"Simon, I’d like to lose some weight before my next Ironman event. I’m going keto!”
Believe it or not, I hear this on a regular basis and it makes me anxious for the individual. Keto diets have been very successful in helping individuals lose weight although that's mostly due to the body needing to store less water from the reduced carbohydrate intake. True keto is also very restrictive and difficult to sustain for more than a few weeks. It is also stressful on the body. Training for an Ironman is also stressful on the body, which is why attempting both at the same time has the potential for disaster. Having said that, I’m sure there are folks who have done this successfully and if you are one of them, I’d love to hear your story.
The truth is that there are much healthier options for losing weight, if indeed you really need to lose any at all. My guest today is Registered Dietitian, Lexi Kelson, who's making her fourth appearance on the show. She has a Master’s degree in Applied Nutrition with a focus on fueling for sports performance and is the perfect person to help us to understand the best approaches for endurance athletes to lose weight.
In the world of social media there is a lot of noise, and it is difficult to work out what is nonsense and what to believe. So, if you are interested in getting to your race weight in a health and sustainable way for next season, by the end of this episode you will have a step by step process to help you do exactly that. We talk about:
- Do you really need to lose weight, and if so, why?
- Confounding factors which influence performance and weight
- Balancing health and performance goals
- How to track and monitor weight loss
- Strategies for sustained weight loss
- Influences of behaviour and culture
- Some considerations for aging athletes
- Balancing training and nutrition
- Guidance for peri & menopausal females regarding weight gain/weight loss
- Are meal replacements (such as Huel) a suitable alternative to real food?
To follow Precision Fuel & Hydration please use these social media links:
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Facebook: @precisionhydration
Twitter: @thesweatexperts
YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/precisionhydration
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Here is some other cool stuff you might be interested in:
Metabolic adaptation explained:
Ponzer study:
Are you fueling adequately to maintain health and performance? RED-S:
Optimal bodyweight for racing: is lighter really better? https://www.precisionhydration.com/performance-advice/hydration/racing-body-weight/#the-danger-of-focusing-on-weight-loss
Free online sweat test: https://sweattest.precisionhydration.com/pages/why-personalise-your-hydration-strategy
Quick carb calculator: https://www.precisionhydration.com/products/precision-fuel-sample-pack/#thecarbcalculator
Athlete Case Studies: https://www.precisionhydration.com/athletes/case-studies/triathlon/
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Hello folks, welcome back and if you're a new listener, I've very big welcome to the show. You're listening to the High Performance Human Podcast and I'm your host Simon Ward. Lexi Kelson from Precision Fuel and Hydration is back with me this week and I'll tell you more about our conversation in just a minute. We will be talking about nutrition and this is one of the key planks for being a high performance human, along with sleep, exercise, relationships and mental health. All of these will help you to build the best help and on top of that, race performances but it's a holistic project and you definitely do not have to be a high level athlete to excel at anyone or all of these. Now we appreciate that you might feel like there's still a little bit of room for improvement in your life and so if that's the case, we would love to help you. I've currently got the availability to take on a couple of clients and my wife Beth who is a certified life coach also has some availability so depending on what you're looking to focus on, we've got you covered and you can find details in the show notes. Right then, back to my conversation with Lexi. So if you haven't heard any of our previous podcasts and you can find links for those in the show notes, then let me tell you a bit about her expertise and what we're chatting about today. Lexi is a registered dietitian who earned her master's degree in applied nutrition with a focus on fueling for sports performance. She's also a power lifter. Now I've lost Lexi back to help me provide you with the best strategy for losing weight. Why is that you might ask? Well because I get asked this a lot by athletes and often at what I think are the wrong times of the year. In the social media world, there's a lot of noise out there and it's difficult for most people to work out what is nonsense and what they should believe. So if you're interested in getting to your race weight in a healthy and sustainable way for next season, by the end of this episode you will have a step by step process to help you do exactly that. Lexi and I will talk about understanding your why of weight if weight loss is the goal. When founding factors which influence performance and weight, balancing health and performance goals, how to track and monitor your weight loss, strategies for sustainable weight loss, the influences of behavior and culture, some considerations for aging athletes, balancing training and nutrition and finally Lexi provides us with her summary on the best approach. So without further ado, let's crack on and hear from Lexi. Welcome back Lexi, how's your summer bean? Thanks so much for having me back, always nice to hop on and chat with you. It's been a good summer, it's been hot here in Atlanta as per usual. I got a puppy too so it's been a little bit of a stay outside for a long time, let the puppy run around kind of summer. Wow what sort of puppy have you got? She's a half husky, half lab shepherd mix so she was a little rescue but he's four months old right now and the cutest most stubborn thing ever and I love her to death. She sounds like sort of dog who would be more comfortable in cool weather rather than hot lots of water. Absolutely, same. Yeah she and I are struggling in the heat and finally it's starting to cool off here a little bit. I wish we could just sort of do a bit of them swapping around on the temperatures because it's been an unusually cool summer here in the UK and it's starting to cool off a bit. Crazy, crazy crazy. Well so I know you've got a tight time window today so let's crack right on. We had some great conversations earlier on in the year and one of the things I wanted to pick up with you about which is topical for the sort of fall and the winter season is that of weight management and weight loss for endurance athletes. There will be a lot of folks in the UK and in the US I guess who are already thinking of what races they want to do next year and entering them and as a coach I always get asked the question you know what race weight should I be to do and I am man and when should I lose my weight okay so yeah when you as a dietician get asked that question what's your first what's your first action? Yeah a lot of times you know it's really important to start with you know as cheesy as it sounds start with the why of okay yeah awesome if this is what you want to do let's let's kind of figure out why to see if it makes sense because sometimes it does sometimes it won't and it's going to be so person to person of why they specifically either want or think they need to lose the weight you know for endurance athletes there's it's very common to you know have the race weight strategy and it's not that that isn't a factor or doesn't need to be thought about it all but there's definitely you know different people have different tendencies of taking things to extremes and so you kind of have to know yourself of knowing where you're going to fall into the trap of just keep you know getting smaller and smaller and smaller thinking that that's going to be the difference in the performance when you know if you're not able to train well anymore and you're running into that the red S the relative energy efficiency and sport issue you know it's likely that there might be an injury or something that's going to stop you before you've been able to perform at your quote unquote ideal race weight so really looking at that yeah yeah that that whole thing about wise is interesting to explore isn't it because often you'll get people saying well I've heard that you need to have a what's per kilo of this yep yep or well all of the best athletes I see are looking really lean and ripped or well the guys that are at the front of the field are a super skinny you know and they're racing snakes and there's probably a reason for that those that you don't see most of those guys playing rugby when they young do you they choose you do because they've got that sort of frame yeah yeah there's definitely a you know what your body naturally kind of tends towards and the people at the front of the field if they are super small let's just say that that is you know let's say in a certain world that would be always the case okay well is that because one you're right they chose endurance because they're naturally but like that is that because they're training a lot and so they naturally can't keep up with their energy output demands and so they're just going to be smaller or do they all have these perfectionistic you know high performing athlete tendencies and maybe they're treading the line and maybe you know they're on the edge of being too small but we don't know we're only seeing a little bit yeah and sometimes I can be quite misleading can't it when you see somebody who is regularly finishing in the top three or four of an endurance race because we could be talking about ultra running as well we could be talking about mouth as well just pure cycling so somebody is regularly finishing at the front you could have this image on the face of it of them being super fit and super healthy and they look lean but actually that could be a short term thing they might not be able to sustain that level of performance over several years they may be on a good day in between injuries and illness because they're not eating properly or they may just have a chaotic and disordered eating plant which is indicative of something else like you know some mental health issues because we can't just assume that because somebody's a regular winner that they're actually have good mental health either can we and I think there's plenty of examples throughout endurance sports of athletes who have suffered with that sort of issue yeah and absolutely it's the same thing you think about with social media you know everyone's highlight reel everyone's social media is their highlight reel you're not staying all behind the scenes but it's the same with athletes in their performances of course you know they're great performances you're gonna see them maybe you're gonna see some of their bad performances but those are still just their races you're not seeing the day-to-day every other factor that's going into it you have no clue so taking one element and saying that is the reason and that is the thing that's keeping me from being a higher performing athlete is the raceway you know that's not necessarily gonna be the case and there's it's really hard to know if that is gonna be correct or not because you don't have all the information hmm so when you ask the question why what sort of answers are you looking for that would indicate that somebody probably ought to be considering losing weight and what answers are the ones that you might want to dig a bit deeper into yeah i think if someone says that you know they think that that's going to be the difference with their performance um the follow up to that is going to be you know why do you think that and have you seen a trend of okay when you are a certain weight you are performing better in terms of you know the metrics and everything or because you feel better or maybe there's another habit that goes along with it it says okay well when i'm trying to lose weight i'm also just more active throughout the day okay well maybe that's the element versus the actual losing weight um or you know if someone is saying that they maybe they have some health concerns that they actually do want to address and that's the focus and the weight loss is just going to be secondary to that that's a different story um or maybe you know if they're not an endurance athlete if they're in a weight class for it that's a whole other thing and you know yes that's important you have to be able to be in the weight class before an endurance athlete you know there's the element of you know weight definitely can be a thing but um you know if they want to race at a certain weight because they used to be that weight and they felt more comfortable in that weight maybe okay there's nothing wrong with that um and it's not to say that they can't go back to that weight just you know looking at the the smartest way to do that and to make sure that they're not assuming that being at that weight is going to be the tipping point for you know all the success to come because that may or may not be i mean this thing we're talking about weight here so this is a figure that we see when we stand on a set of scales now i think most people will know that their weight can change throughout the day yeah uh it's probably you're probably lighter in the morning and heavier in the afternoon um females their weights can change not just throughout the day but during the month because of their monthly cycle um if you've got a tendency to hold on to fluid or not then that can be part of it being dehydrated could cause you to be lighter um being over hydrated a bit heavier um so weights are transient and perhaps misleading figure isn't it uh maybe body composition is something that that ought to be more of a driver yeah and absolutely you know just to think about the hydration aspect of it too um you know when we think about being optimally hydrated going into race the preloading strategy that we talk a lot about at pf&h is you know you want to encourage some water retention and water retention is going to add a little bit of weight so we want that to start optimally hydrated um so from that perspective you want your weight to change in that way and carb loading it's the same thing if you're carb loading ahead of a race carbohydrates store water with them um and so you're gonna add a little bit of weight it's not a ton but it is a little bit so if you're very you know specific about a certain number that you need to see on the scale to race at your critical best are you fact during the carb loading because that's that should add a little bit and and we want that so you know the weight number it's you know maybe giving yourself a range is going to be better um because it can't be expected to be one constant number the entire time you know going back to that whole thing about is losing weight going to add to your performance um generally when there's some weight loss there's probably a bit of muscle loss as well isn't there so they're often is yeah is is that weight loss yourself could have leads a bit of performance if you lose some power or some resilience that helps you to maintain a decent posture of decent technique throughout the day particularly it was a long long event yeah um absolutely the muscle aspect and then also if you're someone who's going to do a let's say like a keto diet to lose weight a lot of that's going to be a water weight and so then you're missing the hydration aspect and so if you're dropping all these carbs and then you're not going to have the stored glycogen so yes you lost weight but you've also lost your stored glycogen maybe you lost some muscle mass that's not good i'd rather you have the extra weight you know the the impact i couldn't quote a you know direct stat or study on this but you know the impact of having the muscle glycogen and the muscle mass for power and strength and you know sustaining you i would argue that that's probably going to be more impactful than one kilo less for your you know aerodynamics you also talked about um you know that compromise so of losing weight versus health if you are losing weight and particularly if you're not eating carbs we know that there's a link between carbs in your immune system so if you're not eating carbohydrates is that going to weaken your immune system is that going to leave you susceptible after particularly after long hard sessions where you're probably burning more more glycogen stores anyway is that going to leave you susceptible to illness and infection and if you get ill then is that going to mean you you miss more training now arguably at the end at the end when you look back you might think well if i'd been a little bit heavier i might have been a bit more consistent would that have been a better outcome for me with my rest result and with sleep too um you know if you're losing weight the that can often be an impact on your sleep you know being an energy deficit that very likely may impact your sleep and if you have less sleep sometimes that can cause a little bit of water retention in the morning and you know then your weight may not show the weight loss let's say from being an energy deficit so and if you're not sleeping you're not recovering from your training so there's so many factors that go into it it really has to be really you know worth it and let's say that you're like you need for a certain amount of weight to be lost to be in a better range for your performance let's say you're trying to lose a significant amount but it really needs to be worth it because there are so many you know negative possible outcomes from being an energy deficit as a high performing training athlete you're missing a lot of energy coming in so it's it's so important to weigh out the options first okay so here's a question for you is there a point where or a situation where you'd say somebody definitely needs to consider losing weight or should we put that whole debate to one side and say let's focus on living as healthy a life as possible let's eat less ultra processed foods let's consume less alcohol let's make all our own meals let's set aside some time to cook those meals and have a sociable meal with our family let's sleep well let's do all of the foundational work and the right amount of training for the event you've chosen and if you get in all of that right your body will take care of the weight without any help yeah and there's that's definitely a good argument to be made because the big moving pieces you know for what's going to impact your race is going to be those elements of you know having a healthy life being healthy overall not getting sick being able to do your training being able to fuel for your training so you can get the most out of it you know that's going to be those big moving pieces for your race and so the weight is going to be one of those marginal gains especially if you're talking about a very small amount of weight that you think is going to make you more aerodynamic um you know definitely having those big pieces in place first let's start there and let's see what happens because there's a very good chance that you may be able to perform really really really well at a weight that you didn't expect because you're able to be consistently their training and you're able to stay healthy i don't know about you but i'm not sure as a coach whether i'd feel comfortable saying to somebody yes you definitely need to lose weight no you don't um we'll take that other healthy approach that we've just talked about is is there a situation where you'd feel comfortable saying that or would you prefer to start off with that let's let's do all the healthiest stuff first and see what happens yeah i think regardless of you know the population that you're working with i think that's a better approach personally just to start there because even if it is someone who maybe their doctor has told them that they need to lose weight okay well the way to do that you're going to want to start with those big healthy lifestyle pieces anyways so i think that jumping to the far end of you know jumping to the extreme of let's be super specific and strategic and you know very nitpicky about everything to make sure you lose weight now sometimes that could backfire and you don't know about the disorder eating past of someone and so you know starting with the healthy big moving blocks i personally think that's just a better way to go about it from the get-go okay let let's i'm going to push this a little bit because i know there'll still be some people saying well i want to lose weight i always lose weight i feel better and so they're they're fixed on that pathway they're determined and as coaches we need to try and find and it is a compromise i think you said before there aren't any solutions there are compromises and i've stolen it off you to be quite frank mixy i've stolen it i've used it i love it i do keep giving you the credit though um so let's say that someone has chosen to do a long distance triathlon or an ultra run or a long distance cycle ride that's going to take you know six eight ten hours next year and they've decided that one of the things that they can do to get the outcome they want is to lose weight we've asked them that question why um what what are we going to do next or what what questions if they don't engage the help of you or me what questions should those folks be asking themselves next yeah um at first i you know the thing is important to just acknowledge that the if someone does is determined to lose weight there's nothing wrong with that either um i think overall it's it's easy to make weights be such a bigger deal than it is you know and just looking at as a number is kind of helpful just being very neutral about it um but yeah so if someone is determined that they that is what they're in their plan they're going to do that cool um the first place that i would start is to really figure out where their maintenance level is because to know how to lose weight you kind of got to know where you're starting from um and so understanding what is your maintenance energy intake where your body weight is staying the same you're not gaining you're not losing you're you know having your normal life that you're going to be living for the next few months while you're trying to lose weight there's nothing different you're doing your training what is your maintenance level intake that is kind of step one how how do they do that then is it just a matter of writing down everything they are they're going to have to get a bit more scientific so it can depend a great kind of way to just you know if you aren't on a time crunch let's say to you just spend the first one to two weeks tracking your food intake um it doesn't sound fun and a lot of people really hate tracking their food intake honestly i think it's a valuable educational tool you know assuming someone's not gonna um already have a history of disorder eating or eating disorder where it's going to be triggering for them but you know being able to have that educational tool of okay what does it look like to understand what what am i putting in my body what you know does everything cost um and really just understanding it from educational standpoint so you're basically tracking your food intake for the first couple weeks and monitoring your body weight same time every morning weighing yourself you know and staying okay is my weight staying the same you know based on what i'm normally eating my normal day-to-day and that's going to give you a good metric of what your maintenance level energy intake is under your normal conditions and is that just as simple as writing it down and making a list or do we need to go to the level of using my fitness pal and weighing out everything we eat and calculating the weights and the color of your values yeah i would definitely recommend using an app whether it's my fitness pal um or you know it's a macro factor there's tons of apps out there that you can do that you can put in um you know like a website but just spending the you know one to two weeks of tracking your food intake by you know understanding the energy coming in and then with your body weight and finding that maintenance level point it's two weeks you can do it you'll learn something it'll be a make it a project make it fun um and then that'll give you some really valuable information about what you're going to need to do to lose weight instead of just you know playing a guessing game do we need to factor in the training that we're doing then and the and the potential training we're going to do because as that increases then that's going to yeah i don't want to get into this calories in versus calories out debate which we can talk about in a minute but that is going to burn more energies in it which means we're going to need to consume more otherwise we will start losing weight that we might not want to or as quickly as you answer yeah so i think understanding your maintenance of what your training is currently because unless your training is about to change as soon as you stop that two weeks of tracking um it's going to be close enough and your training is probably not going to go from zero to 100 i would hope it's not going from zero to 100 really fast and it's going to be slowly ramping up so as your training is slowly ramping up even if that means that your energy output is going to slowly ramp up um you can adjust your energy intake throughout the process to keep a good deficit level but there's such a big factor with metabolic adaptation which is one of my favorite topics ever um and so it is really going to impact how much you're going to need to make up for that deficit from your training because your body is a really good job of adjusting things internally so just because your training is slowly ramping up does not necessarily mean that you're going to need to increase your energy intake to close that gap with your energy deficit hmm sounds like it's getting a bit complicated here is this the point where we actually do bite the bullet and take on a dietitian to do all of this working out for us i would recommend it i feel like it's valuable because it's really even as a dietitian myself you know i'm in a weight class sport with powerlifting it is hard to be objective when you're you know having to put yourself through that process like it's not easy so even though i know everything in my brain about what to do and what i would tell someone to do it's really hard to be objective so having a coach or a dietitian or you know someone to kind of map that out for you and hold you accountable to what's going to be healthy i mean that goes a long way yeah the accountability part i think is really important isn't it oh yeah it's a lot easy to look yourself in the mirror and say oh well it was somebody's birthday when you've got to actually explain to your coach yeah or even the reverse of you know oh i'm not quite lean enough yet i need to keep going versus men know you've hit the mark that we set we're gonna stop now hmm okay so once we've got all of that data from tracking for a couple of weeks and what's the next step yeah so once you know your maintenance that is where your weight is stable um depending on how you know fast you're planning to lose this weight which i would recommend not going too fast because then i can cause them really you know dangerous things for your training too and just your health overall um so once you have your maintenance you know dropping into an energy deficit which is you are um consuming less than your body is you know expending um so a kind of a standard amount is going to be you know a 500 calorie deficit per day the range you know if you're going to be very conservative with your weight loss that would be about a 250 calorie deficit per day if you want to be really aggressive that can be you know 750 and up deficit per day um 500 is a good place to start um especially if you are doing this by yourself um definitely just kind of getting a good starting point um and that is you know very simply dropping your calories by 500 calories per day from that maintenance point um that's not you know you can do a bunch of math and say okay if i'm eating 500 calories last per day for x amount of weeks i will lose x amount of pounds x amount of kilos based on you know how many calories are about you can do that math but there's no guarantee that that's exactly what's going to happen because of the metabolic adaptation factor and just um you know the way your body responds some of it's going to go a lot faster and then you might hit a plateau where you need to increase that a little bit but that's a good place to start of just dropping by 500 so just clarify then if i up my training is that not going to give me the same effect meaning that i can eat what i'm still doing but i cannot much training and so therefore i'm still creating a deficit yeah it may um it's hard to quantify how much it's going to drop it because you have less control over you know how much energy you're burning um from increasing your training versus if you're tracking your food intake you can kind of know okay 500 calories you have a little more control over that um but there's definitely an argument you may have okay i know my maintenance is 2000 calories a day i'm going to increase my training by what i expect would be around 500 calories per day and that can achieve the same effect and that can last for a certain amount of time and then you may get to a point where you then need to drop your food intake in addition okay so you're talking about finding out what our maintenance level of calories are and then reducing that by 500 calories a day and that'll help us to lose weight although it might not be quite as simple as that yeah about this argument then that the calories out versus calories in equation is actually redundant and doesn't really have any value so i think it does have value i think people take it in different perspectives and that's the argument that kind of comes up um when it comes down to it yes and our new balance calories in calories out that does make a difference for weight loss that kind of is the basic math equation of it it is quote unquote correct um there are things that influence calories in and there are things that influence calories out that maybe you wouldn't expect to influence those parts of the equation that's where it gets messy because calories in calories out is true that is energy balance but it's just so nuanced and it's so individual of what's affecting those parts of the equation okay and because you weigh your food and you've worked out that this label says there are so many calories per gram okay we automatically think that if i multiply this by that that gives me so many calories i know that that the body doesn't treat you that way does it because some of that some of those calories are used for digestion or not and when you've got your watch and it tells you how much training you've done and says you've burned x amount of calories doing this that's not necessarily accurate either so the two things that we're using are um we're starting off with inaccurate data and we know that garbage in equals garbage out when it comes to lots of things yeah yeah you definitely need those nutritious foods just for your you know you need the vitamins and minerals and the nutrients to make sure your body's operating well your metabolism is operating normally um i definitely wouldn't recommend using you know the energy monitors as far as like how many calories you've burned and then eating back that in addition to your intake um leaving that out of the equation is normally the best simplest way to go about it and just looking at the metrics of what is my weight doing and what am i putting in my body and am i counting for my important nutrients to make sure that i'm functioning healthy human being so that point you make there about making sure you're getting your right macros so we need we need carbohydrates i know that there's a lot about low carbohydrate and keto diets but carbohydrates are a valuable fuel an important fuel for a particular for endurance athletes they're also important for health as we've already talked about you need your fats because they're important for cellular repair and you know everything else out of the body and we need protein because that's the building block that's going to help the muscles repair after we've damaged them with the hard training we're going to do right so we need those and we need all the vitamins and minerals so when we are going to start cutting those 250 to 750 calories a day where are we going to start are we going to just get rid of bread because as we all know bread's the enemy right of course yeah you know just all the hate goes to bread and i and i just feel so sad for bread i love bread um but you know the place to start um is looking at your intake and saying okay am i meeting the protein goal for what i want to hit um i am normally going to pull protein the last because you want especially in an energy deficit um protein requirements are going to be very important to make sure that you're not putting yourself out of further risk of losing that muscle mass so you know leaving protein high is normally a priority if i'm working with someone and i um if they're going through an energy deficit phase um carbohydrates are important and so so are fat so it's a struggle of you know what are you going to pull first and where are you going to create that deficit normally it comes from both um especially if someone you know has the room as far as they're hitting their macros pretty well of what their maintenance level is then you know we can probably just pull from both but let's say that at their maintenance level they're just consuming not enough carbohydrates and more fat than they would need then you would be pulling from fat and maybe increasing carbohydrates the good thing about pulling the energy deficit from some of your fat intake is one that's really easy to get in your diet because it's in so many things but it's also very energy dense so it's nine calories per gram versus carbohydrates and protein are four calories per gram so pulling back you know a few grams of fat in your dietary intake is going to have a bigger impact calorie-wise um so it's going to feel a lot easier versus you know just eating a bunch of less carbohydrates and protein would it be a reasonable observation that most folks don't have the perfect diet and they do consume too many little snacks and let's call them ultra processed foods cookies pastries cakes um chips as you call them crisps as we call them um that they could easily ditch to create that deficit without limiting themselves on those macros and the vitamins and minerals and also I mean maybe alcohol we could add into that as well yeah yeah because alcohol definitely has energy and it has calories as well and so if you're if you know that your dietary intake is not you know ideal it's not what you would want in a perfect world for yourself um eliminating those extra things with extra snacks here and there you know it's not to say that those have to be gone forever or that you even can't eat them at all during an energy deficit period but starting there and pulling those things out so you can really make sure that if you're eating less overall calories it's so important to make sure you're getting those building blocks based nutrients kind of your base budget elements um first and so that's an easy way to start there okay so just just to go back over what we've gone through first you need to ask yourself the question do you really need to lose weight and why do you feel like you need to lose weight once you've in if you decided that either you do or you set on that path anyway then track what you're eating track your weight every day do this for a couple of weeks and see what a maintenance intake of food is where your body weight stays stable stays stable and then once you've got to that point you start off with looking at that diet that you tracked and I guess cleaning up your diet first is a good way to go because you can get rid of I call them useless calories things that they're not really contributing to you um your recovery or you health or your performance they're just they're just maybe satiating some other desire um so most people could clean up their first and then if you are going to start looking at your macros fats are the easiest ones to target first before you start reducing carbs or on and definitely proteins the last one you would target yeah and you know definitely making sure that when you're pulling from fat so you're not going too low because they are still important you know the fat soluble vitamins are super crucial for your overall health and so you want to make sure that you're getting enough fat to be able to absorb those vitamins um fats important for your you know your hormones everything going on so you can pull from there first just you know making sure that you're not only pulling from fat if you keep going down this energy that's it you know be smart about it know where the line's going to be work with the diet you need to talk to your doctor about you know what your baseline would be um but it's an easier one to start with especially at the beginning of a energy deficit phase it's the best time of year for athletes you you mentioned not trying to do stuff too quickly and I guess that's I wasn't sure there whether you meant trying to drastically lose weight like get rid of 10 kilos across a month or whether you do it too close to an event so let's talk about the timing a little bit yeah for instance if I'm targeting a big triathlon next July 2025 it's the middle of September now that gives me a probably seven or eight months so if I started now I could go for a very small drop in weight each week and that would be much more manageable and much more likely that my body isn't going to complain too much in that process is it am I correct there um most likely there's always the caveat of you know sometimes if you go too slowly with weight loss um you know as your body gets smaller your energy expenditure is going to get lower and so that maintenance level is eventually going to become lower so you may run into a point where you're no longer in enough of an energy deficit to actually be continuing to lose weight um metabolic adaptation your body is going to adapt to kind of make up that difference and create homeostasis and so it might be that if you go too slowly you're not gonna you're gonna hit a plateau eventually um so but then if you go too fast there's the risk of you know being in such an energy deficit that you're not able to do your training you're gonna risk getting sick injuries all the above so finding that sweet spot is one going to depend on what you can practically stick to um let's say you're you know trying to do this over the holidays is that going to be viable are you just going to be ending up going into a binge restrict kind of cycle of overdoing it underdoing it um so finding kind of a sweet spot of you know am I losing a decent amount of weight consistently but can I keep an eye on it to make sure that I'm not hitting that plateau too fast changing your diet is a stress isn't it it's a physical stress in your body but it's also a mental stress because you've now got to watch things a bit more closely you've now got to think a little bit more about what you're putting in your mouth and what you should be saying no to it's a skill learning how to monitor that it's such a skill yeah and beginning your training for a big sports event is also a stress a change in the stress levels on your body so should we be trying to do these two things at the same time or should we be starting with one and then gradually feeding the other one in there's definitely an argument who made to separate them out and not try and take on two massive goals at one time especially you know in some ways they can be um you know the antithesis into this of each other trying to have a really big training goal and also trying to reduce your weight and energy intake because you're not fueling for that then so you know if you are someone who is totally new to training totally new to this big challenge of undertaking an Ironman I would say it's probably not the best time to try and put yourself in an end you deficit because your body is going to be adapting anyways you're probably more likely to have that weight loss happen naturally just from totally changing your lifestyle this training that you're undertaking um if you're someone who's already a pretty well-trained athlete you're doing pretty well then it's not a completely new stimulus obviously so the new stimulus can be learning how to monitor your intake and adjusting your energy intake from there okay so it depends as always the classic answer I honestly just need that tattooed on my forehead it depends you haven't got any room now with there's no solutions just compromise is that it's true i've got two different face tattoos coming up now you left i've won on each four um length ways i'll just add it to my sleeve okay so um once you've done that then what's what's the next part of the strategy is it just to play in a long game then or do we need to revisit things on a regular basis so that the body doesn't adapt or what we're trying to do and we do reach that plateau you talked about yeah the biggest factors to kind of keep an eye on everything it's keep an eye on any of those symptoms of red s that's the biggest thing as an endurance athlete especially because you're you're spending a lot of time training and you're putting your body through a lot so really monitoring those symptoms of red s so like extreme lethargy um if you're getting sick a lot injuries um you know have blood work done regularly if you can just to make sure you're not running into any massive health issues because you're sleep totally getting messed up any hormonal changes you know for females if you're losing your menstrual cycle or having a very irregular menstrual cycle that could be a kind of the canary in the coal mine and something's not right um you know really monitoring those signs as you're going through this weight loss so you're monitoring your weight just make sure it's going down as planned but you're also looking for these warning signs of hey maybe we need to take a break here um those are the two biggest kind of metrics to watch for how often are we going to get on the scales here so it depends on the person but my you know as a dietitian i would want someone to be weighing in every morning if possible because the more numbers we have the better average we're going to get um you know especially since your weight is going to change so much and or some people's weight changes more regularly too um so if you've got a weigh-in once or twice a week but let's say you happen to do those on the two days where you're super bloated you ate you know later than normal it was colder versus hotter outside you had a harder training such in your body containing water from muscle damage all of these factors if you have a consistent number every day you're more likely to get a more accurate average so you want to look at the trend weight is literally just one point in the trend line the trend is what we're looking for so every day same time every day you know that can just be a weight honestly that can be helpful to see of okay my weight is going to change every day but by looking at the trend each specific number becomes less important to me okay so earlier we talked about weight is a transient number and it changes and it's the sum of everything it's the sum of yeah how long our hair is how full our body is how much water we've got you know it's also takes into account how much muscle we have versus fat so our body composition so do we want any other markers as well is it worth getting skin folds done or body composition tested occasionally because we might not be losing any weight but body fat might be changing yeah yeah for sure so if you're someone who you know has access to the skin folds we know how to do that and measure that I would prefer that method I feel like that's a really good way to do it um for a lot of those like the biomedical impedance scale things they're not all bad but it's really hard to get a good measure on them if you're are going to use those um making sure to eliminate all the impacting variables of like time of day on hydration status you know using the same sorry my dog is has the zoomies um having the same metric that you're using so if you're using skin fold stick to that if you're using a certain type of scale stick to that don't try and mix them up it was like a bod pod versus a Texas scan it's going to report differently so you have to use the same one to kind of know what's changing I've noticed on those biometric or biome impedance scales that um there'll be some days when I'm lighter but my hydration status will be lower and when that's lower my body fat is higher yep next day I'll be better hydrated so maybe that's after that first weight is after a long bike ride not really hydrated very well then I've got back on top of my hydration so then I'm heavier and my hydration status is better vastly now my body fat is registering lower so yep it's confusing isn't it and I totally get your point about looking for trends rather than just a point in time and tracking those trends and seeing what happens with certain lifestyle habits as well like if you're if you're doing heavy sessions then it's more likely to be dehydrated and so yes your weight's coming down but being under hydrated it's not good for your body anyway or for your recovery or maybe you had you know less car rides it's a normal or maybe you had more sodium than normal or you know all these different things can impact your weight maybe you were stressed maybe you didn't sleep well um you know stress is a huge impact on the body you know that can definitely mask some of the weight loss and so if you're frustrated saying why am I not losing weight maybe you are maybe you're it's just being masked by all these other factors so that's why you kind of got to play the long game in the sense of waiting to see the impact on the scale versus assuming that it's not working um and you know that something's wrong but yeah the the BIA kind of scales would be the least recommended in my opinion um just because it's going to be a lot more impacted by those day to day things um if you do have access like a DEXA doing what it is beginning of your deficit and at the end awesome or bod pod things like that would be kind of the gold standard yeah i'm not sure how many of our listeners love access to a DEXA record basis so they're actually here in the states at least there are like a fair amount of places you can go just pay for it like i was able to go a while ago or different colleges have five pods now so like they're um they're semi-accessible but skimpolds are great you don't have to do any of those you know you can just kind of monitor how you're performing too to show you listening to right now and all of my others that provide you with amazing real-life advice and guidance from top coaches athletes and successful humans well making it takes me a lot of time but i feel it's well worth it and all in the name of helping you to improve your health longevity and performance and all i ask in return is this please send a link to this podcast to somebody you know who you think will benefit and if you haven't done so already please click follow this podcast on whatever platform you're listening to right now so that you don't miss any of our future episodes thank you let's get back to the show i think we might have touched on this before but it's definitely something that's come up when i've spoken to um a nutrition expert like yourself is just look in the mirror um you can take photographs of yourself or get somebody to take them and just look at just look at the way your body is just look at some of the creases just look at um how you how the body fat hangs because everybody's got different places where they gain body fat as well haven't they so some people will gain it round their lower back and what they call love handles some people will look fairly lean there but they will have a covering across their abdominals or around the chest it might be on the thighs um yeah so just looking at the body and how you close feel combined with how you feel uh how close fit is a huge one um because you can always tell like even if you can't visually see it how your clothes feel um that can be a great you know kind of way to gauge if you're moving in the right direction skin folds are a strange aren't they i know how to do skin folds and you do need to get the same person doing them each time because even even the different experts will take them from a site a different site hold the calipers in a different way but it's almost impossible to do a uh a subscapular skin fold yourself well no yes it's pretty much pretty much impossible unless you're a specialist yeah exactly yeah so skin folds you know if you have that option often just stick in the same metric okay all right so i think we're getting somewhere now um anything else we need to consider when we're going along this weight loss process or are we just now that we've got this set in motion are we just continuing with these same habits and or do we need to introduce anything else as we go along you may need to introduce something else let's say you hit that plateau you've been going along you've been losing weight but you hit a point where it's everything just stops first it's kind of knowing that that's and not uncommon it's kind of normal um you may or may not need to change something write it out for a little bit you know let's see if maybe you know if you're a female maybe that's the time of the month where your body weight you're retaining some water your scale weight is going to be higher maybe you've had a stressful week at work your sleeve hasn't been good wait a little bit and see if your body weight is going to eventually come down if it's just staying stable for a little bit and then it's going to come down if you you know go for a couple weeks and nothing is changing then reassessing kind of doing um an energy audit is a great way to do that of am i meeting my you know normal day-to-day physical activity outside of my training of my steps changed is a great metric um you know is my just movement throughout the day changing um that's an energy audit aspect and then also just you know am i actually tracking my food as consistently as i was in the beginning um am i incorporating a few more like licks and tastes and bites here and there that i'm not accounting for um am i you know being more lenient with going out to eat more just kind of auditing what you're doing um and if everything looks good there and that's not impacting it then that's when you say okay we probably need to either increase the energy deficit from increasing activity or decreasing energy intake yeah um it's it is quite natural isn't it um to have to have these plateaus both in when you when you're training in you're looking for improvements in your fitness but but also in in weight loss and i i think a lot of people get sort of frustrated by that whole uh things aren't happening now and yeah i'm trying so hard almost wanting to throw into the throw in the towel but is it correct to say that sometimes the body just needs to take stock and have a breather and say hold on i've been doing this for a while now just going to get used to this and then we're going to start again yeah you know it definitely that's definitely a valid point and there's a lot of or at least the past couple years there's been more research around the diet break concept um and you know having a few weeks at the deficit and then having a week back at maintenance um to basically give your body a break the research is not super consistent as far as saying oh yes this definitely will help you avoid those plateaus and everything but it can be a good mental break um and let's say you have a week coming up where you're traveling you're on vacation you have weddings to go to you have you know it's Christmas week or Thanksgiving something like that the diet break can definitely be helpful from a consistency standpoint um jury still out of this makes like a impact physiologically um but there's nothing wrong with taking taking that break and letting yourself kind of recalibrate and then going back into it i've been reading a bit of about this concept of the set points within the body so that the body gets used to being a certain weight and if you change from that set point too much it will really it will try really hard to get back there so that's why those folks who've lost a lot of weight like your biggest loser competitions even though they're eating the way they've been shown by the experts on the shows they're constantly feeling this pull to eat more and that they're hungry and tired all the time and the body's trying to drag them back and obviously there's a lot of post show examples where you see these folks have gained the weight back or or gained more do you do you put much credibility in that theory of the set point yeah i i honestly don't have a super good like i'm not as well read on the set point theory as i would like to be as i should be probably um i think there's an element of it that is definitely behavioral as far as you know what you're used to especially for how long of your life that you've been at that weight um you know there's definitely you know genetic factors that people tend to you know eat more or there maybe there's satiety signals are just different i know like for me satiety signals are really a struggle and they just always have been that's a genetic thing for me i think and um you know understanding what your natural tendencies are i think that can really impact what your set point and what your comfortable weight level is um and it's not to say that someone's set point of good or bad you know it's just kind of where their body tends to be there's definitely an impact of if you you know were a certain weight for a long time and then you um lost let's say you know you were 95 kilos then you lost a bunch of weight and you were 75 kilos um and then the person who is naturally 75 kilos versus the person who got down there um the person who's naturally at that weight and didn't have to lose weight to get there they're probably going to have a um a higher energy intake for maintenance versus the person who had to lose weight so just because you weigh the same you have the exact same body composition as someone does not in like the same lifestyle same energy output does not mean that your energy intake for maintenance is going to be the same because someone who has had that weight loss their body has adapted so that metabolic adaptation comes into play of um they're probably going to have lower maintenance intake which can be hard you know you're an athlete and you want to eat more but say you have a strong you know satiety or it blows the tidy um and you're someone who has to eat 1700 calories in maintaining weight versus someone else weighs the same does the same training and they get to eat 2200 calories and maintain their weight that's hard you know behaviorally environmentally socially culturally that's not easy it's interesting that you talk about behavioral habits um for me food and nutrition when i observe folks it's it's often about behavioral habits things that they've grown up with you know things that they like you talk about culturally the types of foods you eat culturally the types of um ingredients you use to cook with culturally but the way in which you consume that food now it's really difficult in europe if you um particularly if you go to southern europe where the culture is to have dinner late well i like to you know Beth and i like to have dinner early so we can go to bed early but in you they look at you very strangely if you're in spain or italy if you want to have dinner at seven because they all come out for you're leaving the restaurant and the family's coming in with little kids at nine o'clock yep i remember that being a struggle traveling around when i was out there and none of the restaurants were open like i gotta go to bed i need to eat we used to go to a stay with a friend who had a place in spain and he said oh yeah be easy to get a restaurant at seven psi so we'd all go in and it'd be empty and we'd sit around and we'd we'd have our pizza we'd have our pasta or something and then we'd leave at nine and just as we were leaving it was all getting a bit noisy and a bit more bit more busy as the family's came in and um yeah the rest we were leaving this small table that was quickly used up um yeah and the restaurant was packed as we walked out yeah it took me a took me a year or two to understand that that was just how they did things over there yeah and the behavioral aspect i feel like is so important when you're talking about weight loss because if you're expecting yourself to be an energy deficit but in a way that is contrary to kind of the way that you approach food and your behavior your tendencies of food you're gonna make it so much harder on yourself it's not that it's not gonna work but it's just gonna be so much harder like i am someone who does really well if i can eat closer to bedtime like i sleep better if i have eaten recently so i know that's not the case for a lot of people but for me that helps my sleep so if i'm gonna be in an energy deficit and i have to say oh because i've hit my calorie intake for the day i put that by 5 pm that's going to be so much harder for me to stick to because i'm used to eating something right before i go to bed versus if i allow for that and factor that into the day and say okay i know i'm going to have my my protein bar right before bed just to have something in my stomach okay i'm setting aside that 200 calories so the rest of my day i'm going to shift to adjust to account for that snack before i go to bed oh my gosh suddenly so much easier so going against your behavioral tendencies when you're also trying to go against your body's homeostasis maintain everything in balance don't put yourself through that don't make it harder on your body and on yourself that's just not worth it i have used some i think we might have talked about this before i used the whoop sleep tracker and one of the things i really like about those sleep trackers is it's not the data so much but the behavioral habits that you can change and the lifestyle changes so knowing if you like a glass of wine at what time of the evening a glass of wine is going to impact your sleep versus not impact your sleep that whole point there about eating close to bed time yeah it's not something that suits me and i found that i slept better if i eat earlier rather than later and i've also heard folks saying well i sleep better if i have a high carbohydrate meal in the evening whereas other people feel better if they have a high protein meal in the evening so um it's quite an interesting journey to do this personal experimentation with eating times eating types and what works for you and what has an what has a positive impact on other parts of your life as well isn't it yeah and it's so individual and you know i we probably need more research around it to see overall what tends to be the average of you know but there's always going to be the outlier of someone who this works a lot better for them so like you said personal experimentation and you know whether that's jotting it down on a note on your phone or telling your coach just so you know and then when you're in those questioning points of okay i'm in an energy deficit i've been in it for a while i'm not losing weight okay well what am i doing that goes against kind of what naturally tends to work well for me how can i reduce the level of stress in my cup and just make it a little bit smoother sailing for me when when i're back to our athletes now that they're doing their big race because we've been down one of those rabbit holes the biggest part of their training is probably the two or three months before the race when they're really coming into peak volume if they're doing a long distance endurance race that's probably going to be a time when there's less intensity but a lot more volume how good a strategy do you think it is to get all of this a behavioral change in terms of how we're eating and what we're eating and when we're eating under our belt and sort of almost grooved in early on in the season when perhaps we can be a little bit more relaxed with our training so that when we get to the you know the juicy end of the training actually these habits are already just well entrenched and we don't have to think about them we can almost forget about the as long as we've got the the good habits about you know not eating lots of ultra-processed food and you know the right time of day and the right quantities we can always forget about that now put it on the bat burner and give the training a bigger priority yeah that's so important because you know it's the same concept that we talk about with your race nutrition strategy of really practicing your carbs so to include intake you know during training so by the time you get to race day you're not having to think about it it's old hat it's comfortable the same thing with your day-to-day nutrition of let's get these big building blocks super comfortable they're part of your routine so when you're under the high stress mentally emotionally physically of a really strong intense training load as you get closer to the race it's one less thing that's a new stimulus one less thing to stress about you're more likely to be consistent with it because it's already part of your routine but then you've also got the added impact if we're talking about weight loss it's you know you've already done a lot of those the weight loss that you wanted to do and so you're able to put all of your energy into your training and know that you're fully fueling that high training session and you're not having to be in an energy deficit you can get the most out of the biggest part of your training I think at that point I might be following a strategy that was suggested by another podcast guest Dr. Tommy Wood who said when you impeach training eat as much as you can without gaining any weight because there are other considerations apart from body composition absolutely and you know you want to be able to give your body all of the nutrients all the fuel and energy calorie wise but also the nutrients of the micro nutrients to repair and respond well and adapt to the training and you know even if you can't see all the things going on inside your body there's a lot going on that we know what's going on and there's a lot that we don't know and so giving yourself every you know every tool possible to make that go well that's worthwhile so I'm going to throw a spanner into the works now because when we're doing a lot of training sometimes we need to eat or we need to consume a lot of calories but if we're just doing it through eating vegetables and good quality protein we just can't get in a volume so do we actually have to start introducing some ultra processed food some calorie dense foods back into our diet now and sort of and some people might feel uncomfortable with the fact that they're now having to break some of the habits that they've got out of yeah and I think it can be helpful to know that when you're in the first part of the phase that we talked about of you know just the basic building blocks keeping your intake super simple and strategic and nutritious and knowing how to incorporate small amounts of like ultra processed foods I am all for that even in an energy deficit base because you know if you're meeting your basic budgetary needs you can incorporate those other things and it's not going to be detrimental just because you had a handful of potato chips like that's not going to hurt you it's actually more valuable in my opinion to know how to incorporate that into your day still meet your energy deficit target but factoring something that allows you to be a part of a social situation or something that you're craving right good I'm glad you mentioned that because I think we all dislike that person that comes along and you go for a meal in a restaurant everybody's getting social and they're like oh no I can't have that and excuse me wait did you mind defer and I'm not having the dessert and like why have you bothered coming to the party yeah there's a way to go about it and still meet what you need and you know like order be smart about how you're ordering there's also the element of you know if you're going to go somewhere and you know that you have to partake in certain elements when made you a meal knowing how to do that in a way that's still meet your goals that's a life skill if you're going to be you know cognizant about your wait for your sport that's just part of the deal so if you learn that in small elements you know why you're in your energy deficit phase then you know you know that when you get to back to maintenance in your training it's really ramping up and you need to have a certain amount of calories to maintain your weight and stay wait stable you know how to incorporate ultra processed foods in those energy dense foods that they're not going to hurt you just know how they fit into your overall intake hmm what do you think about fast training i'm not a fan um it's you know if you're doing it comes back to the why why are you doing fast training it's not to say that it's you know definitely harmful but it's definitely going to hinder your gains there's i'm not saying that you know as a blanket statement at all but i would prefer someone to have some fuel in them because what's what's the harm you know what's the the risk of not having fuel for your training to me is going to be bigger than you know having some fuel beforehand so when people say i'm fat adapted is that really a misnomer i mean is the body pretty good adapting or using fat anyway does it need any help from us to make it fat adapted by going out for a training session a two-hour easy training session in the morning without eating anything yeah i think it depends on kind of where you're coming from and what your history with it has been so if you're you know trying to go for an extreme fat adaptation kind of thing and you you are actually in ketosis like that is what you're doing that is the path you're on um you know there's there's a way that you know people can do that you can become more fat adapted but your body also knows how to adjust to you know like we know in really lower intensity longer things your body can use fat as a fuel source more easily um much it's super high intensity the preferred fuel source is going to be more of the carbohydrate so you know it's not that your body has never heard of oh i have to be taught how to use fat as a substrate for fuel your your give your body some credit it's pretty smart and there's always going to be a combination of you know fuel sources that's using it's not always just one um so if you just have something before training and to avoid the risk of not getting as much out of your training as you could be if you have a little bit of fuel you know that's a very valid concern so i'm just thinking here the fact that somebody might feel they're not fat adapted could be to do with the type of training they've been doing more than the type of food eating or not eating that right absolutely yeah so you know looking at your training and maybe um or maybe to them fat adapted means they're not losing fat or they're able to lose fat which that's you know fat is being used in too many different ways than that sentence then so understanding it as a substrate for fuel um or as you know body fat or dietary fat it's there's so many versions of the word and honestly social media has just ruined it for all yeah i think for all of us i think sometimes this this concept of fat max as part of as the point in your energy burning system you know the the power output or the running pace you have where your body's burning the most facts fat that's much more to do with the type of training and adaptations that training it is to do with when you are not eating food yeah absolutely um you know the the training aspect goes a long way as much as i would love to say that your dietary intake makes every single difference no that's not true training of the huge huge role um i have a few questions for you let's see that we're sent in by some listeners if you don't mind and they do absolutely sort of tying quite nicely with what we have talked about here um we've talked about ultra-processed foods um a little bit so let's just cover this one first there's there's a lot of products out there that claim to be healthy meal replacements i'm always of the opinion that we should be treating food intake as a sociable process as well and and actually part of the process where i much prefer to chop up my vegetables than get them in a packet and in fact i've always understood that if it's in a packet then it is ultra-processed so when do you stand on somebody suggested to me fuel because that's one of the most common ones but i know there's a lot of other products out there where do you stand on this meal replacement thing i think it can be a valuable tool i have no problem with even if it is going to be considered older process which like protein shakes older process um i have no problem with someone using that in their dietary intake if it helps them meet their goals and if it's not replacing all of the other whole food sources so you know protein shakes are going to be a great example of i don't want it to be i don't want your protein intake to consist only of protein shakes but if it helps you meet your protein target fantastic it's the same concept with a meal replacement if it helps you you know like you don't have time to get a meal and it's either eat nothing or eat this meal replacement please eat the meal replacement um you know if it's a way for you to get in basically an extra multi-vitamin on top of your intake and meet your target perfect use it there's nothing inherently wrong with it being ultra-processed as long it's not displacing the other aspects of your diet and i'll probably get shot down for this but often i think that a meal replacement is sometimes just a lazy way out of taking time to make some real food right it might be it definitely can be but if the option is you know making nothing or having no time to take the day off and have a meal placement now i get i get that as well yeah so it's it's nuanced isn't it and does usually it depends yeah especially thinking about like you know parents who have young kids and they're working full-time too it's what's going to actually you know get some nutrients and calories on them and that's the way to do it please do it um i know it's sort of going off topic a little bit and we talked about body composition what do you think about this new idea that instead of um using BMI which is height versus weight versus height squared or weight divided by height squared i think um we use weight waist measurement versus height is that is that an exceptional measure metric to perhaps tell you whether you need to start that weight loss process yeah so a lot of times that's used not necessarily for athletes and more just for a general population um and i i don't think there's anything necessarily bad about it for general population as long as you're accounting for um you know other indicators of health i don't think that should be the only metric that tells you you do need to lose weight um but i know just the abdominal adiposity is definitely something that you know we see as more late to some of those negative health like cardiovascular disease and everything um but as of anything i don't want to use one one metric to make that type of life decision um and especially for athletes i wouldn't use that um because you know muscle mass and just the way your body portions are that one may not be accurate um so if you're an athlete i would just encourage not use something like that yeah absolutely um again different it depends different populations right it depends depends okay a couple of questions on aging and weight loss uh i had a male and a female who wrote to me saying you know when i was younger um weight loss was part of getting into race fitness it happened naturally um but now i'm in my 50s i'm seven to eight kilos heavy and i'd like to be again is that question of what seven to eight kilos heavy and you like to be is that than you were when you were 30 or that you want to be for your race um however the key question is i'm really struggling to move that weight now even though i'm still training a lot so what are the best strategies as you get older now it linked in with that i had a female say when i was young weight loss was an actual byproduct of training so very similar so if i was training i didn't have to think about what he ate maybe that's a problem not thinking about what you're eating yep um now i'm older the two no longer going hand in hand sometimes end up gaining weight when i train question is would it be worth taking a few months out from training to focus on weight loss to improve performance so i suppose the first question is is it an inevitable byproducts of aging even if we train regularly that we are going to gain weight and it's going to be harder to lose not necessarily so there was a study done i think it was 2021 i believe um the ponder study you're probably familiar with it yep um about your metabolism and energy expenditure and because you always think oh i have to get older you know once as a female i've always heard it's like well once you cross 30 everything gets harder to you know lose weight no from the data at least we're not seeing that um you know until you're like age it's only after age 60 does your metabolism according to the study um start to gradually slow down and it's very small it's like less than 1 per cent per year so it's you know that's most likely not going to be the biggest factor um obviously they're outliers and they're underlying help things that could impact that but overall just because you're getting older does not necessarily mean your metabolism is going to slow down the things that impact that could be the factor so maybe your daily step count how many this you know overall steps that can be a huge impact um you know if you're just less active you're more sedentary maybe your job changed maybe your lifestyle changed you had kids and then your kids grew up so you're not chasing them around the house maybe um you know you're you know you're out of work from home sedentary job versus you were out you know on your feet all the day you know you talked about metabolism there I've always understood that there's a big link between muscle mass and metabolism and base metabolic rate so I think it is well known that as you get older particularly into your late 50s then rate of muscle mass in your body declines naturally unless you do something about it so yeah if if you're an endurance athlete and you've never really lifted weights and you continue doing the same volume of endurance training there's a good chance that you're losing muscle as you go along there but if you're the same weight as you were 20 years ago then there's the changing body composition yeah and I wonder how much of what the older athletes are noticing is is not down to the exercise volume it's maybe a more sedentary other lifestyle and also just a natural loss of muscle mass that is leading to a slightly slower metabolism there absolutely that's definitely a valid point and if you're someone who's getting older but you're not sure why your metabolism seems to be slowing down maybe it's the muscle mass aspect and you're you know you're losing some of that muscle mass which definitely gives you something to you know focus on and change about your lifestyle so those folks who are saying that it's getting harder with age is there a simple answer for them or have they got to go through that investigation process that we've talked about earlier I think it's you know best to just go through that process because no matter what your age is that's still going to be where you would start but if you are you know someone getting older looking at those other things in more detail it's just going to be a bigger factor you know your lifestyle day-to-day energy activity it's still applicable okay now certainly with females and we touched on this earlier around around sort of mid-thirties to mid-fifties that we do have the confounding factor of the menopause and those hormonal changes and I have a lot of females and female athletes saying that then they find that they gain weight and it becomes more difficult to get rid of what can those females do you know is it something that they can do on their own or should they be seeking expert help to guide them through because each of them will have different set of circumstances yeah I'd always recommend getting you know some outside help with that but it's going to be you know hormones impact everything so it may be that it's masking the weight loss and you are still you know losing what you're just not able to see it because of so many hydration and water fluctuation water retention fluctuations especially with menopause you know hot flashes always just your temperature levels are fluctuating so much that may be masking what you're doing maybe your satiety signals are just totally thrown off which hormones can do that your sleep is thrown off so your cortisol levels are thrown off and that's causing the water retention and masking things there are so many things going on that one maybe menopause time is not the best time to kind of really work on weight loss or maybe you've had a lot of years of yo-yo dieting being a female and so now your body has adapted to this metabolic adaptation where your maintenance level is way lower than you would ever expect and even though you're eating 1200 calories a day you're still not losing weight so there could be a lot of factors around that time that are just upcoming to a point and from that perspective definitely having you know a digestion or an expert a doctor having helping you through that just to eliminate making it worse on yourself basically and causing any other issues it's going to be harder to see all the red s signs because you've got so many symptoms from menopause anyways going on but it's not to say that it makes menopause it's not going to make it impossible for you to change your body composition it definitely is going to be a little bit more challenging because there are more factors and the data is more convoluted at that point and when we put when we throw HRT into the mix then is that just a confounding factor does that because it's affecting the hormones yeah and it's not it's not that it has a bad effect or a good or a bad effect but it is an effect and so you know waiting till things are a little bit more stable might be a way to go about that I have had several conversations with females who are you know specializing helping other females with female doctors and female experts help with menopause symptoms and what seems to come through is lifestyle habits you know making sure that you are maximizing those lifestyle habits so minimizing stress which we know can affect hormone levels oh yeah maximizing on sleep doing the best you can to tidy up that diet as we talked about before so reducing the ultra processed foods making sure you've got good eating habits in terms of timing getting the strength training in oh yeah being more active and all of those factors seem to sort of keep coming back up again depending regardless of who I speak with everybody's got their own spin but there's some consistent factors that come in there yeah it's that pyramid so you're getting those base levels really you know on point and then once you're able to get those consistent then it becomes more of a nuanced aspects but those are the those are the big building blocks for everyone okay like see I feel like time's up I know you've got to move on to your next part of your day probably take the dog for a walk right probably is thankfully she's sleeping right now is there anything that we haven't covered that we should have done do you think I think the biggest thing that I would want people to take away is really you know if you're an athlete and you're not in a weight class sport prioritizing getting the most out of your training should always be number one priority versus you know the tiny tiny tiny marginal gain of adjusting your weight it can still be a factor but really how can I get the most out of my training because that's what's going to make such an impact on your race and you know really just making sure that everything that you're doing day-to-day is aligning with that goal is you know so important and so nutrition would fit into that in terms of supporting refueling recovery and maintaining a healthy bodily function yeah absolutely and you know it's not just saying you know if you want to go through an energy deficit dieting they find that's totally okay but that has to be a transient time period because if you're constantly trying to go back and forth to go up and down up and down your weight that's going to have an impact on your metabolism and that's going to make it harder to fuel with enough fuel at a normal level to support your training so using it as a small short time short-term transient tool can be a way to do it but ultimately focus on fueling for your training yeah and you know for me personally I just love the idea that it's about healthy lifestyle habits so if you are going to change your diet let's think about what you can still be doing when you are 60 or 70 oh yeah that's sustainable easily and doesn't need to be thought about too much and definitely not what I remember my father used to go on a diet every every year and he would change what he was eating for a period of time until he'd lost the weight and then as soon as he'd lost that weight he'd go back to eating what he did before so nothing had changed and so you know if you always do the same as you've always done you always get the same outcome don't you and I can tell his plan it didn't make any sense yeah what is insanity the you know doing the same things that weren't over getting different results yeah yeah so anyway let's see as always it's been informative and education and and fun so thank you so much for being here again i'm sure that when we i put the call down i will think of something else that we should be chatting about and we'll have you back on in maybe around christmas maybe we could talk about tackling christmas oh yes i would love that that that would be awesome i always love chatting with you honestly i appreciate you having me back on and been a good conversation all right let's see enjoy the rest of your day thanks for being here you too have a good one thank you again to lexie for being my guest on the show this week i put together a pdf document outlining these steps and the considerations for you and if you'd like a copy please check out very obvious link in the show notes also in the show notes you can find links to many of the topics which i had about today and a link to my free daily mobility plan to make sure you don't miss any future episodes please go to iTunes search for high performance human traffic on podcast and click on subscribe button and if you could share the episode with one person you think might benefit that'll be awesome and it would be doubly awesome if you've got a couple more minutes if you could leave me a review on your chosen platform that's all for this week i'll have another great guest for you in seven days time and i do hope that you'll be able to join me for now happy trading and enjoy the rest of your week
