Fat Adaptation In Endurance Sports

In the last years there has been a trend in endurance sports to train your body to become more "fat adapted", meaning that your body can learn to burn more fat instead of glycogen to fuel your endurance activities, such as running or cycling.

This is definitely something that many people look into, since our bodies have many thousands of calories stored as fat, whereas our livers and muscles can only store very limited amounts of glycogen (around ~400 g-600 g total).

During a long event, such as a marathon, ultramarathon or an Ironman, our bodies would deplete our glycogen stores, making fueling a very important part of the equation

If our bodies could switch to use our own stored fat as fuel, then we wouldn't need to use as much food to restore our glycogen deposits. 

That's all cool, but people get something wrong.

They are going on very low carb diets in order to reach that state of fat burning adaptation! 

They are sacrificing their health just for the sake of reaching that physical acclimatization.

Well, to me, that's like throwing out the baby with the bath water.

We all know that low carb diets are no good from a health standpoint. They're generally high in animal products (such as meats, eggs and butter) as well as very high in fats, such as oils, nuts and seeds.

So, the point is that in order to reach the fat burning adaptation there is NO need to change your diet!

I have reached that state just by following two simple paths:

-Fasted aerobic sessions

-Intermittent Fasting (IF)

Personally, I have always liked to run first thing in the morning, before having breakfast. I feel lighter, and better overall.

I know that many people can feel light-headed to train fasted, but that's because they are simply not used to it, and that's why if you are looking to start fasted training you should break into it progressively.

I've built my way to be able to run up to ~35 km (that's almost 22 miles, for you, Americans :) without eating anything before or during the run.

I can go to run a marathon in a fasted state fueling on only ~300 kcal during the whole thing.

So yes, fasted training is, to me, THE BEST way to train your body to use fat as fuel while sparing the stored glycogen.

The other method is Intermittent Fasting. I have a whole blog post about the topic, but basically consists in getting in all your calories within a 8 (or so) hours, and fasting the other 16 hours.

By combining both FASTED TRAINING and INTERMITTENT FASTING you can achieve the so wanted FAT ADAPTATION.

That's it, folks. You can get fat adapted while still getting the best out of your High Carb Vegan Diet!

The "Paleo Diet" Makes No Sense

We have all probably heard of someone who is on the "Paleo Diet".

They definitely got SOMETHING right, and that is that WHOLE FOODS are the way to go, BUT, there are many things that bother me a quite a bit...

Let's look at their food pyramid first:

First of all, they put MEAT (all kinds) at the base of their food pyramid. And I ask... REALLY?

Even in the aboriginal tribes that exist today, they HARDLY eat meat as a staple of their diets.
Meat is an unreliable source or calories. They can get it only when they go hunting and have good luck finding and catching something..

Most tribes today thrive on a diet based on grains or tubers. Corn, potatoes, rice, etc.

So, if even organized tribes can only get meat on occasion, what do you think would be left for the paleolithic man? I seriously doubt that he could get any kind of meat very often.
He probably relied more on fruits and tubers to get his energy from, and supplemented with insects (such as worms) or eggs, when he could find them.

Getting back to their allowed foods, and I saw a controversy regarding this, depending on the author or "guru" promoting this kind of diet, they oftentimes limit their sweet fruit intake (they're missing out!) and focus only on tart fruits, like berries.
Well, I don't understand the science behind this, since sweet fruit was, is and always will be a natural food for us, and I think that there is a reason why our bodies always look for the sweet taste. Our tongue has taste buds for sweetness and we even have an enzyme in our saliva to predigest carbohydrates. We are adapted to eat all kinds of fruit.

Another thing that bothers me is that they tend to allow oils as well. Now you tell me, how are oils natural? They're all processed and are 100% fat with 0 nutritional value.
How would the caveman get oils? Maybe he would eat some nuts and seeds when in season, but never PURE oil!

Also, most if not all the meat that they eat come from animals that didn't exist back in time, and that already makes it an unnatural diet.

Finally, I think they don't understand that our bodies are made to run on carbohydrates. There is science behind this, but anyone should also be able to come to that conclusion just by using some common sense.

They argue that our brain is composed of mostly fat. That is true, but so what? Our muscles are made mainly of protein, yet they use a big deal of glycogen as energy.

It absolutely makes no sense that most of our calories back in the day came from fat instead of carbohydrates.

Again, meat (protein and fat) was an occasional food, and the caveman very likely relied on fruits (when in season) and tubers (throughout the year) as his daily energy source.