The Wellness Scoop - How to Fuel Your Body

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

We’re joined by Anita Bean, registered nutritionist and author, to discuss how to fuel our bodies properly to best support exercise. We discuss: The rise in plant-based high-performance athletes How a plant-based diet can support athletic performance Is soya harmful or beneficial? The performance-enhancing effect of caffeine Pre-workout meals and snacks Why fasted training might not be healthy How to build a balanced meal to optimise training Post-exercise hydration and nutrition The relationship between ketogenic diets and performance Anita Bean: https://anitabean.co.uk ‘The Vegan Athlete’s Cookbook’ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, I'm Ella Mills, the founder of Deliciously Ella, and this is our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better. Each episode explores various aspects of our mental and our physical health to help you make the small simple changes to your life to feel both happier and healthier. And today we're going to be looking at fueling our bodies and what we need to be thinking about diet wise for exercise and performance. There are so many myths about plant-based diets with many people

believing that you can't build muscle and you can't succeed as an athlete if you don't consume animal products but nothing could be further from the truth because we have got very many examples of successful world-class athletes and they find that they experience more energy, that they can recover better, that they experience fewer illnesses and injuries as a result of their plant-based diets. And then scientifically, there is plenty of proof. We know from many studies that a plant-based diet tends to be higher in carbohydrate, and that means that you can optimise your glycogen stores more effectively. That means you're less likely to experience fatigue and you can enhance your endurance capacity.

Before we delve into today's episode, I wanted to introduce you to our sponsor and also a little note on sponsors, which is that we'll only be working with brands that I personally use and personally love and that will never promote something on here that isn't totally authentic or that we don't really, really believe in. So for the next few months, our podcast sponsor is going to be Simprove, a supplements company that I've been using to support my gut health for about five years now. So I've been using it for years and years before I started working with them. I know gut health is such a prevalent topic at the moment, and we're going to have a mini episode specifically on eating for gut health at the end of January, as I know it's something so many of you are interested in too. The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of bacteria that support pretty much all aspects of our mental and physical health from digestion to our immune system, energy production,

and mental health. And keeping the right balance of good bacteria in our gut is just so important our diet and life cells have a huge impact on that but adding in live bacteria can really help too the bacteria in simprove which is a water-based supplement can really survive the long journey from the mouth to the gut where they can then multiply and support our microbiome i truly swear by it and i hope you love it too for anyone wanting to try it they've shared a 15% off code with us so you just need to use Ella15 which is valid on Simprove.com for new customers based in the UK but they also have a subscribers package if you're an existing customer. Our guest today Anita Bean is the official nutritionist for the London Marathon and Ride

London and a published author of 30 books, including The Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition and her latest title, The Vegan Athlete's Cookbook. Anita knows everything there is to know about fueling our bodies and she's here with us today to help us understand just that. And this is for everybody, regardless of how much physical activity we each do. So welcome, Anita. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Hello, it's lovely to meet you. Thank you very much for having me on. Oh, it's honestly such a pleasure. And obviously everything that you do with nutrition and your passion for movement and well-being speaks to us hugely, me on a personal

level and us at Delicious Yellow. And I wondered if you could share what was it that got you interested in nutrition and sports? Was there anything in particular? Yeah, I first got into sports nutrition very many years ago. It really stemmed from my interest in fitness and bodybuilding, which I took up in the early 1980s whilst I was studying for my nutrition degree, actually, at university. Whilst I was training, it became really clear that nutrition plays a huge role in performance and body composition. So I did my degree whilst I was training. And bearing in mind in those days, it was extremely unusual for females to train with weights.

It was always unheard of, especially for I was vegetarian at the time. So that was really unusual. But during the early part of my career, I was working with some well-known track and field athletes. And it was apparent that there was practically no information at all for athletes in terms of what they should be eating. So even the top endurance athletes that I was working with,

they were literally just eating carbohydrates and sweets and sugar. And strength athletes that I was working with, they were just eating literally protein and nothing else. So it really became my mission to try and educate athletes and produce accessible information for them. And so I was very lucky, this was in the early 1990s, that I wrote my very first book, The Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition. So that was published in 1993. And originally, it was for athletes just to give them information about nutrition and how to enhance their performance. But now it has become a really recommended textbook on many courses for personal trainers, for coaches, for undergrads and nutrition students.

So that's, yeah, I've had quite a long history in the world of nutrition spanning over about 30 years actually and if you are then looking at your diet which I'm sure lots of people are who are listening to this episode today and they're thinking about optimizing their diet so many people want to do that to fuel their body to have levels of energy and because I think low energy and lethargy are such incredibly common challenges today I wondered if we could talk a bit about optimizing your diet to fuel the body because I think lots of people and chip in with what your thoughts are but I think a lot of people when they're taking a lot of exercise sometimes to start with sometimes are doing it for example

for weight loss and then they're really kind of reducing the number of calories and and perhaps exercising quite a lot without eating in a way that really fuels their body to work really well while they're doing it yeah i mean definitely when when self-exercising perhaps the biggest change that that you've got to think about making in terms of your diet is increasing your energy intake and carbohydrate in particular obviously that will depend on the type the intensity and duration of your exercise but you know carbohydrate of course is the most important fuel for muscle and we know that when when our stores of carbohydrate become depleted, you're more likely to experience fatigue and there'll be a reduction in the intensity of the exercise that you can sustain. So a key strategy for any exercise program is to ensure that you are matching your energy and carbohydrate intake to fuel the demands of your workout. So that really is absolutely critical for optimizing

your body's response to exercises to match your energy input and your carbohydrate intake with the demands of your exercise. And just in very, very broad terms, the more intense the exercise, let's say you're running quite high intensity exercise, you're going to be burning more carbohydrates during that workout. So by limiting your intake of carbs or energy or total calories, then you certainly won't be able to get optimal gains in endurance and strength. So you'll definitely be limiting the benefits of your exercise so I think that probably is the first consideration that you need to make is looking at energy and carbs and then after that you can look at other macronutrients like protein and fats or unsaturated fats more specifically because of course regular exercise does increase your protein requirements certainly for your

exercise and for three times per week or more so we know that you know regular exercises will need approximately double the amount of protein compared to those who are not physically active and then along with that you will also need more more vitamins or more minerals more antioxidants and this is when I talk about high quality foods or a high quality diet I'm really meaning one that is very dense in terms of these micronutrients and the antioxidant nutrients because we need all of these things to facilitate the adaptations of our body to our exercise program. We're talking about protein there in amongst those other requirements and I wondered

if we could just pick up on that because I think again that's in terms of misconceptions and myths I think there's a lot of misconceptions around plant protein and that it can't fuel your body in the way you need. Yeah definitely and you're right actually until quite recently it was believed that animal proteins are more anabolic than plant proteins in other words that they are more if animal proteins are more effective for building muscle compared to plant proteins but these studies are really based on very short-term measurements of muscle protein synthesis so generally the scientists just measured muscle protein synthesis for the three

to five hours after exercise. And this is largely due to the difference in leucine concentration between animal and plant proteins. So leucine is an amino acid, and it's really important for exercises because it triggers muscle protein synthesis, in other words, muscle building. However, if you match the leucine content between, say, a soy protein and whey protein, there is no difference at all in muscle protein synthesis. But actually, what's more relevant is to look at longer term studies. And they basically found that there is no difference when they compared. So for example, there was a meta-analysis of nine studies, which was published in the year 2020. They analysed all the studies that compared soya protein and whey protein.

And the conclusion was that provided you are eating enough tofu protein per day, there is no difference in terms of your strength, in bench press strength for example squat strength between plant versus animal and this really supports early studies that was published in 2018 by Robert Morton which found that provided you hit a threshold of about 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram body weight each day then your protein source is irrelevant so whether you're getting it from plants or animals. And I think the most interesting study was carried out, it was actually published last year, 2021, carried out by researchers at Sao Paulo University in Brazil. They compared 19 long-term vegans with 19 omnivores. They matched their their protein intake so both of them consumed

this magical 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight each day they did 12 weeks of resistance exercise training and they found that after this this exercise training period that both groups gained exactly the same muscle mass and strength so in in other words, there is no difference between plant and animal proteins in your ability to build muscle. And the final thing that I will say, Ella, actually, is that I think that, you know, I'm certainly living testament to that. So I've alluded to my days as a bodybuilder, and then people used to say, well, you can't build much muscle on a plant-based diet. But I did prove them wrong. I went on to win the British Championships, actually, in 1991. So I sort of defied all my critics and showed that,

yes, you can build muscle. And yes, you can perform really well, you know, at an elite level, even in bodybuilding. But no, I'm not the only example. There are plenty of other examples of well-known athletes who consume plant plant-based diet and they build muscle and they're very successful in their sport. Yeah so as that documentary wasn't there on Netflix Game Changers which some of the listeners might have seen as well which was talking exactly what you've been saying about plant-based diets for athletes and a lot of high-profile athletes now Venus Williams, Lewis Hamilton seem to be adopting a plant based diet. So there seems to be a trend there. Is it that

it goes beyond just the plant protein versus animal protein and there are actual benefits of a plant based or predominantly plant based diet for fueling your body that you see in exercise? Yeah, you're completely right that there are a lot of well-known athletes so we know that anecdotally they find that eating plant-based gives them more energy helps them to recover faster they experience fewer illnesses they experience less injury but scientifically we know that there are a number of reasons why a plant-based diet does give you give them that performance advantage firstly plant-based diet does give you give them that performance advantage firstly plant-based diets they tend to be slightly higher in carbohydrates so generally you know a

vegan athlete will will have a higher carbohydrate intake and that helps to optimize glycogen stores and that means that they're going to experience less fatigue they'll be able to maintain power out longer and experience those endurance benefits. The second reason is a plant-based diet is higher in fibre, is higher in phytochemicals such as polyphenols. And that means that you're more likely to have a diverse gut microbiota. In other words, you're feeding all those billions of microbes in the gut. And this is really beneficial for performance and recovery. We know that it reduces post-exercise inflammation, it reduces oxidative stress, and all these things are absolutely critical for supporting our immunity and for supporting optimal recovery. The third reason is that

plant-based diets tend to be higher in antioxidants. So as I've already alluded to the fact, this can help to reduce oxidative stress and therefore improve your post-exercise recovery. And finally, a plant-based diet will be higher in nitrates. So these are found in many vegetables, so particularly green leafy vegetables. And nitrates in the body are converted into nitric oxide, which helps to improve blood flow. So it has a really powerful effect on vascular function, so that better blood flow,

better oxygen delivery to the muscles. So there are really quite a number of ways scientifically that a plant-based diet can support athletic performance. And we certainly know from study, I mean, there's been about a dozen studies in total that have looked at omnivores versus vegans. And essentially, they have all found that a plant-based diet, whether it's vegetarian or vegan, does not put an athlete at any disadvantage at all when it comes to performance. So I think that's really good news. All those sceptics who think that, you know, vegans, you can't perform well, or that they're going to be weak, or that they're going to somehow be disadvantaged. There's no truth, there's no basis to that. It is exciting. As you said, I think there is an extraordinary amount of

confusion and nervousness around a plant-based diet for all the reasons you've listed. And it's exciting to see the science is actually backing up the fact that it's got huge benefits for everyone, whether you are a world-class athlete or just a kind of regular person doing some exercise in the gym a few times a week. But one of the questions we see a lot of the time and I'm sure you see it too is a nervousness around some things I wanted to pick up on some of those now so one of them is soy products because I know obviously in order to hit these higher protein requirements you you probably are going to be consuming soy protein um tofu tempeh etc and I think tofu in in particular, is an ingredient that people have a lot of concerns around the supposed link, for example, between soya and breast cancer. Could you tell

us a little bit about the evidence that exists there? Yeah, absolutely. Now, first of all, first and foremost, just to cut to the chase, there's absolutely no evidence that soya raises the risk of breast cancer or any other type of cancer but I think those fears stemmed from early studies that were carried out with rodents and they fed rodents a very high intake of isolated isoflavones so these are the phytonutrients or the sometimes called phytoestrogens which have got a similar structure to oestrogen but these soya isoflavones have got a very much weaker effect on the body it's something like 100th of the effect compared to the body's own oestrogen so really these studies were completely irrelevant to humans and carried out on rodents they were fed very unusual quantities of isolated phytoestrogens so they bear very little

relevance so what we do know in fact there was a review that was carried out in 2019 and they've actually linked soya intake to a lower risk of cancer of certain cancers and lower blood cholesterol levels and even showing that there may be benefits of consuming soy for for menopausal women to help them to reduce certain symptoms like hot flushes so yeah the overall conclusion was that in fact soy that you find in tofu edamame beans and so on may actually be protective against breast cancer and certain breast cancer recurrence as well so yeah I think that's a myth that really does need to die. I totally agree and I find it absolutely fascinating how prominent it is but it's so deeply ingrained now it feels challenging to shift but picking up on that a

little bit further I think there's a few questions I'd love to ask because I think there's preconceptions and perhaps myths that exist around some of these things as well and I wondered what the evidence is about caffeine and performance and training does it really give you more energy or not so much? Yeah so caffeine is actually a drug it acts on the central nervous system i. the brain, as well as the peripheral nervous system. And its main mode of action is that it blocks a substance called adenosine. So this is something that all our body cells produce all day long, and it cross-serves the brain. So basically, what caffeine does, it blocks adenosine, it stops it getting into the brain. So adenosine would normally make you feel rather tired, rather sleepy. If you're blocking that, then caffeine means that you're going to increase

alertness. And during exercise, it helps to reduce your perception of effort. So exercise actually feels easier. And it can mask fatigue, it can allow you to continue exercising for longer and harder. And it can also increase your endorphins as well. So we know that caffeine does, it's been very, very widely studied, literally hundreds of studies. So we know from a meta-analysis actually, which was published in 2018, where they looked at 46 of the most prominent studies on caffeine and exercise. And overall, they concluded that caffeine can enhance your performance by between 2% and 4% in very many sports, endurance sports and high-intensity sports. So I think there's sort of firm evidence behind caffeine.

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Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com. But in terms of the amount that you would need to consume to get a performance enhancing effect, this is what's really, really interesting. So until recently, we all thought it's quite high doses. It was between three and six milligrams of caffeine per kilogram amount of caffeine which is quite a lot and I don't think I'd be able to stand up if I had two double expressos just before exercise but what's really interesting now is more recently they've discovered that if you have a lower dose of caffeine between one and three milligrams per kilogram body weight provided you consume that with some kind of carbohydrate in other words you know most foods it could be you know it could be a banana it could be a sports gel whatever you like but you can have a performance enhancing effect for a very much lower dose so you can get this caffeine either from coffee you can get it from tablets or gels

from certain sports drinks and certain gels. But the only problem with getting your caffeine from coffee is that you don't really know how much caffeine is in there. It varies enormously depending what kind of coffee it is. But you can do that with to 60 minutes, either before your event or perhaps midway during a long event like a half marathon, a marathon or a bike ride. So it takes roughly 30 to 60 minutes for it to peak in the bloodstream. So that can produce this performance enhancing effect. And the final thing that I'd like to say is that actually not everyone responds in the same way to caffeine. So we know that there is a variation on a gene that makes you either a fast metabolizer or a slow metabolizer. And it's only the fast metabolizers that respond to coffee or caffeine. So if you find that, you know, really caffeine has a negligible effect on how you feel, your mood, your energy levels, you may well be a slow metabolizer. So in other words, caffeine,

unfortunately, doesn't work for you in terms of performance. So, you know, that's something to bear in mind that it's not something that everybody will benefit from. And in terms of what you could eat before doing exercise, even just simple everyday exercise, is that something that you want to be quite aware of? Anything in particular that supports the body? Yeah, definitely. I mean, certainly fueling before exercise is really important. It gives you the energy to perform. It allows you to achieve your workout goals, whether that's endurance whether that's strength but it's also important to appreciate at this point that it's not just

the meal before exercise that affects your performance it's actually the food that you eat in the hours and even the days before your exercise so in terms of what to eat well obviously the amount that you eat will really depend on the intensity and duration of your planned exercise session. So you'll need to adjust your carb intake. But just to give you a rule of thumb, you'll need to include some carbohydrate-rich foods. We're talking about potatoes or pasta or rice or oats, actually. So you need to include a carbohydrate-rich foods and then a smaller amount of protein and fat and having those three components together means that you will get sustained energy the problem with having too much fat or too much protein it means that they

they slow stomach emptying and slow digestion and the other thing that you want to avoid before exercise is having too much fiber especially if your gut is quite sensitive, you're more prone to gut problems during exercise. So for most people, perhaps avoiding lots of fibre in the 30 minutes before exercise is really quite important. But I can give you some examples actually if you like of some pre-exercise meals and snacks that would be really suitable. I mean, this is not prescriptive, this is just a suggestion. So a suitable pre-exercise meal that you could have, say, two to four hours before exercise could be perhaps either a baked potato or a sweet potato, which you can have with hummus. It could be a simple rice dish, such as a chickpea pilaf, or it could be perhaps a pasta with lentil bolognese. So all of those meals, they're quite rich in carbohydrate, but they're quite low in fat and

there's only a little bit of protein in there. And then a pre-exercise snack could be a banana, it could be an oat bar, a fruit and nut bar, it could be perhaps a smoothie that's made with berries and bananas, it could be porridge, it could be gran bar. It could be perhaps a smoothie that's made with berries and bananas. It could be porridge. It could be granola. It could be some dried fruit like medjool dates or dried apricots. So a pre-exercise snack you would have perhaps about 30 minutes approximately before an exercise session, especially if it's been, say, three or four hours or longer since your last meal. So, it's not compulsory. You know, say you've had lunch at one o'clock, two o'clock, and then you want to work out at five o'clock. You won't want to have a meal beforehand, but then it's been

several hours since lunchtime. So, having a pre-exercise snack about 30 minutes before that session will help to just give you that a little bit of energy boost, just increase your blood glucose levels enough to sustain you through your session. And what about fasted training? It's something you see quite a lot about at the moment. It seems to be, you know, some people would argue quite a lot for some advantages and other people disadvantages. As far as I've come across, there's quite a lot of literature and conversation about faster training perhaps not always being fantastic for women? Yeah absolutely I'm not a fan at all so the idea behind faster training is to encourage the body to burn a higher percentage of energy from fat and to reduce the reliance on glycogen or carbohydrate. The reason why a lot of people

do it is to try and lose weight, but some people will do it to try and enhance endurance training adaptations. The main problem about faster training is that, first of all, exercise will feel harder and therefore it will definitely compromise your intensity and volume. In other words, you'll find that you just won't be able to exercise as hard, you know. So if I'm, say I'm on a bike, and I'm doing it in a faster set, I just know that I can't get the same power output as I would do if I am doing it after consuming something. So you're more likely to fatigue sooner and have a lower overall energy expenditure. The second thing is that it is not an effective weight loss strategy. So you won't

necessarily lose weight. The only way you would lose weight is if you're overall in an energy deficit over several days. So just doing your workouts in faster state isn't the best way to create this overall energy deficit or a goal and then you're absolutely right you've alluded to hormone disruption and that is literally what happens if you are trying to do a workout with low stores of glycogen it's very stressful for the body you're going to get an increase in cortisol levels and that will disrupt hormonal output particularly if you're doing this workout after workout. So, you know, the odd workout probably will be fine,

but if you're doing this repeatedly, it can lead to disruption in hormonal output and an increase. You know, I'm talking about reproductive hormones and estrogen for females and testosterone for males, your output can actually go down. And that can have really quite severe, harmful, both short-term and long-term health effects on the body. So generally, I don't recommend doing faster training. And generally, I don't recommend following a low-carb diet, certainly not on a long-term basis. And that seems particularly relevant for, which I'm sure people can really

relate to, very busy modern life, perhaps stressful job, lack of time, and then you haven't really eaten properly all day, and then you go to the gym and you do a really intense session and your body just becomes quite depleted. Absolutely. I mean, I think fasted training is fine if you are doing, you know, relatively low intensity, you know, fairly gentle workouts. So let's say, let's say it's first thing in the morning and you want to exercise before breakfast. Well, that's fine if it's, you know, sort of low to moderate intensity, it's unlikely to have any, you know, any effect because when you're exercising at you know that low intensity you're getting most of your energy actually from your fat stores and so having quite low

liver glycogen stores won't really make a great deal of difference to your performance but you're you're absolutely right Ella that if you're trying to you've got busy lifestyles that already your stress levels are quite high you know Your sympathetic nervous system is being stressed. And then you do a full-on workout, a high-intensity workout in the gym. That's adding to the stress that's imposed upon the sympathetic nervous system. And that will have an effect on your hormonal system as well. So that isn't healthy. You're putting it so brilliantly it's so

easy to follow and I think really inspiring to think about ways you can simply and I guess most importantly from everything you've said sensibly look after your body and I wanted to sort of putting this in a real life setting for someone who wants to look at their diabetes maybe feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the information that's out there all the varying different bits of advice what do you suggest that they start with to help fuel their bodies are there any kind of top nutrition tips or ways of thinking about putting meals together that you really recommend yeah I mean quite honestly you can't go wrong with getting the basics right and in fact nearly with everybody whom I advise, I think it's really worth taking things back to basics. Because you're right, there's so much

information out there and people get really carried away. They want to follow the latest keto diet, low carb diet, paleo diet, and they're always experimenting with things. But getting the basics right. So what that means is that each meal should contain four main components so is there a source of carbohydrates so when i'm talking about carbs i'm talking about you know the healthier carbs or the nutrient-rich carbs like potatoes oats rice pasta fruit a source of protein so you know we're talking about plant-based nutrition here. So we're talking about tofu, edamame, beans, pulses, the beans, lentils, chickpeas, falafels, hummus, and nuts and seeds are also in that category and plant-based milks and yogurts. So that's your second category.

And then the third category are your fruit and vegetables. And the fourth category are the unsaturated fats. So that's avocados, olive oil, rapeseed oil, nuts and seeds. So in terms of the proportions, I was to say if you are having a fairly easy workout day or even a recovery day, I mean, not really doing very much. So about half your plate should be filled with your fruit and veg, about a quarter with the carbs, about a quarter with protein, and then a little bit of the unsaturated fats within that. But if you are working out harder, so let's say you're doing an hour's workout, then you need to think about increasing the amount of energy and carbohydrate in that meal. So you need to up the carbohydrates. And then if you are having a really heavy training day, so let's say you've got an event,

maybe you're doing a 10K or a half marathon, or you're doing a two-hour bike ride, then carbs will probably occupy about half of your plate. And then fruit and veg about a quarter and the protein about a quarter. So in other words, there's a lot more emphasis there on the energy-giving foods. foods because remember carbohydrate is muscle fuel and you need that if you're trying to exercise without enough carbohydrate it can actually cause not only fatigue but also it can

cause more muscle damage as well so that's the first thing and then the second thing that I'd really like to emphasis is to focus on your post-exercise refuelling. So I suppose that the best way to think about post-exercise refuelling, there are three goals, which I call the three R's, and that stands for rehydrate, refuel and repair or rebuild. So we're talking about rehydrating with fluid, and then we're talking about refueling with carbohydrates and that helps to replenish the glycogen fuel that you've burnt during exercise and then the repairing is with protein so you need to get all of those elements into your post-exercise refueling snack or meal and ideally you know with nutrient-rich foods that are rich in antioxidants as well. So think in terms of smoothies.

So we've got lots of lovely recipes for homemade smoothies that could be made from berries are brilliant because they're really rich in polyphenols that help to promote recovery. So smoothies made with berries, with bananas, perhaps with some spinach as well, and with plant-based milks or plant-based yogurts as well. One of my favourite post-exercise refuelling snacks is actually a bowl of yoghurt, you know I'm talking about plant-based yoghurt with berries, maybe a little bit of honey, maybe some peanut butter or

almond butter as well. So it's really simple, really easy but incredibly good for you and incredibly good for promoting that all-important recovery after exercise. I love that and I love how simple the suggestions you're giving are. Anita, I have one last question because I can't not ask you because you mentioned in that the very first bit of the answer about a ketogenic diet and I know that's something that kind of pops up all over the place at the moment it's a big trend in the kind of well-being space I'm going to be totally honest and say I'm not a fan but I would I would love to hear your opinion yeah absolutely so ketogenic diet actually I'll just just for the benefit of people who might not

know exactly what it is I think it's been conflated with anything that's lowish carbohydrate it's actually a keto diet it's actually a really high fat diet and very low carbs so fat is usually about 80 percent carbohydrate i'm definitely not a fan so the thinking behind it is that it encourages the body to burn more fat and so you end up fueling your workouts mostly you're kind of training your body to rely more on fat and less glycogen so you're trying to conserve glycogen. So I've already alluded to this when we talked about faster training, but the thinking is that it can enhance endurance training adaptations. In other words, it can increase the number of mitochondria. This is the powerhouses of the cell. It can increase fat burning, enzyme activity. So the theory sounds plausible. However, this is the reality is that there is actually

no evidence that a ketogenic diet ultimately enhances high intensity endurance performance. Exercise feels harder at any given intensity, and it can actually reduce your ability to burn carbohydrates at high exercise intensities. So even if you're an endurance athlete, so let's say you're a cyclist or you're a runner, but there'll be a point where you want to sprint up a hill. If you're on the bike, you might want to overtake somebody. You might want to get into that finishing straight and put on a little bit of a sprint, but you'll lose that ability if you're following a keto diet all of the time. So it kind of knocks out your fifth gear. So it might be okay if all you're doing

is just really going low intensity work, but it's not for high intensity work at all. It can actually cause muscle loss, increases protein oxidation. I've already talked about how it can increase cortisol. It can decrease your immunity and disrupt hormones. And perhaps the best study actually that it was carried out by a group of Australian researchers led by Louise Burke who is really a world-renowned

sports nutritionist well they compared a low-carb diet with a high-carb diet amongst some race walkers. So these are world class elite race walkers for three weeks. And although both groups, they did increase their endurance because they were on a strict training regime. But what they found was that the low carb group actually reduced their energy and metabolic efficiency. They needed more oxygen to produce energy and it basically impaired their race performance so there is really no evidence that a ketogenic diet improves performance unless of course you know so the only exception is if you're just doing low intensity work maybe you are an ultra endurance athlete and maybe if you suffer from gut problems it may help to reduce the need to take on board carbs during those long distance events there's a practice a strategy that we we

use a lot nowadays it's called fuel for the work required so whenever you're doing high intensity work you ensure that you're consuming a high intake carb hydrate beforehand and that means that you'll be able to get a lot more out of that session. So in other words, you'll get better training benefits and better training adaptations. And elite athletes sometimes use strategic carbohydrate periodization, which means that for their low intensity sessions, they'll do that with low carbs, the high intensity sessions, they'll do that with a high carb intake. Very, very interesting. And I wondered, Anita, if you, as we wrap up, could share three take homes for our listeners, the three things that you wish everyone knew about the importance of

fueling your body properly. Oh, okay. So first of all, really important that you think about fueling your body to match the energy demands of your activities. So we're talking about eating enough carbohydrate before and after training. So it's very much about adding in food and it's not, you should never think about exercise in terms of restriction. Second thing is to prioritise your post-exercise recovery nutrition and the easiest way to do that is to remember the three R's, which stand for rehydrate, refuel and repair. And the third thing, especially if you are on a plant-based diet, is to ensure that you're

getting enough protein each day. Remember that your requirement goes up when you exercise regularly. So aim for about 20 grams in each meal and ensure that you get that from a wide variety of different plant sources. And what's the one thing that you do every day, Anita, to help you feel better? The podcast is, of course, called Delicious Ways to Feel feel better and I wondered if there's one practice in your diet or your general well-being routine for your mental health as well is that one thing that you do every day yeah there is something I've been doing probably for the last 20 or 30 years and I'll continue to do for the rest of my life and that is I have a sort of a 10 minute rule so I aim to do 10 minutes of yoga or yoga like stretching first thing in the morning so when I say 10 minutes it means that I set myself a

really low bar it means oh it's always achievable it's always doable it never feels daunting so I always spend 10 minutes doing yoga no matter how much of a rush that I'm in so if you just say 10 minutes everybody's got 10 minutes in the morning no no matter how pressurised you are. And sometimes it extends longer, it might end up being 20 minutes or 30 minutes. But by saying to myself 10 minutes, then I never set myself up for failure. And the benefits it brings me for the rest of the day are huge. It brings calmness, brings stillness, allows me to focus better, it helps to energise me and helps me to feel more centred at the start of each day. I love how accessible that the 10 minute part of it is. I've been doing something quite similar recently and it's amazing what 10 minutes

can do. I think we can all be quite quick to dismiss the fact that it couldn't really have an impact so short but actually as you said it really really can well anita thank you so much for your time today i'll put all the details of all your different books in the show notes if anyone wants to find out a bit more about anita and her work but otherwise have a lovely day everyone and thank you so much for listening. or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.