I second the request for this study, I also was unable to find it on Maffetone's site, or elsewhere. IntenseOne needs to pony up a link.

From the ST interview with Stevens, she says this: "At IM Arizona I only had 1100 TOTAL calories, 36oz of water on the bike, a few sips of water on the run and no salt. Yes, it can be done!"

Figuring 8 hours for the bike & run, that works out to be 137 calories/hour. So she didn't do the race on no nutrition, but that is a very low intake. The interview doesn't specify what those calories came from.

Let's see that link for the Dr. Stevens study. We're not finding it.

I've not thought about the in training bit but cut added sugars out of my normal diet best I can. You've got me thinking though about checking my Gatorade Endurance concentrate I use.

Separate food from fuel. The sugars in your drinks, as long as they are taken during training, are unlikely to have any detrimental impact on your diet. You need fuel, worry about the sugars and other food you may be eating outside of training.

---

On the internet, you can be anything you want. It is a pity so many people choose to be stupid.

Coming off an injury that has more or less sidelined me for a year (and added some lbs), this is what worked for me getting me back to race weight. I agree largely with the advice that RowToTri has given you. Before anyone can properly address the general question of "should I eliminate sugar in workouts", we would need to see what you normally eat during the course of a day.

Almost--I start off day with 4-6 ounces of baked sweet potato, 2 eggs and hemp seeds. Coffee with unsweetened coconut milk (full fat) and a little stevia. Having eaten this, I get my carbohydrate intake that I need to get me through morning. I also eat this just before a long bike ride and therefore don't have to start fueling with normal training nutrition (bars, dates) until an hour thirty or so into the ride. I typically take in 250 calories of nutrition after that. I'm 5'3" and 110 lbs.

At night--I rarely eat carbohydrates--just a ton of non-starchy veggies, some fat and protein. I usually eat a HUGE Salad as my main meal post workout. I almost always top off a long workout with a 4:1 Protein:Carb snack of about 200-300 calories

Alcohol (including more than one glass of wine at night) makes me FAT.

"Sugars"-- Take them just before workouts, and if long workouts, take during. I never restrict here. My training and performance has never suffered and I when I need to drop weight, I adhere to timing my "sugars" aka "simple carbs" for just before and during your workout. I eat tons of non starchy vegetables with lunch and dinner. I cook most meals and stay away from processed food. Watch the alcohol intake and limit carbs at night. The rest (the weight drop) should take care of itself. I think your question is a little more complicated because in order to reach your optimal weight, you need to look at what you are eating outside of training.

I don't think that in order to lose weight, you have to overcomplicate or do something as radical as cutting out sugar during moderate-hard training.

---

leslie myers
http://www.foodsensenow.com

I also find it funny that they are bragging about low water intake. If I were one of her competitors I would think "thanks for giving up 20-30+ minutes because you chose to under fuel and under hydrate" :)

A quote from the site...I guess I'll tell the pro/1/2 fields I race in that we need to stay at the fat burning pace for the 80 miles. No need to attack and risk a sugar craving.
You should exercise regularly at or below your MAF HR – this can be walking, running, cycling, or swimming. The closer you exercise to your MAF HR, the more body fat you will burn. When you go above this zone and your body is over worked, it requires fast-burn fuel (carbs) leading to more sugar cravings and overtraining risks.

---

-Physiojoe
Instagram: @thephysiojoe
Cycling coach, Elite racer on Wooster Bikewerks p/b Wootown Bagels

checked out nuun tablets - they look expensive. Right now, I just mix gatorade with water (its very cheap) for my rides and runs. I know gatorade has a lot of sugar. What are folks' thoughts on gatorade?...any recommendations for a better (still relatively inexpensive) drink to use?

SO just for the sake of starting an argument, are we then to assume that fat burning is better at a lower HR? When we say "fat burning" are we talking actual use of excess body fat, thus lowering BMI, or are we talking about what the body uses for fuel, which may or may not be one in the same? Because that would directly contradict the calorie in vs calorie out theory, which I thought we have decided here on ST to be an absolute.

You do burn more fat at low Z1-Z2 intensities than you do at harder efforts. As effort levels go up, the amount of carbs you burn goes up and the amounts of fats you burn goes down because you cannot burn fats fast enough to fuel the amount of energy you are demanding. At very hard efforts fat burning goes down to 0. As a triathlete, the majority of your training should be done at Z2, so you should be burning fat and at the same time, training your fat burning system so that it can become even more efficient and burn fat faster as you get fitter, allowing you to rely on a higher % of fat at the same pace, or go faster on the same amount of fat.

The calorie in, calorie out thing is true, but for the sake of feeling ok, and particularly for athletes who want to perform well in training and races, you cannot rely on that alone. If you were to burn all of your stored glycogen doing high-intensity training, and not replace it, at first you would be burning little fat. Soon you would "bonk". If you do not replace that glycogen, you will remain in a glycogen-depleted state, and the energy, even for just daily activities and brain function. Your blood-glucose levels will drop. A couple things start happening at this point. One is your body will start converting fat into glucose. It is theoretically possible that your body can then turn that glucose into muscle glycogen, but it is unlikely because that only happens when blood glucose is too high, which is unlikely to occur in this situation. More likely is that blood glucose levels will remain far too low, especially if you attempt to continue training, which will feel very very terrible at this point. Within a few days, your body will start to use fats to produce ketone bodies in your blood to use for energy. This state is called ketosis and is typically associated with fasting, starvation or diabetes, but is becoming popular as an intentional state with people such as IntenseOne (this is the diet he is advocating). In this state, since glycogen is not available to you, and you have very limited glucose which your brain needs to function, most of your energy will come from processing these ketone bodies. As soon as your body has access to glycogen again (because you started eating carbohydrates again such as bread, rice, sweet potatoes, whatever), it will convert back to glycolysis again.

That is a long-winded way of saying running a caloric deficit will end up with weight loss, but how you do it matters a great deal, particularly if you are concerned with athletic results.

---

-------------
Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

Makes sense. 1000 calories of broccoli is not the same as 1000 calories of soda for example.

I've come to the conclusion that added sugars for the most part are not necessary. If I cut added sugars it's likely because I'm cutting a lot of the garbage that I currently eat and probably means I'm having a better diet of lean proteins, healthy fats and veggies. I don't plan to totally eliminate carbs, but if I get most of my carbs from fruits and sweet potatoes, I should be better off than getting my carbs from white breads, pasta's and cookies, which have tons of sugar. I will track calories and work at a deficit of net calories, so making sure that I still properly refuel from calories utilized in workouts. Hopefully this plan will help me see some serious weight loss, but also an increase in performance simultaneously.

Also, the Phinney study that someone on here mentioned as research that shows ketogenic diets are good for athletes was this:

6 untrained, overweight subjects. At the beginning they were tested, walking on a treadmill to exhaustion. The walking on the treadmill was at 76% VO2 max, which is about the effort level than what a well-trained ironman triathlete races at and is already burning a high percentage of fat vs. carbs. Yet this was just walking for these subjects and average time to exhaustion was 168 minutes. They were restricted to 50 to 750 calories per day of meat and fat and provided vitamin supplements. After 6 weeks they had lost an average of about 23 pounds each. Walking on the treadmill at the same pace was now only 60% of VO2 max for them, so super-easy effort and time to exhaustion was extended to 249 minutes.

There was no control group that ate carbs, which means there is no way to scientifically attribute causes to the results.

So how do we know what contributed to the extended time to exhaustion? Could it be that because they lost massive amounts of weight from calorie restriction that mild walking became a lot easier than it was before?? Could it be attributed to the training effect over 6 weeks starting with untrained individuals? These would also contribute to a higher % of fat utilization because of reduced effort on the second test. There is no reason to believe that ketosis was just a magic fuel that made things easier and made them go longer.

Starting out with people who are at 76% VO2 max is hardly relevant to even mildly trained athletes. These are people who are MASSIVELY out of shape.

---

-------------
Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

Sounds like a smart plan

---

-------------
Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

Here you go

http://36iusc2tb88y2g492si2bqd1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/...Poster-Autosaved.pdf

Name of athlete not mentioned, but there is only one elite female athlete who concluded her season with a 8:52 IM, you can check the 2015 IMAZ results to confirm

While the specific make up of the 130 calories is not noted, it is reasonable to assume it would not be far from the 12% ratio of cho she was training with, based on consistency of Maffetone's methodology and purpose of the study. If you want to see the detailed paper, just email him :-)

If your skeptical, that is a good thing. If you are open minded, give it a try- you have nothing to loose. If you decide to try it, do it right, Maffetone has a lot of good info on what is needed

She's not running out of fat reserves during the course of a race so why would the 130 cal/hr be of the same makeup of her normal diet of 12%CHO, 13%protein and 75% fat? It was almost certainly close to 100% CHO as that is what you run out of during races. It would not make sense to eat fat during an ironman, much less mostly fat! You would be replacing what you already have plenty of and ignoring what you have run out of.

And 130kcal/hr is not absurdly low for a lightweight female triathlete. Her previous number is unbelievably high - 450/hr after the swim - probably higher on the bike. This is more than a large professional male triathlete can handle without gastric distress. No wonder she had severe gastro issues! Just eliminating all the gastro issues from excessive over-fueling during the race could account for her performance increase, but because this is not a controlled study there is no way to know. At IMAZ she consumed 0 calories on the swim. If we divide up the remaining calories at a constant rate/hr on the bike and run, that means 144 kcal/hr. It's more likely that the calories are a little skewed towards the bike. That IS pretty low, but it is not absurd for a small, light, female who is highly trained at ironman intensity so she is highly efficient at burning fat at 70%-75% VO2max and is able to get the race over with quite quickly compared to slower, heavier, under-trained, inefficient amateurs.

And as I mentioned this is not controlled study. This is an anecdote with lots of complicating factors. It's also hard for me to believe that a pro triathlete can put in 15-25 hours of training per week on 2700 kcal per day. Say she does 3 hours per day of relatively low intensity training at 650 kcal/hr and all other caloric needs add up to 1500 kcal/day that is 3,450 kcal/day just to maintain weight. This even sounds like an underestimate to me. Something is fishy. Maybe he is not including fueling during training and recovery food after training...

---

-------------
Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

Speaking to recovery meals after training, something I always suck at, what are folks typically eating immediately after a session? Say a 60-90 minute run or a pretty tough bike with intervals at near FTP for 60-90 minutes?

the forum is not an appropriate place to give you a detailed education so that you can understand why the specifics of calorie intake are critical in what your body will metabolize for muscle contractions. The study summary I provided has an excellent bibliography- if you are not just trolling, and actually are interested in this subject, I suggest you read some of the referenced materials.
Ultimately, if this will, or will not work for you is a very simple process of testing. 40 years ago the type of communication we are now enjoying was hardly imaginable, yet here we are! Ironically, the physiology and principles involved in low carb/high fat are not new- but were the norm for the majority of time our species has existed! Have fun!

I just have a glass of chocolate milk

From all your posts, I think you're just eating too much outside of training. Less crap food, more clean food. KISS

I'm both openminded and skeptical at the same time. I think it's possible that something real is going on here, and I'm intrigued by the Sami Inkinen story as well.

What you've referenced is not a study, it's a case report from a poster session. So an interesting anecdote but far from a real study. I am openminded enough to have listened to the entire podcast with Maffetone and Dr. Stevens. FYI, she mentioned that she fueled on the bike with honey and on the run with flat coke. So essentially sugar, and a bit of caffeine from the Coke. She mentioned she also took in some fat but didn't specify what or how much.

I think it's interesting that Sami didn't change his training, and it wasn't all low intensity low HR stuff, and he appears to have also gotten the same fat burning effect. I do find the Maffetone HR stuff a but cultish. As a 62 year old male with a relatively high max HR for my age of ~190, I'd end up with a training ceiling of 123 bpm, factoring in my age and putting back 5 bpm for being well trained and healthy. For perspective, I might average a HR of 135-150 for long endurance rides & runs. I like to be competitive in my performance, but mostly training and racing is about having fun and staying fit. All I can say is if Iimited my training to that HR ceiling it would be incredibly tedious, slow, and unenjoyable, so don't think I'll be trying that anytime soon even if it does have long term benefits.

A clear takeaway of the podcast with Dr. Stevens is that she had been chronically overtrained, and for her a bout of low intensity training might have been just what the doctor ordered to restore her body and her motivation.

I'm not too nitpicky about recovery drinks/meals. I make sure it has both carbs and protein. I often add some powdered L-glutamine to it, an amino acid to help with muscle recovery. I pick whatever I have around. Might be orange juice with the l-glutamine and some nuts. Might be milk and crackers and hummus. The amount I eat is dictated by how hungry I feel.

You can definitely be more scientific about it, but this works for me.

---

-------------
Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

This is not an appropriate place to talk about what you should eat during the race and why? Seems to me this is exactly the place! If you think I am a troll, you do not know the definition. It is more likely that you are a troll, but I believe you are instead just in a bubble. I am familiar with Phinney's work on this subject which is referenced on the poster. Most of his studies have been uncontrolled and he draws erroneous and unsupported conclusions to support his prior biases. His one controlled study of trained cyclist he claims as support that ketogenic diets are a benefit for competitive cyclists, touting that at 60% to 65% VO2max average performance was not adversely affected, however he ignores the fact that that effort level is way below race intensity and that in his study the ketogenic athletes had deteriorated performance at higher intensities while the "high" carb athletes had no deterioration in high-effort performance, but even THEY were restricted from eating as much carbs as they should and might have done even better if allowed to supplement even more carbs. Also the standard deviation of the change in performance of the ketogenic athletes was so high as to make the results unbelievable, even at low effort levels.

---

-------------
Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

LOL- I am 61, and also have an HR profile that does not fit the 180-age, although in fairness to Maffetone he designed it to be safely in the aerobic zone, meaning for some it will be in the very low aerobic zone, for others at the high end. You can perform blood lactate testing with a Lactate Pro to determine the specific point when your metabolism transitions to dominate sugar burning.
In my personal use of this protocol (low carb/high fat), I have had very similar results to those noted by Sami. Most of the year I train easier, in my case an HR of about 135, running or riding. 4 weeks before a big event I do a 3 week "over reach" block, in which I only observe HR for reference, but train to PE, pace and speed- followed by a taper week. I have also noted that since switching to low carb, high fat- my respiratory rate stays lower even when I push harder, which is a indicator that I am not moving into sugar metabolism. I started this diet change (training and meals) last October, and have not yet raced, but have done a couple of 8 hour bike-run bricks at 70.3 effort- (HR 155ish), eating only a mix of sunflower seeds, walnuts and blue cheese (about 600-700 kcal), and have had no drop off in energy- and my recovery has been in line with when I used sugar based nutrition.
The referenced material is indeed a case report from a poster session, but it is in fact a summary from a detailed study done by Maffetone. I have not asked for the study detail, but he may share, depending on his agreement with the study subject :-)

That's not exactly what is going on. As an athlete piles on more and more carbs in their daily diet, they become less and less sensitive to insulin. And then they need more carbs for insulin to extract the same amount of energy out of the food. It's the same process as a kid becoming diabetic from drinking cokes all day. The body becomes numb to insulin, because there's so much insulin being created in response to all the sugar coming in. Stevens wasn't choosing to eat 450 sugar cals per hour, she was having to eat 450 sugar cals per hour to generate the same energy to move forward at the same speed as her competition.

Since that is way too much fuel to digest hour after hour, high-carb dependent athletes like Stevens (and many of us) blow up a while into the run. We either get sick from trying to eat all the sugar we need, or we bonk from our stomachs shutting down right before getting sick and now we can't make the energy to keep going.

The trick that is proposed here is to eat way less sugar and simple carbs in your daily diet, get those calories from fat and slow carbs instead, which in turn increases your body's sensitivity to insulin, which in turn makes your body able to keep running on less carbs coming in.

There's also the problem that carbs coming in signals your body to turn off fat burning, because you don't need fat because you have carbs. So again, less sugar coming down the pipe turns the fat burning furnace on more and more.

In Steven's case, she swapped out the carbs in her daily diet for fat, which raised her insulin sensitivity, which in turn lowered her need for carbs and upped her internal fat usage for fuel at the same time.

The quoted statement above doesn't pan out exactly how you'd think. If she just cut the carbs during the race before fixing her metabolism, she'd bonk. At her past metabolic state, she had to have those carbs to race at all. It's fixing the underlying metabolic issues by adjusting the daily diet that worked and shifted her carb needs to where they are now.

People can go get tested to see how high of a carb burner they are. The Tri Shop in Dallas did it for me a while back and I came back super high, and also recently came back from blood testing as nearly pre-diabetic. All this while being super fit and low body fat from training for Ironmans. The big giveaway is not being able to have a strong workout without gatorade or other sugary stuff. I didn't understand the impact of the high sugar burn rate at the time, because I was way more focused on FTP. But FTP is useless if you've bonked because you can't feed the engine fast enough.

A mistake people make trying to fix themselves is removing too many carbs too soon and/or not replacing their calories with fat. Go slow and enjoy the process.

BTW, "1000 calories from soda is not the same as 1000 calories from broccoli" is definitely true, but if it took as long to digest those soda calories as it took to digest the broccoli ones, they'd be a hell of a lot more alike. :)

---

----------------------------------------------------------
Zen and the Art of Triathlon. Strava Workout Log
Interviews with Chris McCormack, Helle Frederikson, Angela Naeth, and many more.
http://www.zentriathlon.com

+1

These threads tend to end up in the weeds, there is some nice grass in there as well:)

My food for thought:


Fat burns in a glucose flame; taking availability out of the equation it is largely an intensity dependent relationship


Fuel workouts in line with the proportional demand and supply, but be ready to accommodate for your ability to assimilate

Although not mutual exclusive: separate fitness/session/performance goals, health, and weight loss in dietary considerations. You may be able to envelop all of them, but at the price of dilution.

Translating and generalizing research in terms of diet/performance is problematic at best; there are massive subjective variables

Cheers!

Regarding insulin sensitivity, it appears the opposite to what you say is true. High carb, low fat diets actually increase insulin sensitivity.

http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/Insulin.athlete.html


and


http://www.ajconline.org/article/0002-9149(92)90981-4/abstract?cc=y=


I eat all the carbs I want. And I want a lot. And I burn a lot of fat. In Zone 1 I burn 0.87 g/min of fat and in Zone 2 0.86 g/min. This is comparable to the amount of fat burned by some grand tour cyclists they tested and shared the results with me (anonymously of course). The biggest difference was those cyclists kept it level into zone 3 and I dropped to 0.71. Still not terrible, and improvable with the right training. So obviously my high-carb diet has not ruined my ability to burn fat and made me "carb dependent". Inkinen's results of something like 750kcal/hr (if memory serves) from fat translates to 1.39g/min. I think that is pretty un-precedented. I would love to see an expert physiologist's analysis of his results and methodology.

---

-------------
Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

So what actually does increase one's ability to burn fat then? A bigger aerobic engine? Sorry, it's tough to keep up with a lot of the more scientific discussion here and I'm trying to understand it as someone newer to endurance sports and nutrition.