting 100 grams of protein bumping up from 100 grams of protein to 200 grams of protein consistently not like i did it on monday and thursday but it was too hard to do the rest of the week yeah doesn't cut it um if you start consistently eating more protein you're going to feel a lot better i've had had many athletes come to me just in the last year that say, you know, this is my problem. I tell them to eat that much protein. You know, a week later they go, I feel amazing. And it's like, I'm like,

and the thing is they didn't know they could feel that good. You know, I was like, I can train two days in a row. Like they couldn't do that before. And I was like, me personally, I think Doug probably is in the same boat. I don't think I've consumed, maybe in the last five years, I've consumed less than a gram of protein per pound of body weight, maybe 10 days in the last five years. I'm extremely.

So what does that mean for your daily intake? 170? Oh, yeah. I break 200 almost every day. 200 grams of protein a day. That's strong work, man. So. That's not easy.

Yeah. I'm eating like seven to eight ounces of meat at every meal. Yeah. I'm trying to get four or five meals a day. Yeah. And then post-workout shakes on top of that. So getting some whey protein. Liquid calories help.

Putting down some raw milk yeah that helps too yeah so um so we're going to talk a little bit about the difference between what might be the difference for someone who's doing a lot of volume is more protein right and then also post-workout shakes and and this isn't nutrition per se but it's as it's just as important and it's kind of nutrition. But that same athlete, if they're vitamin D deficient, the protein's not going to help them recover faster. And the only supplement I've taken in the last –

the only supplement I've ever taken where I had a palpable – noticed a palpable difference afterwards was vitamin D. Fall time consumption of vitamin D turns about, turns your recovery around like in a, in less than a week, you'll see, you can tell the difference. Um, so that's one thing to think about is what time of year are they, is this a person who never gets out in the sun? Are they stuck in an office all day? Cause that might have more of an impact than the protein. Yeah. And then obviously sleep is not nutrition, but they're joined at the hip, you know? So, um, you can't, you can't shortcut sleep without having an impact on your metabolism.

Uh, it changes, changes the hormonal product that you're putting, that you're, that's mixing with the food that you eat. And, and so if you are a performance athlete and you're leaving sleep on the table, that's a, probably a more, I would, in my book, that's probably a bigger piece than food. Yeah. At least as big. Yeah. Usually like when I, when I talk to people and they're doing, we're straightening out their diet. Yeah.

It's, you know, the next question is how much sleep are you getting? Bingo. Yeah. If you don't get enough, then life is going to be hard. It is going to be hard. I don't, I couldn't go back to the Navy schedule for sleep. That was terrible. Yep. Um, not very productive. I'll tell you that. It makes it super hard to lose weight if you're, no matter what you eat,

it's much harder to lose weight if you're not getting to sleep. Yep. Um, so, uh, one of the things that we, we, uh, advocate for our competition athletes, uh, is the post workout. Well, during workout and post-workout shakes, whey protein and some kind of carbohydrate. And it's going to vary depending on the type of workout they're doing. But, uh, um, we've always done whey protein and Gatorade and a rate, you know, we also, you know, measure out a certain ratio depending on what your goals are. Right.

If you're doing a CrossFit style workout, like a two to one ratio is probably really good for you. And so you're saying one part protein, two parts carbs. Yeah. So what I would do in the past, maybe like 60 grams of carbohydrate or of a Gatorade and then 30 grams of like a whey protein. And I would usually sip. I usually sip on that like, um,

while I'm warming up and then while I'm training, doing strength training and I'll do some strength training and then I'll do some type of CrossFit style conditioning. And, uh, depending on what's going on and how long the conditioning session was, if it was really long, I'll, I'll slug another shake down.

If it was a really short conditioning session, I might not drink as many. I might just stick with that one shake that I had. I've more recently started moving to Waxy Maze, and I like that a lot better. It's definitely not paleo either. Waxy Maze is derived from corn and it's pretty close to glucose. You drink it and it gets in your system. No fructose.

That's one reason I really like that. I started off mixing half and half, half Gatorade, half Waxy Maize, but I like the Waxy Maize just fine. I try to keep about a two-to-one ratio. I find that helps me a lot. If I don't do that, I start dragging, like a week later. Like a week later, I can tell that, like, you know,

my conditioning sessions start going in the gutter real fast. I know Doug's in the same boat. I know we both played around with cutting the carbs in our shakes before yeah both we both were like you tell the difference

yeah I'm constantly varying the amount of carbs that are in my shakes sometimes it's a one to one ratio sometimes I don't put any waxing mix in I just put a little protein

I call it good that's what I did this morning this morning I had a very short amount of time to train and basically all I did was I ran some quick sprints, then I squatted and I left and that was it. And you know, you don't need a whole lot of carbohydrates for that because I'm not, I'm not really breaking. I did doubles for squatting,

like pure strength work. You're not going to build up a, like a lot of that acidic burn, which is an indicator that you're burning lots of carbohydrates. So you can get away with not really eating or not really having carbohydrates flowing into your system at that exact moment. Moreover, my volume's been pretty low. I had a fight a couple weeks ago. I've been training, but not really like I'm prepping for something. So I didn't train yesterday.

I've been eating pretty well lately. So I just didn't need as much. So I didn't take as much during my during my shake so i constantly vary the amount of carbohydrates that are in my shakes depending on what i had done in the 24 hours leading up to it as well as what i'm going to do the 24 hours after it if i know i'm going to train tonight i probably had a shake that way i'd be feeling good tonight but i'm not training later so if i didn't if i could segue for a minute that is me, you just put your finger on an issue. That's that is the difference between what 90% of the population of people that come into a CrossFit gym need to do compared to what you as a

competitor needs to do. Because 90% of the people that come into your CrossFit gym, they need a formula that they can follow relentlessly for a month or six months or a year until they get their metabolic systems under control. They, they really don't, they shouldn't be doing wild variations day to day. They need a daily formula that they can groove on for, for a long time until they get healthy. But once you get to that point and you want to switch from, okay, I'm, I've, I've lost my belly. i've cured my blood pressure i've fixed my triglyceride problem i have i feel better i sleep better i've you know my life my whole life is better now now i want to be a competitor i want to see how far i can take

this crossfit thing then they have to do a little bit more yeah i think too um doug and i are probably and you two probably way more tuned in to our bodies than the average person. I think the average person they may oh I'm feeling tired maybe I need shakes. It's like

you might just be feeling tired because you're out of shape. Or you train too much. Or you're not getting enough sleep. Yeah there's probably a lot of variables but if you know yeah you got enough sleep

you know I ate the same breakfast every day you know I know these things haven't changed. And the one thing I changed was my shakes. And now I don't feel as good. And then also how I used to, my old good is not the same as my new good. And my old bad and my new bad are two totally different things. And I now feel like I'm tuned in.

And I can almost, I can go, okay, I know what I'm training today. I know what I'm doing today. I know what I'm doing tomorrow for training. And as far as like measuring goes, I don't, I look at the scooper and I may go, I may go through three heaping scoops of whey protein and I'll look at my waxy maze. And I know if I'm going to be doing, you know, six five-minute intervals all out, and I'm getting like a three-minute break in between each one of them, and I'm going to be breathing really hard the whole time, a lot of burn,

then I'll do like a whole scoop of Waxy Maze. But if I do what I did today, it's like one Metcon took me five minutes, and I just blew it all out at once. I did like half a scoop. And you probably could have done none. Probably could have done none. You know? Yeah, I did like half scoop and it's, it's not where I'm like, probably could have done none. Probably could have done none. Yeah.

For something like that. But for me personally, I don't care about how lean I am. Yeah. And I'd rather just be ready to train later. So part of it is, is, um,

if I was trying to be as lean as possible, I probably wouldn't be doing hardly any afterwards. Like I've cut out, um, the way I eat, uh, I've cut out post-workout shakes altogether before. And I was in ketosis like three days later.

Yeah. So I was like pissing ammonia. So, yeah. Um, that's kind of like when we talk about, uh, getting some carbs with your protein and stuff like that.

Yeah. It's like, that's, that's all. If you're riding the line like that. And the only thing you need between you, like just ketosis and not is a post-workout shake you're probably interestingly enough there's a this is another segue forgive me but there's another there's a book out by the uh by finney and volick about training in ketosis and there's a

there's the guy peter atia from, used to be war on insulin blog. Now it's called the nutrition Academy, I think. But, uh, you can Google Peter Atia, uh, ATTIA and, and get it easily. Um, but his thing is all about doing endurance training and ketosis. So the, the concept of performance nutrition is changing literally before our eyes because nobody would have said it was even possible 10 or 15 years ago. Well, I wonder if it's a temporary trend also. Could be. Matt Lalonde, who you're probably familiar with, I think he was doing that for a while.

And now he's gone. He's like, no, don't do that. I guess he was doing a lot of row intervals or something and then now he's kind of like uh you probably need some kind of post workout nutrition yeah and then and you never know where it's going to go because he could have just been doing it badly maybe you know um i know a lot of guys are talking about you know a lot of endurance guys are talking a lot about medium chain triglycerides too. They're doing a lot of that.

Again, my theory is they'll probably, Doug and I have talked about this, it'll probably just kind of swing back to what's always worked. Because I've tried it too. I've gone the whole, I'm going to cut my post-workout shit, and I'm going to do the paleo thing. And if I'm in ketosis and my body can handle it. Yeah. And the next thing I know, my numbers start going down.

And some people say, well, you got to ride that out until you get more sensitive. Right. And I'm just not willing to do it. Well, I don't know if that's going to happen. Like I, I'm not, I'm not really buying that's going to happen. I think that, I think if I try to ride it out, I'll just run myself into the ground. I don't know. Hey, there are conscious whispering in our ear.

The little devil whispering in our ear says, what's ketosis? The short answer is ketogenic metabolism is when your brain is like a big sugar burner. It's like a big sugar burning, something like 600 calories a day to your brain, just to keep it running. And it's preferred fuel is sugar. And I like to think of sugar as like a high performance fuel, like a drag racing fuel for cars. Extremely potent, but also really high risk. You know, you've got to handle it super careful or you burn yourself. And so just like a high-test drag racing fuel, it's got special handling requirements.

But ketosis is the body's way of providing the brain a sugar substitute when you don't have enough glucose available to supply that 600 calories per day. And it, the, the liver produces ketone bodies via, uh, uh, uh, process so that you don't need as much sugar. It's a natural metabolic function and it's, it provides you with a lot of metabolic flexibility. I, I like to refer to it as the hybrid fuel model. You can run on one or you can run on the other one, whichever one is, uh, most beneficial to the body. You can run on sugar or you can run on the other one, whichever one is most beneficial to the body. You can run on sugar or you can run on fat and ketones. So hopefully that answers the question of what is ketosis. It's when you get low on sugar so your body provides an alternate fuel for the brain.

That's a good explanation. To your point about the medium chain triglycerides, briefly, for people that don't know what those are, those are saturated fats that are a little bit shorter that your body can very quickly use for energy similar to sugar. And so the endurance community has kind of taken that on, especially people that are concerned with being paleo all the time and didn't want to have sugar during their workouts because they're trying to just eliminate sugar out of their diet altogether. The downside there is I've never seen a performance study i looked at like a dozen of them that compared medium chain triglycerides to glucose um in in specifically in endurance athletes and in every case uh the people that that consumed sugar performed better so in theory

you could get by with it but it just seems that when it when it's tested it just doesn't pan out and if you want to dig into that more atia goes into it in great detail because he even goes as far as measuring his ketone bodies pre and post workout uh he talks about how he and finney and volick have worked out this thing where apparently there's a threshold it's a it makes no sense to me i i want to believe it's not true because it's so counterintuitive or nonsensical but basically when you're trying to do what those athletes are trying to do which is substitute coconut oil or MCTs, which is the same thing really, uh, for carbohydrates and an endurance athletes diet. Apparently, if you eat, you can be eating the same amount of MCTs,

but if you overdo the sugar, your body defaults to a less efficiency with use with making and using ketones. And so if you want to use that model, there what keep what uh finney and and atia are getting at is you have to be super careful about how many how many carbohydrates you eat overall if you if you bust like a 50 gram threshold for atia he loses his mct efficiency but if he stays under it his efficiency running on mcts coconut oil his whole ultra high fat diet works great for him. But I think what they're also going to find is that there are huge variations between people. And there's also going to be a huge variation between somebody who's been doing it for two weeks and somebody who's been doing it for six months. Yeah. And that, that could be why the studies are at not

very favorable, but individuals are getting favorable results because they are doing it better you know oh yeah studies are always going to show an average yeah which doesn't account for outliers at all yeah exactly and especially when every super performance athlete is an outlier pretty much yeah a lot of times in studies too like they get people they're like okay here's here's what you're going to do for the next couple of weeks. Just make sure you log your notes correctly and go off and do it. And it's not what these people are like. They're not diehard athletes that really believe in this new way of doing things and they're going to do 100% and they're going to give their best effort. I've been involved in a lot of studies where they tell a group of people to do something and I've hung out with those people while they're doing it

and it's not always what you might think it would be when you're reading the study after the fact. It really is not the case in a lot of cases. I remember watching a study where they were looking at recruitment of muscle groups during a certain movement and I watched literally every person do the movement totally fucking wrong. And I was like, that's going to show what it shows for sure. But I wonder how it would be different if they were all performing that movement 100% correctly.

That really goes to what you just said. If you take the philosophical segue, I'm good at that, I guess. What it goes to show you is that the point of the scientific method should be to identify a concept of conjecture or speculation, whatever, and then try to disprove it. Because for the most part, you can really never prove anything is true. You can only disprove. And if you've tested it a million times, then you wind up with a theory. And if that lasts another 10 years after that, still, it might be accepted as a theory. And if, and if that lasts another 10 years after that, and still it might be accepted as a law, but, uh, we forget because of our frustration with how slow it is to use the

scientific method to find truth. The point of the scientific method is to take that painful methodical approach of disproving everything that, you know, the first, the first thought process for any scientists should be, I don't think that's true. And I'm going to prove it by doing this. And, you know, our, our overall understanding of science or the philosophy of science is so poor that almost nobody thinks that way anymore, which is why we get absurd quote unquote, well, studies show that you're, you know, if you eat 14 tomatoes, your right leg gets longer than the other leg. Depends which newspaper is writing about the study. Yeah, exactly.

I hate seeing what journalists write about studies. It's never what the study really is saying in a lot of cases. We need to have a whole discussion on that one day. That would be good. Just bring up every... You know who's bad about it? I subscribe to Wall Street Journal. My wife, she'll read the last section.

It's got something nutrition in it once a week. They're almost wrong. Every time? In my opinion, they're wrong. I've never seen them right. I'm like, man, this is terrible advice. You don't want to write about something that everybody already knows and is generally accepted.

You want to write about something that shocks the world. Yeah, my opinion on nutrition journalism is that, first off off they don't know what they're writing they have no idea how to read a study right and then number two like they just want to be exciting controversial yeah you know omega-3s aren't good for you they used to be last week yeah uh all right so we want to talk about one more thing and that would be a day of competition so if you're competing in crossfit like what type of what what might the diet look like or maybe even like the day of a long endurance race yeah um i know i know a lot of athletes get very ritualistic and do some weird different things but do you have any

thoughts on that yeah the my thought on that is the day of competition is not your day to experiment and see what works for you so if if you want to if you want to deal with this question intelligently it means you got to simulate a competition day and and you guys do that in your gym which i've seen i've actually been there when the athletes were suffering through that oh crap i you know less than an hour before my workout and now my meal's in the trash can so yeah uh i've uh i've also practiced competition day yeah nutrition for myself i'm like okay i'm gonna eat these sweet potatoes then eat this chicken breast then i'm gonna drink my shake now and then i get to the competition and i'm just you know something got thrown in somewhere else yeah um i'm nervous so my appetite just went out the window sure um

you slept differently the night before yeah the only thing i can eat now is chocolate and almond butter when i pack sweet potatoes and it's like it's like i gotta eat something yeah eat the chocolate and almond butter yeah it's like that's not what i'm supposed to eat so i'm like i just sip on a shake and then drink that and eat that and then like things go out the window so so you make a plan and you test it uh you know simulate it as best you can. And then that still doesn't always work. What you're saying, what might be the best plan is to go to smaller competitions. Yeah. Do the smaller competitions,

have the, someone else running your schedule, no exceptions, uh, be sleep in a hotel the night before, not in your own bed, you know, just things like that.

That's the only way to like kind of figure out your day of competition. I also find that like a lot of people give a lot of advice on day of competition nutrition. And then everyone ends up tweaking it to whatever their needs are because everyone's different. Yeah. So I find that younger athletes tend to freak out more. I know I did. Now I don't care if I win or lose. Now I don't freak out at all.

I just assume I'm losing. No. Yeah yeah we do too but I usually tell people don't eat too much fiber at the beginning of your day yeah you don't want to put down a bunch of fiber right at the beginning six ounces of colon blow every day man that's right you don't want to be like oh you know about doing an event, and now I've got to go to the bathroom. That especially goes for guys that are endurance athletes, you know.

Yeah. If they're running a four-hour race, you don't want 90 minutes into it to have to go hit one of those porta-potties. Or worse yet, you know, you're doing an ultra-marathon, and it's just a tree, and, you know, I know those guys keep toilet paper with them. Yeah. If you run ultra-end know those guys keep toilet paper with them. If you run ultra endurance race, keep toilet paper with you. That's what I heard.

Day of competition, usually going to keep things pretty high carb. Guys that try to keep it paleo, a lot of sweet potato baby food. I see that and uh some like some some people do uh the baby food meat you know it's already processed you can find stuff that doesn't have hardly any additives it's just basically just ground up yep um and and it's a wrinkle for the paleolithic template especially people who are doing it in a high-fat way because fats are, most fats have about a six-hour process

from your mouth to actually being available in the body with the exception of MCTs, which can be rapidly digested and therefore be possibly part of a game day kind of nutrition strategy. Mm-hmm. Yep. This is all set on the assumption that

you're doing something like a CrossFit competition where you're going to be competing and then another couple hours later competing again and another couple hours later competing again. You're going to be competing all day long. You're not just doing one WOD and being done with it. No. Having higher carb and then having a post-workout drink, all these things might help you

for the long haul, especially if you're going two days in a row, which a lot of competitions are two days in a row. You're doing multiple wads Saturday and Sunday, for example. One of the things I found, I wish I would have discovered Waxing Maze a little bit sooner, is on competition day, between my nerves and just the extra intensity, going extra hard, my stomach would get upset, and the Gatorade, I just couldn't handle it. And the Waxing Maze, it doesn't taste like anything. It's very mild.

You can get that carbohydrate without getting that upset stomach from sugar. Anything sweet just throws me off. You guys have also done powerlifting competitions. How did you manage your diet on those days? Or did you? Illegal drugs. Oh, well. those uh days i definitely illegal drugs no well i definitely wasn't as concerned about eating high carb beforehand not at all i ate pretty much paleo all the way up to it like power lifting me that to

me that just kind of felt like every day like a yeah seriously like like every other day training you walk in it's you warm up casually and then you build up to a heavy squat you just do it in front of people and then you move on to the next thing and it's it's it's funny like you don't really get that tired you know afterward if you set some prs you might be a little sleepy like you're a little beat up but like not like crossfit competition where you feel like you got your ass kicked yeah or you know you were you're you know you were like really like spent some energy that day got your heart rate up and got that muscle burn. You were super sore.

Yep. A little sore, sure. But I didn't really change my diet that much leading up to my last powerlifting meet. We had a big team go to state, like SPF state competition a while back. I actually went to nationals after that. And so I was like one of the i think i was yeah i was the only one competing from our gym at that i think people just weren't as interested like i mean spf is a good organization but like for most crossfitters they don't want to like spend all day

to do three lifts right um but i was staying i remember standing around eating a salad i was eating a salad amongst a bunch of like spf powerlifters which is like a bunch of west side dudes yeah and they're all big fat dudes they're all walking around like who's this guy yeah freak like oh he must do crossfit he's eating paleo remember what your numbers were at that meet yeah uh 415 squat terrible bench maybe 275 and then uh 485 deadlift and i went for five and i was just i'm so tired from the the meat lasts all day like you know your first lift is in the morning and then my deadlift was like at five o'clock at night it was one of those things where i should have like found a place and went to sleep or something like that but what i tend to do when i go for big lifts

is jack myself up on caffeine big time. And I'll drink coffee and then pop a pill or whatever on top of that and then get crazy. May not be the best thing because I've hit PRs with no pre-workout. What am I thinking about? Like Jack 3D? Yeah, you know, that kind of stuff can work really well sometimes,

and other times it doesn't. You know, is the intensity of being in front of a crowd, you know, enough to not have to have that chemical stimulation? You know, I don't know. I haven't competed. You know, I think you'd have to compete a lot of different times and be willing to experiment at competition time which most people are not willing to do that then right i'm not sure if they're if you can get over aroused at a power

lifting meet like oh man it just got too crazy i totally just couldn't squat it's like like usually the crazier the better for like a big squat. Yeah. Unless you get so over aroused that you short your rep, which I think a lot of noobs do that. Like a lot of people who are new to like having to meet a squat standard. Right. Like they go, oh, oh. And then they like, they cut it short and they're like, yeah. And like, yeah, you went down three inches.

It's a new three inch PR. Right. After competing a few times, like I would rather overdo it than underdo it for sure so go too deep that's another thing, go to SPF meet as an Olympic style weightlifter and they're like blown away by your squad depth

because you get a whole two inches deeper than what's necessary I was even like low bar cutting it cutting it short for me yeah and they were still like i remember the judges being like oh all right enough about powerlifting yeah um yeah all right so you also have you guys also have a couple ultra endurance athletes out of fashion more than one i mean yeah they eat paleo too male and female eat paleo. How do they manage? I mean, one of them comes into my house twice a week and takes care of my kids,

so I get to hear the stories. This is what he made me do. Race day, they eat the goo, and they do the workout shakes and stuff like that. The thing that I see they do different, and I think Vaughn is learning, is to do less goo. I think he's overdone it a couple times. I think it's one of those things where kind of like, well, I'm just going to take Extra Jack 3D, powerlifting, same thing. It's like, well, I can't get too much sugar.

You know what I mean? It's a race, and I think he actually felt it this last race. I think he went too much sugar. it this last race i think he he went too much too much sugar i know he did he felt that way um so he's gonna back off the goo and time a little bit better but again that's that's the only things you're gonna learn on race day so you gotta compete to find out yeah you know you're not gonna go run 50 miles by yourself one day or 50k i mean a lot of guys do but like i don't have them doing that very very frequently so so you could summarize this whole episode really in a way by saying here's some ideas you can try but if you really want to figure out performance nutrition you got

to go compete yeah uh it's it's for the for the performance in the gym it's good to be very very consistent with how you eat normally outside of training. Yeah. And then play around with your ratios. There's some general guidelines. Is it 0.4 grams of protein per kilo of body weight? Per kilo. And probably double your carbohydrate

from your protein. So if you're getting 30 grams of protein, get 60 grams of carbs. I would start there and then play up and down there. If you start putting on some fat mass, you might want to lower it down a little bit. I mean, you can also raise it up for a week and kind of see if maybe you feel even better. Some people aren't going to need as much. Some people are going to do better on the fat like you were talking about.

They may deal better with more medium uh, medium chain triglycerides. And then, um, some people can go higher carbohydrate and then you could also eat high, you know, drink your shake. And then an hour later, eat like some chicken and some sweet potato, get extra carbs, depending on the individual. It depends on the volume of training. Um, my post-workout shake and Doug's post-workout shakes look differently depending on how our training looks. If our training is really high volume and we're doing a lot of stuff where I'm out of breath all the time, a lot more carbohydrate.

And if you're not privy with pounds versus kilos and whatnot, 0.4 times how many times grams per kilo might be a weird calculation for a lot of people. So just take your body weight and times it by 0.2. It'll be close enough. So if you're 170-pound guys, 10% of that is 17 times 2 is 34 grams of protein for your shake. Then you can just double that for your carbs if you feel like you need to. Most of the time these days with my strength stuff, if I don't met strength stuff if I'm just doing strength stuff I do a 1 to 1 so for me being roughly a 200 pound guy

times.2 is 40 carbs protein I call it good and if you're one of those dudes that are hard gainers add some carbs let's add protein you gotta try both what I usually do is take that formula

which I was talking about and I take a shake for the weight I want to weigh. So if I'm 175 and I want to weigh 190, then I just bought my protein and carbs. Just, you know, more post-workout nutrition. That's where you're going to be the most anabolic anyway. That and when you sleep. Yeah.

So drink a gallon of milk before bed too. That way you'll pee 20 times before you get up all right i think that about wraps it up uh you got anything you want to promote doug yeah definitely uh like we said at the beginning of the episode come out and to the live nutrition event that we're putting on here in the next week october 15th is a monday come out to the website yes come. Come out physically. Yes. It'll be a live online event. Again, it starts Monday, October 15th

from noon until 1. And it'll be noon till 1, Monday through Thursday that week and the following week to register for that and to get sent the link to... That's me typing. To get sent the link

to that very first session and all the sessions that follow. Click on the banner ad right below the opt-in on Fitter.TV, and it'll take you to a page where you can put your name and email in, so you can be on the list. If this is well after that live event, and you just want to check out the Faction Foods Nutrition course, which is what we're showing, you can buy that in the Fitter shop.

Just go to the top of Fitter.tv, click on the shop, scroll down and click on seminars. And then it's called the Faction Foods Nutrition Course. Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it. Anything you want to promote, Paul? You can go to my blog at fireofthegodsfitness.blogspot.com. And my goal is to give a digestible amount of nutritional,

either health or performance information out five days a week. So, uh, you know, you can go in, in a short term, you'll find a lot of great sources for that kind of information. The links that I referenced in the blogs that I referenced in, in the longterm, uh, you know, it's a lot of people have told me, or a lot of the feedback that I get most often is the easiest way to learn any of this stuff is daily exposure in a small amount that you can, you can digest pretty quick. Cool. Agreed. All right. And, uh, the last thing is, uh, if you don't want to sign up for the

nutrition course, you just want to be stubborn or you can't make the time go ahead and go to the fitter.tv F I T R.tv and, uh, sign up for a newsletter. That way we can let you know when we post new podcasts and post new technique wads and, uh, just all the other stuff that we do. That's really awesome. I got to see you next time. Thank you.