WHOOP Podcast - Calories: Nutritionist Kassandra Hobart joins Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo to discuss exactly what calories are, how your body uses them, the challenges in tracking them, plus tips for being smarter and healthier with how you consume them.

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

Nutritionist Kassandra Hobart chats with WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes and Director of Analytics Emily Capodilupo about the science of calorie tracking, including what calories really are (4:01), basal metabolic rate and the ways your body burns calories (4:26), a recent update to improve how WHOOP tracks caloric burn (9:04), food label inaccuracies and other things that make calorie counting difficult (11:09), if weighing food helps (14:50), why eating slowly and in a restful state is so important (18:16), general guidelines for where your calories should come from (22:56) and why this varies depending on your goals (25:06), why food timing matters (29:12), how calories affect your sleep (32:18), and the biggest misconceptions people have about calories (38:55).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world, to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve.

What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? And now that we've just launched all-new Woopstrap 3.0 featuring WOOP Live, which takes real-time training and recovery analysis to the next level, you're going to hear how many of these users are optimizing their body with whoop and with other things in their life. On this podcast, we dig deeper. We interview experts. We interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the

Whoop podcast. So I think that we need to get away from this quantity approach and more look at quality. One thing that is good about weighing and measuring food is it gives you a better understanding of how nutrient dense your food is. I believe that that is more important than if you're calorie counting what's going in and what's going out because what you're eating and how you're eating it matters a lot. What's up, folks? Today's episode is all about calories. Calories. All right. Our VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes and Director of Analytics, Emily Capulupo, are joined by nutritionist Cassandra Hobart

to take a deep dive into the science of calorie tracking. You're going to want to listen to this. Kristen, Emily, and Cassandra explore exactly what calories are and how your body uses them, as well as the difficulties that arise with trying to count them, both coming in and going out. They also discuss a recent update to the Woop app to improve the way we track our caloric burn, as well as some general tips for how to be smarter and healthier with the calories you're putting in your body. Without further ado, here are Kristen, Emily, and Cassandra. Hi, everyone. I'm Kristen Holmes, Woop Vice President of Performance, and I'm here with our lovely director of analytics, Emily Capital Lupo.

Hi. We also have a very special guest with us, Cassandra Hobart. She's a nutritionist from M to Performance Nutrition. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. Glad you could join us. Cassandra will talk a little bit about her background, but she's a CrossFit athlete and an expert in our topic of discussion today, which is centered around calories.

We're going to talk about the science of calorie tracking, including what calories are and how your body burns them, the challenges that arise with counting them, as well as, the method whoop uses to do this and some of our recent innovations and improvements around our algorithm. So to start, Cassandra, why don't you give us a quick background? Sure. So I've been working as a nutritionist full time for M2 Performance Nutrition for the last two years. And then before that I worked for my local CrossFit gym as a nutritionist for gosh, maybe four years. It's been a wonderful part of my journey. So you've been thinking about food a lot. A lot. I love food, all different kinds. Nice, nice. Yeah. Well, really happy to have you here today. Thank you. Great. So why don't we dig in and just talk quickly. What exactly are calories? Sure. Calories are a unit of energy.

They're short. They're our fuel. You know, they're a way that we are able to do our daily functions. Anything from breathing to working out, we get our energy from these calories. Being able to quantify it in a unit is what it's all about. Nice. We'll talk a little bit more just kind of how to think about calories generally. But also, can you talk about BMR, basal metabolic rate and kind of how that factors in and how we need to think about that? Sure. So your basal metabolic rate is like your very, very basic need or energy need for living. So anything like breathing your digestion, so just swallowing food, anything like that comes from your basal metabolic rate. And so you need a certain level of calories to function. What happens is you wake up in the

the morning and just stand up out of bed or even just like when you first notice that you're waking up, your basal metabolic rate is at work. It's already working in that perspective. So you're using calories and in particular the energy unit ATP to make those things happen for you every day. You know, your BMR is really the best baseline so that we can calculate things on top of it too. So not only is it going to be a great way to learn what you need, but then on top of it, how can we add in activity and perform at our best level? It all comes back down to your basal metabolic rate. If you're not doing that and able to learn what you need there,

it's hard to build off that baseline. And there's a lot of factors that go into BMR, right? Establishing that baseline. For sure. Your height, your weight, if you want to expand on that a little bit. Yeah, sure. So you mentioned two really good ones. So you're like your height, your weight, your age,

getting into things like where you're living, your environment around you, your epigenetics, and I know we all talk a little bit more about this, but individually your genes and how they're being expressed, like that matters for your BMR. Right. So, Emily, how does WOOP specifically calculates BMR? WOOP is sort of limited with the information that we have. So we currently calculate BMR as a function of your age, your reported gender, your height and your weight. And we have a formula that we've developed to predict BMR from that. We can use this formula to get a pretty good estimate of BMR, but it's actually somewhat imperfect. We know that the error on it is about sort of plus or

minus 200 calories. And so one thing that we're really excited about is there's a recent partnership with Pinotie, which does sort of metabolic testing and allow us to sort of ingest third-party BMR data in order to make that even more accurate going forward, because most online calculators and most wearables are doing this, like, you know, something similar to what we're doing right now, so the function of your height, weight, age, gender, and that's like okay, but they're actually using your height and weight as a proxy for your lean muscle mass, which is a much better predictor. It's just most people don't know what it is. But if you measured your lean muscle mass, you could get a much more accurate prediction of BMR. And then even that's sort of a proxy for measuring

gas exchange at rest directly, which is what PinotI can do for us. And so we're really excited using height and weight, which is a poor proxy, or sort of at the limit of what this sort of imperfect information can provide. And so the sort of ability to get more perfect information in order to make our calorie count more accurate in the coming months is really exciting. Right. How did we actually improve the algorithm to kind of do all of this better? And what does that actually mean for WOOP users?

So beyond kind of the integration with Pinot and kind of what that means for the future, super exciting. Just this kind of short-term fix. How do you want to explain that? Sure. So Cassandra was actually kind of hinting at this a couple of minutes ago, but we burn calories sort of in three ways. So there's your basal metabolic rate. Those are the calories that you burn just to stay alive. Then there's the thermic effect of food, which is sort of all the calories we spend in order to extract nutrients and energy from the food we eat. So that's the calories that go into chewing, the calories that go into peristols, which is like the smushing that your stomach does in order to like break food down further and then absorption. And we, depending on the food, you actually

can spend like a lot of the calories that you're ingesting just on sort of getting the rest of them. So like certain proteins you can spend 25 to 30 percent of the calories just on sort of breaking them down. It's an effortful task on our system to adjust. It's a lot of work to eat. So, you know, next time you're eating and somebody asks you, like, what you're doing, the answer is not nothing. You're busy. But anyhow, so that's a thermic effect of food. And then there's what we call active burn. And so that's like the calories that you expend to do anything above the bare minimum, except for the ones that are spent eating the thermic effect. And so in the recent update that we released on November 6th, we just changed the active burn

part of our equation. So the BMR part didn't change at all. We don't really deal with the thermic effective food because we don't know what you're eating. So we just changed the active burn person and we just really changed the lowest end of that. Not so much when you're working out, but like right when you're sort of above baseline. So the sort of think the activity level of playing fetch with your dog, washing your car, kind of you're definitely doing something, but you're not really working all that hard. And so what we had noticed was that we were over-predicting calories sort of in that range. Like, most of the literature out there that sort of has studied the relationship between

caloric consumption and heart rate has actually only been developed by data collected on much higher heart rates. So, like, think about, like, going for a run or playing a game of basketball, and very little data has been collected on, like, these really low heart rates. And so they just take the equations that they develop on the high heart rates and blindly extend them higher and lower to sort of cover the range of all possible heart rates, but never actually validated it in that lower range. And so most of the other, like if you just go on to like any online calculator, they're all using these same equations. They're developed in 2005,

and they just dramatically overestimate color consumption at like the lower end. And so one of the things that WOOP can do, which is really cool, is, you know, we're collecting like millions of workouts. And so we have this really big data set that we can look at and sort of find these discrepancies that these studies, which only look at like, you know, a dozen people at. at a time kind of miss. And so we just corrected the equations in order to kind of bring that range of heart rates kind of more in line with what actually seemed

to make a lot more sense. Right. Emily just wrote a really great blog post that kind of outlines the specifics around kind of what we've done to change the calorie information on that you see on the Woop app. I think what was interesting is people and the feedback that we kind of got from the article

is that people are actually really surprised at how imprecise calculations related to calories are just generally. So I think it would be great. I think just to spend a couple minutes on just talking about some of these challenges that exist with food labels, you know, and just again, you know, you outlined Emily just how complicated the system is in terms of really under, and to be able to give this actual number. These are actually how many calories you've burned is really challenging. And so I'd love to just dig in for a second and just kind of talk about what are those challenges that they really do exist as it relates to kind of getting that number. So, I mean, this is sort of like both sides of this equation are highly flawed, right? It's really hard to know from. a sort of wrist-worn device and how many calories you're burning. The only way to get that information accurately would be to sort of put a mask over your face and measure your oxygen

exchange, which nobody wants to do 24-7. So it's not like a practical solution, but that's sort of how you would do it. But if you sort of want to abstract that away and sort of use this proxy of heart rate, you're going to end up with it's sort of probably 10% error bar on the whole thing. We think that practically that that's an acceptable error bar because if you you actually try to like action this information, the error bar on the other side of the equation is way higher. So the FDA requires that all food labels are within 20% of the actual amount of calories that they claim. And then they actually don't even enforce or police this requirement at all. The only way that you'd ever get found out is like if a competitor sued you and then they like tested it.

But there's no like active regulation of this. And a bunch of studies have actually gone and like tested common foods or like major restaurant chains. and found that not only do they tend to exceed that 20% limit, but they tend to exceed it by being too low because that obviously makes their products more attractive. I think it's also important to understand that this isn't because companies are being intentionally misleading all the time or being lazy in their measurements or anything,

but actually food varies quite a bit. And so the more your food is food, a natural product, there's going to be natural variation. And so we see that like the calories on like salads tend to be off buy more from like their reported labels than like the calories on a Snickers bar because a Snickers bar is a very consistent product. It's sort of always the same thing. And so it's pretty easy to know how many calories are going to be in that. But if you're like getting a salad from a restaurant chain that report the certain number of calories, like it could have if you get one

chef on Tuesday, he's a little bit more heavy handed with the nuts, you know, different chefs more heavy handed with something else or they're running low on some ingredient. And so, you know, put in a little bit less than they normally do. And so you get like much more variation. A good point that too is that different chefs or at different restaurants, they'll definitely pick something subconsciously even, you know, what they like to do for a complicated food like a salad. The more you get, more ingredients you have, the more likely that it's going to be more in precise with the calories, even if it is whole food based. It also matters how it was cooked. Is it raw or is it cooked? Is it sauteed? Is it boiled? Again, that will also change how much calories are in it. And then

even so how you're measuring the calories matters you made a good point that different restaurants different companies will as long as they report within 20% the FDA is cool of it and it's true you know the FDA doesn't even regulate like how they're measuring it there's like up to five different ways that you could you know measure the calories and the FDA is totally hands off with like how they do it even and there's no regulation around that so now you have different calories from just how you're measuring it There's no consistency year over year, you know, for a company to measure it the same way. And on top of it, the more you have for ingredients in a particular food, even if it is whole food base and we get away from that argument of refined sugars, you still don't know how much

you're really ingesting as far as energy goes, your fuel. Yeah, so count of calories is fraught with issues, right, which I know is going to be concerning for probably some users. That's core to kind of how they think about intake. Is weighing the alternative? What are your thoughts on that, Cassandra? I think that weighing can be good for a couple of reasons because it does get you maybe a tiny bit closer to understanding what's in your food. As far as calories are concerned, you'd have to weigh each individual ingredient, say, in the salad or in the stew to have an understanding.

But you're still taking an average. So like, for instance, if you're weighing your protein and we use the calculation that one gram of protein is going to be four calories, well, that four calories is an average. You know, it's not necessarily four calories exactly. And then also what you're eating, you know, that four grams of or one gram of protein is going to be different than what you absorb. So you're not even getting that four calories for that protein. It's probably a step in the right direction for some people who want to learn what's more involved in their food.

But I don't think that it gets closer to how many calories are in each individual food item you're getting. Because again, you still go back to the imprecision between like your cooking, raw foods, and then just what labels you're going off of, whether it's a website or something that a company put out. So just given kind of a lot of these challenges that exist, you know, what are some strategies that you would recommend folks employ to just a more holistic view about what they're putting in their body and under-eating, overeating, you know, how do you kind of strike that balance knowing that it's really difficult to kind of quantify, not to mention it would take a lot of time.

And again, there's imprecision. You know, what from your viewpoint and kind of how you're working with various athletes, like what do you recommend? Sure. So I think that we need to get away from this quantity approach and more look at quality. One thing that is good about weighing and measuring food is it gives you a better understanding of how nutrient dense your food is. I believe that that is more important than if you're calorie counting what's going in and what's going out, because what you're eating and how you're eating it matters a lot. You know, it'll matter for your performance athletes. So for instance, having a meal that has a protein, carb, and fat, and it's also, you know, cooked at home. It's not fried. And you're able to sit for 10 to 15 minutes and

slowly chew each bite and put yourself in a very calm state while you're eating it and digesting. That is like going to be way better for you, you know, as a performance athlete, even if you're trying to lose weight or gain weight, then focusing more on calories of a particular meal at a particular restaurant. So it kind of goes back to looking at it from a quality perspective are my food's nutrient dense does that mean that per bite i'm getting more of a micro and macro nutrient profile am i getting my vitamins and minerals because these are the things are going to affect our metabolism they specifically go into the cells into the mitochondria we're actually making the ATP and make it run more efficient and better so even at our cellular level it's more

important to have nutrient dense food than it is to worry about am i a little bit in a calorie deficit or am I in a calorie surplus, and that can change, you know, day to day, too, because your metabolism is going to change day to day, going back to your resting metabolic rate, and even you spoke about neat, you know, your non-exercise, activity thermogenesis, that's going to change day to day. So let's worry less about being precise on your calories and calories out and being more in tune with your body. You make such a great point in terms of just your mindset, right, when you sit down to have a

meal, you mentioned chewing slowly, right? But I think getting into this parasympathetic state is really important, right, where you're reducing your heart rate. You know, you don't want to be flooding your system with cortisol and ever in an adrenaline. And, you know, so I think when you do sit down to eat, trying to be calm and be mindful and, you know, chew your food slowly. I think we're putting ourselves in a state then where we can actually efficiently digest our food by activating that parasympathetic response. Absolutely. And that's one thing I love about whoop is that you guys really do a good job of explaining and understanding how important that parasympathetic system. is. And we need it. You know, we need it for digestion. We need it for absorption. If we want to

absorb more of our food, then we need to be calm when we're eating it. I have to say, like, I'm guilty of not doing that too, you know, like it's so easy in this busy lifestyle to, you know, eat your car. You're eating in your car. You're standing up, hovering over the computer, trying to eat and trying to, like, I don't know, wash the dishes at the same time. Crank out some emails. Crank out some emails. Like, you're just all over the place. So it's so easy to get wrapped up in eating while you're hungry, but not really taking the time to rest and digest. And I think that's really, really important for all of our athletes out there who want to reap the benefits of eating nutrient-dense foods because it's about the quality and it's about what you're absorbing.

And to get the most out of that, you definitely need to be in a calm, relaxed state. And one tip I use a lot with my athletes is you need to be chewing each bite like 10 to 15 times. Oh man, I need to work on that. Hey, you know, it's one of those things, but you'll notice a couple of things is that, one, you're going to probably be full a little bit sooner because you're getting more per bite. And two, you're going to feel better not only in the next hour, but in the next three to four hours because you're a little bit more balanced as far as what happens during digestion and absorption, especially of carbohydrates. So the whole point here is just be more mindful.

And the more mindful you are, probably the better choices you're going to make. And because you're a little bit more connected with what your body needs. And I think that's probably, am I sum of that up? Yeah, absolutely. That's definitely it. So you want to be more connected because then you can be in more in tune with. What are you craving? How is your body feeling?

Because these other biofeedback markers, they're important. So you'll be able to, you know, hopefully eat better, eat more higher quality food. So we're talking about proteins, vegetables, nuts and seeds, fruits, some starches, some natural oils, like, things like that. And then on top of it, you're going to be able to sleep. better because you're able to get your body in that rest and relaxation mode versus being so cortisol heavy, I bet if you're going from one thing to the next and not ever letting your body kind of come down. And I think that's what I find in my athletes is they start to sleep better. Their choices

are a little bit better because they're craving some of these vegetables versus just focusing on something quick, you know, when you start to use your taste buds, when you start to connect your microbiome to what you're eating. So in that sense, those little gut bugs that are living in there, and yet we don't know, you know, that much about them yet. It's such a new area of study in nutrition science. We know enough that it's important to have a good balance. And so when we're eating more whole foods and eating them slowly, those good gut bugs are able to grow and help us absorb more nutrients.

Yeah, I think you make a good point, you know, in the sense that nutrition science, it's super complicated, right? And it's very, very unique to each individual. You know, how you respond to carbohydrates is going to be different to me. It's going to be different to Emily. You know, it's based on our genetics and our activity, our lifestyle. There's a lot of influences, right? Is there a way, you know, for folks to kind of think about, all right, I've got, it's complex.

It's very individual. You know, what are some steps that I can take to really understand what I need to be putting in my body in order to optimize my performance? Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that the very baseline you want to stick to Whole Foods, which we kind of talked about. Limiting refined sugars, right? It's really core. limit refined sugars, limit liquid sugars. Look at what you're drinking. You know, we don't want to be drinking things like sodas or teas or sugar tea. Because we process it when we drink liquids,

it's a very different process than if we're actually eating sugars. Most folks don't know that, right? But there's some really interesting research as of late around that. Yeah, I mean, so everyone's going to process it differently. But in general, yes, if you're drinking liquid sugar, man, more harmful. That's, you know, that's going to just raise that blood sugar like crazy for most of us, which is going to cause such a higher insulin response. In general, we want to be insulin sensitive. So, yeah, you know, you want to keep that quality high. And I think a good place to start, too, is a good rule of thumb is 30% of your calories come from protein, 30% of your calories come from fat, and 40% come from carbs. Now, that's before we kind of look at any of the other factors or your goals,

but that's a good baseline to start. Can testing kind of help us refine those percent? Again, getting back to the individual, you know, if you do some gut microbiome testing, for example, or some genetic testing to understand kind of your origin and how you might digest foods, would you recommend using those type of services in order to help guide your nutritional content? Yeah, absolutely. Like, I ask clients all the time to go get some blood work done and some testing done. And even before that, there's a couple of things you can do before you're buying those expensive tests, because a lot of the times they're not covered by insurance. Right. And to be honest, you need to do a couple and take the average. That's what I found.

you know like I think one just doing one is not necessarily the best because there's a lot of factors that influence that one test so doing it three different tests three different weeks it kind of captures like all the lifestyle factors that actually influence that test so I've kind of gone down the rabbit hole with that but yeah that would definitely be my recommendation yeah so because because all three of my tests were different oh I'm sure that they were all different and even if you try to keep all the variables the same like we are so complex and that's why it's so hard to do clinical trials with nutrition science long term you know because because you're your psychology is going to impact how you digest, right?

Everything. So, you know, we do the best we can with what we have, but it is definitely high variable with a lot of factors that can influence results. And so I would say that, you know, start off by looking at, like, how long you're sleeping, how well you're sleeping, you know, what's your energy like in the morning? How is it midday? How is it at night? Do you have one cup of coffee a day?

Are you looking at three to four in a couple of those in the afternoon? You know, you want to look at some of these other biomarkers. Even things like, what's your performance like in the gym? Do you get to a certain point and you're, gosh, you're just so tired or are able to, like, go through your whole workout? So things like performance, sleep, energy. And we talked about stress a little bit too. Like, these are all things that we can kind of test to see how you're doing and then

change maybe your protein, carb, or fat intake, depending on how they're doing. Because some days, if you're doing a super long endurance run, for example, like your nutritional requirements on that day are going to be a little bit different or even the day before. So thinking really intentionally about, all right, what is this behavior, this activity? Like, what are my energy requirements, right? And then backing into, okay, how do I need to eat before and after in order to kind of maintain this level that you're talking about? Exactly. So, for instance, glycogen storages take up to 36 hours to replenish.

So what we're doing and how we want to accomplish that goal, those are so important for nutrition. So if I have an athlete who's running on Thursday, I want them to be increasing carbs and even some protein on when. Wednesday, even Tuesday. Like, that's important, you know? So you want to make sure that you're fueling for a particular goal and that you can recover for that goal. So even, say they have an extra hour, I would probably, on average, increase their carbs by 25 to 35 grams, increase their protein maybe by 5 to 10 grams for those two days before.

And then again, after, to help with the recovery on that fourth day. So it is very goal-oriented, too. And it matters because, again, not only are you going to burn more calories and use more energy for that endurance day, your need's going to be up too. You know, what you're doing around that day will probably be increased as well. So it does matter how you're preparing for that and recovering from it. One of the things I think a lot about is kind of this tension between kind of performance and longevity. I find that they're not always in concert, right? Like what I need for performance sometimes is actually like contradicts like what is really good for longevity. How do you

guys think about that or do you have a framework on how to approach that just that concept? Sure. So I think I would go back to defining what is your goal and how important is it? And if we're going to look at it for the short term, I'm definitely going to say it needs to be higher carbs. And even if it's a lot of volume short term, I'm even less worried about the quality because I just need you to be so fueled and clerically ready for that particular event. Now, what does that do on your long term? Well, obviously we don't want to be having refined carbohydrates or things like bagels long term so then it plays with that balance of how is that going to affect us you know what's our blood glucose going to be like what is our insulin sensitivity going to be like long term that matters too so the body is so amazing and

complex that if you can do something short term and succeed at it but understand the consequences of what might happen long term that's okay you know if you are okay with keeping it whole food base in the short term, knowing that maybe your performance, it'll take a lot of legumes and it'll take a lot of sweet potatoes to get you to where you need to be short term. But you're more concerned with the long term piece of it. That's okay as well. And then the last thing I'll say on this is like supplementation. So then you kind of get into like taking omega-3, you know, taking magnesium, taking a probiotic. You know, these things can also help buffer that balance between the short term and the long term because those goals can be so conflicting. Yeah. I think that, you know,

it's also worth thinking about like what you need to do to sort of fuel the short term can sort of be made up for in like how you then respond the rest of the day. So like back when I was marathon training, you know, I'd go for a really long run. I'd use like goo, right? Which is sort of this like tiny package of like pure. Yeah. And it's like, you know, and like I have a lot of them and you know, kind of swore by them for, you know, any run over 15 miles. But like if I was sitting on my couch watching TV, like I would never reach for, you know, like just candy or like kind of, you know, something that's equally pure sugar. And it's about sort of giving your body what it needs in that moment. And then sort of knowing that I had like 200 calories of goo, right? Like, then for the

rest of the day, it's sort of like, well, I had my sort of empty calories already. So putting on that extra intention around eating really good whole foods and sort of, you know, quote unquote cheating less the rest of the day. So that sort of on the day can really look back on that diet and say like, you know, I ate for longevity, but, you know, if I had a salad while I was running, that would just really, like, not have been what my run needed in that moment. And I think that food timing is so important that it's not just sort of what did I eat today, but did I eat those things at a time when they were sort of giving my body the signal that it needed and sort of letting it respond in this optimal way so that it's not like, oh, I need 30% of my calories

to come from fat. So I'm going to eat a stick of butter before I go to the gym, right? That's, like, definitely not eating for performance. Please don't do that ever. Horrible idea. Or a block of cheese or whatever. You know, that's like I want to have my carbs before I go to the gym. And then after I go to the gym, that's when I want to make sure I'm getting in some protein. And maybe some recovery carbs as well, kind of depending on what that workout was.

But like if you swap that, so you have exactly the same amount of calories, exactly the same, you know, sort of macronutrient profile. But you take your pre-workout, post-workout, and your post-workout pre-workout. workout, like it's not nearly as good. And so baking in these like things for performance in a really intentional way, I think does promote longevity and you just kind of have to be a little bit smart about it. Totally. I think that is 100% how I think about it, you know, is really, okay, I'm going to eat foods that enable me to optimize whatever that behavior it is that I'm doing. So if, you know, I think at Woop, we think a lot about cognitive health, right? So not just, you know, physical health, but also brain health. And we actually have this awesome study coming out on that was done with

Cornell Wheel, Dr. Richard Isaacson. There's some really interesting and promising research with animal models that show this link between keto and calorie restriction and cognitive health. So if we're thinking about brain health and we're thinking about how to think about our foods in relation to our brain health, keto seems to be the way to go. What's your take on that? Well, I have to go back to that it's so individual, you know, and I think that keto can have a really wonderful place depending on your goals. If you are not looking to do a super, high intense or super endurance event generally, you know, something with a lot higher fat is going to be, you know, more favorable to your digestive system. Having said that, there are always

exceptions to the rules, right? Like there are so many other studies out there and individuals, especially endurance athletes that still swear by keto if they are running or are trying to do an endurance event. And I think that it is so individual. But again, right now we only know the short term of it. You know, we don't know the long term effect of someone. doing such a high fat and ketogenic diet in the endurance world. And on top of it, too, our bodies are made to change by the season. Food wasn't so available as it is now. And we had to change our percentage of our macronutrients, you know, our proteins,

carbs, and fats, depending on what was available and depending on the season. So if there's an athlete out there who wants to keto and it's okay for them and they feel like they can keep their biomarkers up, their blood work looks good, their energy is fine. They can sleep and they're sleeping well. I'm in no place to say, no, you can't do that, you know? From my experience, higher carbs are going to help, especially in endurance, but keto isn't necessarily bad. I think it depends on the individual and what their goal is in keeping their performance and their energy up for sure. Yeah. Nice. I love that you've mentioned sleep a few times. I see, Emily, I would say it's our love language, Emily. What do you think?

A little bit. A little bit, yeah. We love talking about sleep, everything to do with sleep. But let's talk a little bit about sleep and nutrition. And I think, you know, we can kind of maybe wrap it up there. What's your take on pre-bed nutrition, just even maybe the timing? I think that a lot of our users think about time-restricted feeding, too. So, I mean, maybe getting your take on that. But if we want to kind of focus our energy, talking specifically how that relates to sleep, and we can kind of dig into that. Sure. So one thing that we do at M2 performance nutrition is have our athletes start a power down routine. And so one of my fellow coaches, Jenny, put together this great article. And basically, from an hour to 45 minutes before you go to bed, what does your routine look like? You know, are you

getting off your blue light devices? Are you done eating for the day? And are you able to pull yourself into like a resting state so that you can sleep well? Sleep affects our nutrition in so many ways. We want to be careful with what we're eating before bed. So in particularly, we don't want to have probably a bunch of fat before bed because that digestion is going to take up to two hours. So if you're laying in bed but your body still needs to digest and use energy, man, that's going to be hard to kind of fall asleep. On top of it, you want to keep your cortisol levels down. So getting off those blue lights and being able to really pull yourself back from the world, that's going to also help get us into that state. If you're able to eat your last meal, maybe two, one to two hours before

a bed, that's ideal. And you don't want it to be super high in carbs. I see a lot of athletes do well when they have a protein and maybe a little bit of a carb. You want to keep that carb cool. You don't want something hot because that will raise your temperature. And then a couple of things you can do is even just like take a cold shower or rub your hands and face under cold water. That again will help get to your power down routine ready for bedtime and sleeping. And then just speaking about your fasting. So gosh, if you can even pull back that last meal to like two to three hours before bed, that'll be great. You know, it'll help you sleep. But it will also help your gut and your digestive system just start to like settle down and kind of like clean up for the day. You know, like it did all this work

during the day and now it kind of needs to like reset itself. So allowing at least 12 hours to do that is like such another really healthy way of getting adequate sleep. And the last thing I'll note here is that if we don't sleep enough, our body will start to look for that energy in other forms. And in particular, it'll crave junk food. So if you ever sleep, you know, maybe under six hours a night or five hours a night, that next morning, watch what you're craving because it might be more refined sugars. You know, I wake up and I'm like, I want a bagel today. Right. Well, that's directly, it's left and agrelin, right? If you want to talk about that for a second, just because I think that's really important for folks to understand, like, how sleep impacts both leptin and how that's actually driving your food choices. Absolutely. So if you're not sleeping well, if you're not getting recovered at night, that next day, most likely your metabolism is going to be a lot lower too. So you get into the leptin. And so you're levitating at a lower frequency and is probably a good analogy for it. And so along with not getting all the energy that you needed from sleep,

in that recovery. You're now going to crave things the next day that you normally wouldn't need or wouldn't want. And if you're underslept, you actually are going to consume potentially 200 and 400 more calories. Again, something like that. Yes, that's exactly what I was just going to say. Even if you're tracking, you'll find that you're still hungry at the end of the day. And I find a lot of athletes are like, oh, it must have been a hard workout. But no, and actually it was from those last 24 hours where you didn't give your body enough sleep and not enough quality sleep too. That's a big piece. that's big here at whoop, like your REM and your deep sleep are so important for this, not just getting spending time in bed.

Yeah, that's, you know, like, exactly. And that's where it goes back to that power down routine because you really want to help your body get into like a nice deep sleep so that you can attack that next day. Cassandra, I work with a lot of big boys, right? So a lot of athletes, right? Yes. They get hungry when they stop eating. A lot of the literature suggests to, you know, kind of stop eating a couple hours, three hours before bed.

what would be like the perfect if I know that I'm going to get hungry. And so, you know, waking up and that can fragment your sleep right if you're just like hungry. So what would be like the perfect thing for folks to eat if they do find themselves getting hungry and waking up with hunger during the night? What would be the perfect thing for them to eat and what would the timing of that be? If you wake up hungry in the middle of the night, one, that lets me know that the next day, we got to increase your calories and we got to increase your carbs in particular because you did not give your body enough time to slowly get into your deep sleep, as well as now your rhythms

off. So if you're having like some kind of like blood sugar dysfunction, that's a sign that from waking up in the middle of the night. So that's the next day. In that moment when you wake up, eat something. No, I. What can you do before? Oh, before? Because you don't want to, you don't want to wake up and have to eat, right? No, you don't. So we want to be able to sleep through the night. So is it case in protein with some, some honey potentially? You know, because now you're giving your liver, you know, the glycogen that it needs and that can kind of help the brain function and help you sleep a little more night. Like, is there like this little cocktail of food that you can recommend that easily digestible that can help folks stay in these deeper stages. Yeah, so you could do

a plant-based protein or a casing protein. Okay. I'm not too concerned about the particular kind of protein because people sometimes have a reaction to dairy. You do want some kind of protein. I would definitely do slow release, like something that's going to be slow released, right? I would say, yeah, it could be slower released. And I would say you would want to pair that with some kind of carbs. So a good one would be protein powder in your oats. It could be like overnight oats. So you could add some fruit in there, which again is going to help restore the liver. You definitely want to starch. You know, you want something that's going to break down into glucose because a lot of the times if you're waking up in the middle of the night, it's because your muscles are

trying to recover and they just can't. So you need a type of carb in particular glucose. It's going to be able to recover and get to your muscles, you know, and help them recover and replenish and rebuild because you don't want to make that a habit. If you're waking up in the middle the night, multiple nights a week. That tells me that you need to be eating more carbs. Right. So they're just not getting enough probably calories during the day throughout the day. So it's the same concept as potentially water, right? Like you don't want to drink all of your water right for bed. Like you need to be drinking consistently throughout the day. So I guess it's the same concept. Very similar. Yeah. Yeah. I would say with water, you definitely want to wake up and the first thing you do is drink water.

Right. And then taper back around like three, four p.m. You don't even need that much going into your last meal as long as you're hydrated during the middle of the day. Ladies, so we've talked a lot about calories and food. So what would be kind of, Emily, what would be your kind of one takeaway from this conversation that you would want our listeners to focus it on? Well, what I would not want it to be is I don't want people to sort of listen to this and then go like, oh, well, it's all hopeless, right? Because, you know, it's not.

The way that we're counting calories at whoop, there is this sort of plus or minus 10%-ish error, but it's internally consistent. If we tell you on Monday that you burned more calories than on Tuesday, then you can trust that that relationship is true. And so while both might be, you know, a little bit too high or a little bit too low, what you can sort of look at is these trends and the trends are very reliable. So if I see this increase, then I can sort of think like, oh, okay, my calorie consumption is increasing. So I want to think about that and make sure that my fueling is also increasing, or I'm going to lose weight, or I'm going to sort of start to be fatigued, or my workout performance might slow down and sort of same. If they're decreasing, then, you know, I might want

to sort of think about backing off the food a little bit because otherwise I'll sort of gain weight. And so, you're keeping track of what is this trend doing is actually still very reliable, which is why, sort of, despite this error, you know, we still think that it's worth surfacing this information to our users. And then the same thing's kind of true on the food side. So plus or minus 20% is like a huge error. So if you're eating like 2,000 calories a day, that means you think you're eating 2,000 calories a day. You might have actually eaten 2,400 calories. That's the difference of like a hamburger. It's not like a casual difference. But if I'm sort of noticing, like say, I'm tracking my calories, I'm tracking my macros and I'm going up, up, up, up, up, you know, it's probably true that you are in fact going up, you know, over time. If you think you're going down, you probably are going down. It's just that you can't know, like, oh, today I burned 1,672 and a half calories. Like that's silly. You know, it's not that precise. But the trends are really useful. So there still is really valuable information here for people who are interested in weight management, either trying to to gain or lose weight or maintain weight. So, you know, it's not hopeless. It's just that if there's

sort of one takeaway here, it's that like, you know, on both sides of the equation, it's much noisier than I think most people appreciate. And so use the information, but don't drive yourself nuts, you know, making sure you calculate, you know, every little blueberry or whatever. That's perfect. You've really summed up a lot of it. I would say that quality is just so important. Calories in versus calories out, they do matter, you know, calories. There are a unit of fuel. You know, we do need them and it's important to have them but it's also important to have that quality in our food and what we're eating it matters as far as nutrient density goes and what we're absorbing we want to absorb nutrients and with our athletes if we are seeing a trend in our

loop data where our calories are increased and our expenditures increased we need to accommodate that with an increased in maybe carbs or protein but again it's that quality carb. quality protein. And I think that matters for most of us because even if we are so individual, at the end of the day, we all need macronutrients, you know, macro. It's abundant in the name. Yeah. You need all of that. So it's important to understand the limitations, but also the trends and then how we can kind of pair that with what we're eating and how we're eating it. Perfect. Yeah. And I think I would just add just really trying to get yourself in that parasympathetic state when you are eating. So you can really capitalize on the digestion and being really

efficient and how you're digesting and metabolizing your food. Kind of being more conscious of that, I think it's going to help you have a little bit of a better experience when it comes to just eating in general. Being social, being around friends and family, the connection I think is important around meals as well. We didn't really talk about that, but I think that's what we're kind of getting at by being mindful and try not to multitask too much unless we're kind of chatting with friends and being social, but trying to really be thoughtful about the process. of putting food in our body so we can have more awareness of what it's actually doing to us and for us. All right, well, this has been fun. Emily and Cassandra, thank you so much for helping

clarify this kind of weird thing we call calories and just appreciate the time. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure being here and I really appreciate this opportunity. Thanks again to Cassandra for joining Kristen and Emily on the podcast today. I hope their insight has helped you gain a better understanding of calories. If you're not our first, already a whoop member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to begin. We provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data, as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and more. The membership comes with a free Woopstrap 3.0. We offer 6, 12, and 18-month memberships. The more you sign up for, the more you save. If you

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