Overloaded and Under-fuelled: A case study

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With all the ongoing and seemingly never-ending debate in the paleo/low carb world about the likes of safe starches, low-carb paleo vs. high-carb paleo, and so on, I admit I get a bit frustrated by it all.  We hear examples of how people have supposedly followed a certain protocol, meeting with either with great success or with the wheels coming off their health in spectacular fashion.  Despite people trying to dial carbohydrate intake in to the nth degree, juggling 5 grams here and 5 grams there (remember when we played the same game with fat in the 90′s?), we are slowly but surely seeing an increase in the number of people reporting that “paleo/low carb didn’t work for them”.

Amongst the many possible reasons as to why these strategies might not have worked, one of the ones that I see most commonly is a failure to compensate for pushing carbohydrate intake down by pushing fat intake up.  For some, this might be completely unintentional – they just don’t know how to get fat intake up.  They have spent so many years trying to get fat out of the diet that they really have no reference point for how to load it back in again – they don’t know how much is not enough.  Others, who may have limited gut capacity to digest and absorb a lot of long-chain fats, may find that making such a big jump in their fat intake makes them feel unwell and so they struggle to get enough in.

Other individuals seem to be of the opinion that if low-carb is good for weight loss, very low-carb will be even better – particularly when combined with low-fat.  These people invariably end up eating a low-carb, low-fat, moderate-protein, low-calorie diet.  On such a diet, you are on borrowed time before either the hunger sets in or your body starts taking steps to protect itself (stalling fat loss).  In my experience, these people will typically swear black and blue that they are eating carbs – that they haven’t cut them too low.  They will also swear that they are eating more fat.  But when you turn the thumb screws on them enough, you eventually get the truth.  You see a small plate of food, with a small amount of pumpkin (or the like), perhaps coated with a small amount of olive oil. Fail.

[Incidentally, if these same people see you eat, they balk at the amount of food you put away]

I was recently contacted by a young chap wanting help and whose situation reflects some of the above.  As he had numbers to put all around his specific situation, and given how often I have seen similar situations, I asked him if he would mind me using him as a case study and example.   He agreed and I very much appreciate him giving me this opportunity.

  • Male, 21y
  • Current weight = 100kg
  • Target weight = 90kg
  • Goals: Pass navy diving exam, lose weight, increase endurance capacity

Brief history;

A little history, over about 18 months I lost around 30kg eating low-fat conventional wisdom (stupid whole grains etc.) and took my 10k run time down to around 45 mins. I am lucky enough to have come across paleo and I now eat like that on the most part but struggle to put a plan into place that allows me to lose weight and maintain the amount of training I now need to do with the navy diving gig. I have played around with lower carb (~100g) etc but have struggled a little with poor performance.

Goal wise I need to lose around 5-10kg and have to regain a mid 40′s 10k run time (now in mid 50′s after a 6 month layoff). I currently crossfit, strength sessions and run in a bit of a haphazard style, usually 2 sessions a day, 5 days a week. I also run weekly intervals with a triathlon club, 6-8km of 200,400,800 and 1k’s.

I agreed to take this young gentleman on and asked for a more extensive background, including diet, a more detailed training schedule, and his sleeping patterns and quality.  This is what he sent through, starting with his training load…

4 x week run as per Crossfit Endurance – 1 x short intervals (10×400 usually), 1 x long intervals (6-8km of 200,400,800,1000 at 10k/5k race pace), 1 x stamina (2.4,4,5,10k TT) and 10×100 sprints/4×500 hill sprints alternated each week.

3 strength sessions – 5×5 Back squat and bench, 5×5 front squat and press, 5-5-5-3-3-1 deadlift

5 or 6 CF wods as per my box or something via sealfit/military athlete wods.

Swim twice a week, 1 x intervals and 1 long for recovery.

Ride the road bike 10k round trip to the box.

Rest Thursday AM and Sundays.

Usually do endurance workout in AM, Strength/WOD in PM.  I also add in specific training for my pushup/situp/pullup as required by the navy gig.

Training volume is large but I think it’s the sort of level I’ll need to be at.

This is a MASSIVE training load!  Most of the intervals are very extensive by nature.  10x 100m is a solid enough session.  But 10x 400/500m will (or should) bury you.  Most of this is very much lactate tolerance-type work, being very heavily glycolytic in nature.  In other words, this level of training would require a good intake of carbs given the total daily and weekly loads.

There was no mention of whether this training was cycled – that is, whether it was completed as a 2 weeks on, 1 week off -type of programme, for example.  My suspicion, based on what I know of CF & CFE programmes, is that this was the set load, week in, week out.

So how was this chap fuelling such high-powered training…

6am – Endurance Training

7am – Breakfast: 250g tuna in brine with 10g coconut oil, 450g broccoli pesto (250g broccoli, 200g carrot, 10g coconut oil and spices pureed into mash)

8am-4pm – Work: Fasting – just water/black coffee.

4:30pm – Banana and 10gm Branched-Chain Amino Acid supplement

5pm – Strength training or WOD

6:30pm – Dinner: 100g beef liver, 300g grassfed beef, 500g zucchini, 100g sauerkraut, 200g sweet potato

I stick to that 6 days a week and then fast from [lunchtime saturday to dinnertime sunday night] where I eat to satiety on the meat/veg as well as some frozen mashed banana as an ice cream substitute. Not sure if this is even required but I do it with the idea of fueling the first few days in the week and making sure I’m not slowing down any hormonal/metabolism sort of things. (Could be stupid of me but that is currently the thought process)

I am a bit disillusioned with the level of carbs, having been keto before and have performed fairly well, but with this volume of training on a fairly low carb level could provide problems?

You think?

In summary, this athlete was undertaking fasted sprint (glycolytic) training in the morning, eating a low-carb AND low-fat breakfast, followed by more fasting and only a light snack; undertaking a second training session (also glycolytic), before finishing the day off with dinner.  At the weekend, an extend fast of approximately 18 hours occurs.

Let’s put some numbers around this.  This is the approximate breakdown of this gentleman’s daily intake;

  • Energy: 1732 kcal
  • Protein: 162.5g
  • Carbs: 129.2g
  • Fat: 67.8g

To give you some perspective, I do nothing approaching this volume of training, and I would eat more fat for breakfast than this guy has in a day!

He is eating a low-carb, very low-fat, and therefore low-energy diet, whilst putting himself through the wringer on a day-to-day basis.  It is no wonder that his performance and weight loss progress had stalled.  And in my mind at least, this scenario is exactly the reason why those “gurus” who are getting bogged down with playing around with low-carb and very low-carb diets, attempting to manipulate various hormonal outputs, and generally tinkering with all sorts of fringe strategies, all with the aim of sorting out those who are claiming they have “done everything properly” but “paleo isn’t working for them”, need to be very careful.  This guy doesn’t need less carbs, or more intervals (or more of anything else on the training front for that matter), nor does he need to be stuck in an ice bath and have his leptin/insulin/cortisol/<insert vogue hormone of the week here> adjusted/reset.

He just needs to do less and eat more.

I generally don’t prescribe hard and fast numbers for people to work to – counting anything other than how many steaks are sitting on the plate is just far too tedious in my mind.  However, I did calculate some targets that I thought would make a good baseline and rest point from which we could negotiate and adjust his eating from.  Clearly the current baseline is too low to support his outputs.

I used the following numbers (calculated on his target weight of 90kg);

  • Protein – 2.0g/kg of body weight (current = 1.6g/kg) = 180g (720kcal)
  • Carbohydrate – 2.0g/kg of body weight (current = 1.3g/kg) = 180g (720kcal)
  • Fat – 2.0g/kg of body weight (current = 0.7g/kg) = 180g (1620kcal)

Even conventional wisdom suggests his fat intake should have been approximately 1g/kg.

These would all be approximate goals and give him plenty of room to adjust the variables up and down.  Interestingly, I have recently picked up a paper on high-fat diets for endurance athletes where the researchers were using 1g/kg carbohydrate and 4g/kg of fat!

I advised him to continue to undertake the morning training fasted, as per usual, but to drop the fasting during the day and at the weekend.  An extended fasted training session at the weekend might be more appropriate, followed by a regular eating schedule from there.  I wasn’t specifically asked to address the training side of things, but I would generally try to knock a lot of the volume out of this man’s training sessions, if not dropping the overall intensity of it barring a couple of select sessions per week.

This was the first paragraph of my response to him;

Right, well the short story with this is that you simply aren’t eating enough total energy.  I often talk of people who screw their carbs right down but do not pull their fat intake up sufficiently, either through not knowing how to do so, or by almost subconsciously taking a low-carb and low-fat approach.  I think too that your lack of calorie intake is exacerbated by overuse/misuse of fasting.  If you put together your low-carb, low-fat, low-energy, high-volume, excessively fasted training, you can soon start to see where some of the issues are coming from.

This was his response to my advice and his initial progress;

I really have to get the idea out of my head that low calories and excessive training are the keys to weight loss. My reading explains they’re not, but having lost substantial weight like that in the past I guess I just need a good swift kick in the head to re-align everything.

I suppose the cramming of training elements and extreme dietary practices is due to the navy testing coming up and I am trying to get everything done last-minute due to some very poor behavior on my part. I let myself go over christmas all the way through to late January (gaining about 5kg over a 6 week period; I can eat) and now have to try to do my best in dropping the weight and quickly gaining a little bit better aerobic capacity. I’m back over the ditch in late March in Auckland for a residential divers board so that is the short-term goal, all going well, I could well find myself fulltime in your lovely country.

I will have a play around with [dietary analysis] now and see what I can knock up with those macro’s [target numbers] and will put it into operation for a few weeks.

I have just had a few days of low-carb without the training volume to lose a bit of the water weight I was holding and re-establish a base for ketosis. Did a funny thing before my wod this afternoon…

- 4 eggs and 250gm tuna for breakfast. Lasted me all day no problems.
- Around 4.30pm, coconut cream to 75g of fat, 4.5k run to the cf box, 3-3-3-1-1 front squats followed by 10 rounds of 100m sprint, 15 wallball @ 9kg.

Felt great the whole entire time, no fatigue like I have been experiencing. Put it down to the coconut cream?

Will put the plan into practice over the next 4 weeks and then report back. Going to keep it all Whole30 strict as well. Will keep you posted on how it goes.

He also recently reports that body fat levels have already started coming down again.

The lessons here are;

  • While there are benefits to fasting, fasted training, high-intensity interval training, metabolic condition workouts, and eating low-carb, you overdo all of these strategies at your peril, and combing them all together is not going to give you the cumulative effects you think they might.
  • If you are going to eat low-carb, you need to eat high-fat and likely a lot higher than you think what a high-fat diet actually is.
  • If you are eating low-carb and low-fat, you are on borrowed time before you stall.
  • If you have goals (whether they are performance, weight, or health orientated), with the exception of the occasional break, taking large portions of time off from the strategies you need to achieve those goals and putting yourself under time pressure to achieve them, is likely to see you defaulting to behaviours which you logically know are likely to fail.

Thanks to this client for allowing me to detail his story in a hope that it is a lesson to others getting themselves in similar situations.

Update: The young chap who is the subject of this post contacted me overnight with this update on his progress…

Just a quick message to say the article is great. The fat is falling off me like it never actually has before and I’m feeling fuelled for every workout. I honestly can’t thank you enough. Coconut milk and cream have become my new best friends and I am talking everyone’s ears off at the gym with how good they are. I will keep in touch with the progress as I think something a bit crazy (good crazy) might be happening here, exciting.

31 thoughts on “Overloaded and Under-fuelled: A case study”

  2. I wish I was young and athletic like that guy, but I’m 68 years old, overweight, and sedentary. However, I am working on a low-carb high-fat diet, with a very large portion of the calories coming from high-fat avocados –well, actually Wholly Guacamole. I’m hoping that will work for me.
    Jim Purdy

    • I’m 60 now, started the diet experimenting to recover my health in August of 2007. Have been pure Paleo for over a year now and I can tell you that fear of fat will get you ever time. If you think some high fat avocados will do it, forget it. You need ANIMAL FAT and LOTS of it. I eat a pork burger with added fat in the grind (thanks to a cooperative butcher) every morning and I put about a tablespoon of raw butter on top of it. I eat a side of fatty bacon, and both the patty and bacon are deep fried in lard. Pork chops with about three inches of fat on them make lunch, shrimps and scallops dipped in butter for dinner and sometimes home-made mayonnaise made with olive oil too. Once or twice a week I might eat half a sweet potato or beet or a few lettuce leaves drenched in olive oil, and if I eat an avocado, I dip it in melted butter. You just have to be creative about finding ways to get more fat in the body.

      Our Paleo ancestors ate brains and cracked long bones to suck out the heavy fat inside. Well, I’ve tried the brains, and do make bone broth, but find that I prefer the meat fat with the meat. Every bite of meat has an equal chunk of fat with it. We deep fry chunks of lard to make crispy, fatty snacks. Plus, I take 3 to 6 grams of Omega 3 oils every day.

      With this regime, I have lost over 44 pounds and a whole host of other problems have cleared up including chronic, debilitating pain from rheumatoid arthritis (for which I’ve had three surgeries to rebuild joints.)

      Yes, in the beginning I had to take digestive enzymes, acid, ox bile, and so on to help me digest the fat that I hadn’t been eating for years. But now, my body handles it just fine. The big plus is that when you keep your liver busy digesting fats, it keeps your liver clean and detoxes your body effectively.

      FAT IS YOUR FRIEND! Vegetable fats are NOT what your body wants and needs though certainly, a little bit will do no harm.

      creative

      • Laura, you’ve got me impressed with your extreme inconsistency. You are for fats, but you rant against avocados, which are higher in fat than meat. What specifically is your objection to avocado and guacamole?

  3. Pingback: A must-read – Overloaded and Under-fuelled « Thor's Reads

  4. Great post. Sounds like this guy was on his way to adrenal/ANS fatigue as you discussed in your recent post ( http://thatpaleoguy.com/2012/02/07/are-your-sprint-intervals-a-pain-in-the-ans/ ) but luckily got some intervention before that happened. Obviously reducing training volume is critical but how do you otherwise approach adrenal/ANS recovery with respect to diet? I’ve personally reduced my training volume to 30-minute strength-only workouts about 3 days per week and have bumped up the carb intake in an effort to improve some issues with decreased sleep quality. Minimal improvement so far is frustrating and I am hesitant to cut training volume even further.

  5. “I really have to get the idea out of my head that low calories and excessive training are the keys to weight loss.”

    So. We get beat over the head that it is “calories in : calories out”. And, creating a huge calorie deficit does seem to work in the short term. At which point it seems that the body is able to “compensate” (perhaps by becoming more “metabolically efficient” and wringing more calories out of the food?) and the weight loss stalls. Or possibly even reverses.

    At least that is what it looks like externally.

    I just got the book “Hardwired for Fitness” where they say: “However, when energy expenditure fell below a certain daily level (look at moderately sedentary to very sedentary individuals), the relationship between energy expenditure and calorie consumption broke down or became uncoupled.” (pg 55)

    So, the idea seems to be that “calories in : calories out” really only applies (tightly) when the difference is within some band. Stray outside the band (too much of a difference) and the body does something to affect the relationship. Thus, increasing calories could actually help with the weight loss because it get you back within the band where the body doesn’t fight the deficit.

    Any ideas what the mechanism might be where this guy is taking in so few calories, performing so much work… and still not losing the weight? Because at first glance it certainly seems not to be “calories in : calories out”.

    • Calories are a man-made rather than a biological construct. Yes, macronutrients can be converted to energy along multiple pathways which invariably see them being turned into ATP. But the body doesn’t directly measure “calories” as we think of them. If anyone has discovered which part of the body undertakes a system-wide analysis of calories coming in vs. calories going out, could someone please point me in the direction of it.

      Yes, at some point “calories” count, because “calories” come in the form of carbohydrate, protein, fat, and alcohol. So really when we say that “calories” count, we are saying that consuming each of the aforementioned oxidisable macronutrients counts. But they don’t count equally as those who believe a calorie is a calorie, would have you think. And even the individual fatty acids, amino acids, and mono/di-saccharides are going to have a different influence on the system. You only need to compare and contrast glucose vs. fructose to see that. Both have the same calorie load, as measured outside of the body, but have quite different fates once inside.

      If it were a case of calories in vs. calories out, this guy should be starving. Instead, he was chopping through a huge amount of work and struggling to utilise his body fat stores (though possibly chewing through a bit of lean mass to prop up some gluconeogenesis to fuel all that glycolytic training). But, based on his most recent feedback, we have increased his “calories” and he has lost body fat (though in actual fact, we have increased his fat intake for the most part, with a good portion of that coming from medium-chain triglycerides, and he has more energy and is decreasing his body fat… the fact that there are calories attached to this transaction seems neither here nor there to me).

      Read up on Zoe Harcombe’s work for more info on the calorie myth – http://www.zoeharcombe.com/thecaloriemyth/

  6. Pingback: The Paleo Rag | Overloaded and Under-fuelled: A Case Study

  7. Jamie, I so appreciate this post today of all days. i have been reading alot of Dr Kruse and his leptin re-set and find it very interesting and have been using some of his suggestions with good results. But….I am an endurance athlete and do not give a hoot to live to 100 realizing that my endurance cycling might shorten my life span! What i am interested in is improving my performance goals…dialing in the training..eating…and recovery. Your blog posts are very helpful to me and the fact that you are a cyclist helps alot.

    What is your take on the leptin reset to optimal health?

    Barbara

    • Hi Barbara

      Like you, I’m here for a good time rather than a long time, so I’m not particularly fussed over anything that promises to help me live forever. I really can’t comment on Dr Kruse’s leptin reset program. I struggle to read his posts at the best of times and it isn’t of enough interest to me to dedicate enough time to it to make more informed comment. However, I’m yet to meet someone who is having issues, and who despite what they think about having “tried everything”, still doesn’t have some basic areas that can be manipulated (dietary, exercise, sun exposure, sleep, etc.). I can’t measure a person’s leptin and nor could I refer a person to anyone to get this done in our system, so I would be chasing shadows to try and deal with it.

      Clearly it works for some people and that is great. Though it might not necessarily work by the mechanisms they think it is working by.

      Jamie

      • Jamie,
        I appreciate your comments. So let me ask this…for the past few years when riding in the AM i have been going out in a fasted state and early into the ride I take in some gels and electrolyte fluid combined with a protein (typically soy based) and then post ride i drink a replacement drink of whey protein and carbo’s and when i get home go back to a paleo eating pattern.

        What is your sense of how i manage this…using the gels, replacement fluids and recovery drinks only on the bike and briefly after …does this mess with my trying to be a fat burner using the carbo’s in ride and after?

        I go back and forth on this…
        Thanks again.
        Barbara

          • Jamie…what would you suggest then…i am doing 50–80 milers at a good clip with my riding buddies…no real racing..just the pain we put one another through on a regular bais. I have bonked on the bike before and do not want to put myself close to that again..

            Thanks –Barbara

          • As always – it depends. If your goal is to be a better racer, then is this ride really going to help you achieve that? You are riding someone else’s distance and pace and this might be out of step with what YOU actually need to become a better rider. If you want to be better at this ride, you might need to look at your training to support this ride, and you eating around it and see if you can’t push yourself out to at least the 2-2.5h mark before hitting the gels. I’d be trying to push it later and later into the ride before taking anything onboard (and then I’d be looking very closely at what I was taking), and relying on that stuff only to get you home.

          • Okay Jamie…I am going to push that as see what happens, thanks for your time and ideas. The training rides that I am doing are for me and not anyone else. I do a few century rides a year and in July a 4 state ride for Diabetes…and have done it for 8yrs and that is my target event for the year..alot of moster hills ..and I ride with guys so there is always a push to be better…no slacking…

            If I find it difficult in pushing the carbs out further on the ride, my guess is that I am not as fat adapted as I think i am right?

            Barbara

          • There are going to be obvious limits as to how far you can push out and many factors that will influence this. But I will say that training isn’t racing. Go into your races/events red-hot on glycogen – locked and fully loaded. But you don’t always need to do this in training and you shouldn’t fear losing power and slowing down in the short-term if this sends a signal for adaptation and a bigger payback when it counts.

  8. This kid seems way off track in my opinion. I began my paleo experience 13 months ago at age 45. I am 5’10″ and at the time weighed 215 lbs. I had been mountain bike racing and competing in the clydesdale class, but at 5’10″ and 200 plus lbs, I was fat and could not compete with guys who were over 6′ and carried the weight better. I had to lose weight and did I ever lose weight! I lost 30 lbs in 30 days and eventually got down to 175. I did so by eating eating a fairly strict paleo diet, but I ate (and still do eat) a lot of fat. I no longer trim the fat from the meats that I eat. I eat pork cracklings, bacon, coconut, olives, sardines, eggs, grass-fed beef, nuts, berries, and grapefruit. I started on February 1, 2011 when the weather was horrible and unfit for bike riding, and the only exercise i was doing at the time was hiking 3 times per week about 3 hours per sessions. I believe that lots of people cannot completely give up on the idea of the conventional “food pyramid” idea and they over train and so their weight loss is sabotaged.

  9. We are so bombarded with the “low fat “message that its hard to get around. I went to see a registered dietician/sports nutritionist ( nz trained!) 3 years ago when I realised my fueling for triathlons (ironmans) was a bit off and I felt I should have been leaner for the trainign I was doing. When I got the food plan ( a carb loaded day as you can imagine) I thought – there’s NO way I am going to eat all that processed s***t in a day!!! So never followed through with that and kept doing what I was doing. So after a couple of years of research, reading Loren Cordain + Jo friel’s book and all these gems I stumble upon on the netweb, have made changes ( albeit gradually) and starting to see some results.However, as you point out in the article, I think I may still be a bit low in the fat dept so now full fat greek is on the menu with my berries, nuts, seeds+coconut for brekky.Also had to laugh on the news tonight about ground breaking information from researchers at Otago that fruit juice and all those packaged cereals are now not being labelled with heart foundation tick and are not that healthy – they are full of sugar. YOU DONT SAY??!!!! A chronic fruit juice drinker has the same decay rate as a coke drinker. Healthy? yeah right. Sorry rambling now :)

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  11. Congrats to your client. The idea of consuming more to burn more is really confusing to people stuck in the calorie counting paradigm. Most fail to understand that the input and output are coupled (and non-linear) and can’t be treated independently (see eigenvalue problem).

  12. Interesting anecdote. I totally agree it sounded like he was way under-fueling for that workload and I definitely see a lot of people not compensating with fat intake when going low carb. I’m interested to know objective measurements of the fat now falling off like never before. Were you provided with these? I’d hate to have to chalk this up to the old “my clothes are fitting differently” line of thinking.

  13. In regards to the amount of food you prescribed for him to eat: was this a baseline or was this the intake suggested for the days he works out?

    • They were starting point numbers. Clearly what he was eating wasn’t enough to fuel his endeavours. So you draw a line in the sand with an educated guess at some numbers and say “have a crack at this”. It might be too much – I have no idea. But it is another point to work from and experiment with. That’s what it is all about – not applying a hard and fast formula to all situations. If anyone else reads those as gospel numbers and just starts applying them to themselves without much thought to anything else, well more fool them.

      • Thanks for the reply and post. It was really perfect timing. I’m coming off of ultra marathon training and getting more into the lifting and crossfit scene. Like a lot of people, when I came off the endurance stuff (after eating 70% SAD and 30% paleo) and got back into paleo 100% I dropped a quick 10lbs. But having probably gone too low carb, not enough sleep, not enough fat, and running myself ragged, my weight jumped up 13lbs and some of my lifts have suffered. I have a decent baseline knowledge on food and dietary guidelines via reading everything I can get my hands on (Robb Wolf, PHD, Gary Taubes, Mark Sisson, Cordain), it’s just going to take some time to get off that mantra of eating 5-6 meals per day, stop logging every food to the nearest tenth of a gram, be a little more liberal when it comes to fat, and to realize that carbs aren’t the enemy that a lot of people on Paleohacks claims them to be ;)

        Anyway, Good show! Looking forward to reading future posts :)

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  17. Wow. Stuff I see everyday with the athletes wanting to go Paleo…they have a fear of fat. Get over it!

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