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Bye!

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Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday. And this Monday, I wanna talk about athlete weight gain and subsequently, athlete weight loss. I get this a lot with people that I talk to and indeed, it happened to me as well. People gain weight when they train for endurance events and a large proportion of people when they start training for an endurance event, in the back of their mind, they're thinking,

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This might be a really good way to lose weight actually, or it could even be their sole motivating factor. They know that they want to improve their body composition and lose body fat. They know they need to be motivated to do so, and so they sign up for an event. And really, in terms of sort of goal setting, it's not a bad one to choose. However, it doesn't always work out that way. And indeed, when I trained for my first half marathon,

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And indeed marathon, I actually ended up gaining five kilos, which was a little bit soul destroying given all of the effort that went into running and training. And what I thought was burning calories and creating a calorie deficit. Indeed, that was not the case. And there are some super common reasons for why people can gain weight when they were hoping to lose weight or even just maintain where they're at. So I want to go through some of the most common

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mistakes that I see my athletes make and indeed mistakes that I made. And then how to approach both training for an endurance event and either maintaining your weight or actually even improving body composition. And of course there is a time and a place with which you want to focus on fat loss as an athlete. But it can be done. I would say right up until probably that last eight weeks where you've got some super key training sessions.

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That's when things may, you may need to shift your focus more to performance rather than necessarily fat loss. And the reason for that is because it can be very difficult to, as I've heard people say it, chase two rabbits at once. You cannot sort of chase a goal of fat loss and chase a goal of performance. However, you can integrate the two if you do it sort of smartly and are happy to take it more slowly.

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That way, performance and recovery isn't compromised to the same extent as if you were to go on a super crash diet. So first, let's discuss some of the reasons why people gain weight. And one of the first really obvious ones is that running or endurance sport can just make you hungry. A large part of the training is done at an intensity that can drive your appetite up rather than help dampen it down.

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super intense work, knows that feeling of nausea and not wanting to eat after a workout because of the effort that you've put in. Of course, this can drive appetite up later and it might be even later that day or the next day where you start to feel hungry. But a large part of the training that we do is done at the intensity which just sort of drives this gnawing hunger. So therefore, naturally, we just eat more. And if you're not eating foods that

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are favorable for both recovery and improving body composition, it can then drive your hunger even more. So, you know, you get this ravenous hunger on and then your blood sugar drops and all you can think about are processed refined carbohydrate. So that's what you eat. And of course, after about two bowls of cereal, you're full at the time, but two hours later, you could be starving again. So it's choosing the right type of foods when you are hungry that help with satiation and

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help you feel satisfied and not necessarily just make you feel hungrier later. So because endurance can make you hungry, it is actually quite easy to overeat and eat more calories than you need or eat more that then takes you out of the calorie deficit you think you're creating. And part of it is a psychological thing too. There's a large sort of reward factor that comes when you do long training and this is totally speaking from experience.

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You know, you complete a super hard run or a super long run and you're quite stoked with yourself. And then you're like, oh, I'll just have this beer or I'll order these chips or I'll have this chocolate because I deserve it. And I'm not necessarily saying you don't deserve it, but if it is coming from a place which then makes it hard for you to maintain the calorie deficit, then you really need to sort of rethink that and maybe rethink how often you do that.

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because if you're doing it too often, then that can be one of the reasons why you end up gaining weight. Another mistake I see people make, and we've talked about this before, is when you use the calories burnt on your Garmin or your Apple Watch or your Fitbit as a gauge for eating more food. And these can overestimate by a substantial amount. And in some reviews, I've seen that it's overestimated by 30%.

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And I've even seen people report that they're overestimated by a whopping 98%. So if you go out for a run and it tells you you've burnt 500 calories and you eat those 500 calories back, you will likely put yourself into a surplus because you've eaten more calories than you've burned off. But also part of losing weight is to create that calorie deficit. And so when you're eating back the calories you burn, you are essentially again, eating into that deficit, which

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could be one of the things that is either preventing you from losing weight or in fact making you gain weight. Another really simple mistake and this is I see very common is not eating around training and it almost seems intuitive to think well you know I'll wake up in the morning and I'll do my training and then I'll hold out eating until later on in the day. But what can happen when you do this is it can then purely from a hunger perspective drive hunger later in the day.

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and you can then end up overeating later to compensate for not eating earlier on. And another really obvious consequence is you may not be adequately fueling your session. So you might not get the fitness gains and have the metabolic output that you otherwise would have if you had fuel on board. You know, particularly when you do intensity based sessions, it does require a fuel on board to be able to get your power to the point where you want it to be or to hit the pace that you want.

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to hit, or at least for a lot of people it can, and therefore this then drives your fitness gains and you burn more calories because you're able to have a higher metabolic output. This might not be possible if you are going into every training session fasted, waking up and then training without putting any fuel on board. The other thing that can occur is that you can get that metabolic downturn that occurs,

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when you are training and then going for an extended period of time without fuel. But your body reads signals like that if this is something you do all of the time. So you wake up, you go for your run, you get home, you shower, you might have some fluid without calories, then you go into work and you don't eat for another two to three hours. What this does is that your body will start breaking down muscle tissue in auditory type to try to feel recovery. So you extend that catabolic state.

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that you've woken up from and that you've placed your body in through the training. But also your body may burn less calories across the course of the morning because it's getting the signal that you don't have anything in there to replace it. So it may well be turning down your physiology essentially because you're not refueling from your session. And it can also impact on your behavior.

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So if you've done a faster training session and then waited for an extended period of time to eat, just your non-exercise activity thermogenesis can also reduce as your body tries to, in effect, save calories because it isn't getting any calories on board. Not fueling your training in order to lose weight isn't the way to lose weight, for all of the reasons that I've suggested. And in fact,

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In addition to what I've described, a pattern I do often see with some endurance athletes is that they may sort of lose muscle, but also gain fat around the middle because if you chronically follow this pattern and it's not working for you, then your body gets into that stress response, which means it's going to start storing more fat rather than shifting it, even if you are thinking that you're creating a calorie deficit.

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You may be eating fewer calories, but your body's burning fewer calories to make up for the fact that it's trying to sort of run on the smell of an oily rag for the better part of a day. So that's another mistake that I see a lot of endurance athletes make. And of course, all that said, the other consequence of this is that you might not recover as well, which means you go into that next training session being under fueled and it has implications for the, for how fit you can get.

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On the flip side though, you've got athletes that will fuel everything. And this is a mistake actually that I made when I was training for a marathon. I would follow the advice of the goo gels and I would all lep in actually is what we had. And I would have a gel every 20 minutes during a training session. I would have a gel before I went training and I would have sports drink when I came back from training. And of course I had lollies as well because they were a quick source of glucose. So rapidly massively upping your carbs.

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more than what you actually need is another mistake that I see athletes make. And look, it's a really sort of a fine balance, particularly if you are an age group athlete, you're not, this is not your life, this is not your job to be an athlete. And to sort of find that balance of having enough fuel on board to be able to train the way you want to, to recover the way you want and to maintain your health, yet also not sort of overdo it.

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But I see a lot of athletes up their carbs and it tends to be at the detriment of other food sources such as protein, you know, and fibre because the carbs that they're upping are the processed refined carbohydrates and not ones which also help keep them satisfied and have nutrients. And if you think about it, for an athlete who might be training, say, an average of 90 minutes a day, and if you look at sports nutrition guidelines,

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that would indicate that they would need about, say, six to seven grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight. And that's a substantial amount of carbohydrate to then layer on the appropriate amount of protein and ensure they've got enough fat. So it's easy to see how upping your carbs too much can increase calories to the point where you are unable to lose weight, and instead you start gaining weight.

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Another mistake I see some athletes make is not eating enough fibre or protein, obviously, to help satisfy them. And so if your carbohydrate choices and your meal choices are based around more refined, energy dense foods, and by energy density I mean foods that have more calories per gram, so less volume, then it's very easy to overeat.

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or the training rather, is driving your hunger. Another mistake is not hydrating effectively. So often we think that we're hungry when in fact we're probably just thirsty. And if you are sort of chronically dehydrated and lacking in energy, well not only might you turn to sugar to help pep you up, but you may well also have an increased appetite because you think you're hungry rather than the fact that you're actually just thirsty. And...

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Lastly, often athletes who are trying to lose weight, they tend to under eat across periods of the week to overeat later on. And part of this is the reward factor as well. Like you know, you're quote unquote good breakfast through lunch, and then you overeat later on in the day and think, well, you know, I haven't had that much, so I can have this here now at dinner time. Not really understanding that overall.

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the calories you might be taking in are greater, or a bit of what of that metabolic compensation I talked about earlier is also occurring. So this can be sort of unfavorable for fat loss. But also you might be someone who has, you know, who Monday through Thursday is able to hold a calorie deficit, but it's quite an aggressive one, which means by the weekend, you end up just being in the space where you can't help but overeat.

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because you need the fuel and your blood sugar is all over the place. So you're starving yourself Monday through Thursday, then you're overeating in the weekend. And if you do overeat, it can be very easy to consume hundreds of calories without even sort of realizing it, particularly if you are eating a lot of these energy dense foods, which some people are. So these are some of the mistakes that I see athletes make.

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when they embark on endurance training thinking they're going to lose weight and instead end up gaining weight. So here are some solutions or some tips. Firstly, try to think about how you might be able to knock say anywhere from 300 to 500 calories off from your typical daily intake. For some people or for a lot of people that's actually not a lot of calories and it's not going to be too aggressive. Now the harder you train and the bigger the training load,

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potentially the less of a deficit you want to create through reducing calories, because you still need to fuel that training. So this is why when you are trying to improve body composition and lose body fat, you really want to sort of make that decision ahead of time. So you're not thinking that you're going to have to, you know, slash your calories by up to a third, which I see a lot of people do. So try to knock off three to 500 calories and keep it at the lower end of that.

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if your training load is higher or you're not recovering as well. And make sure you're fueling around your training. So consider your training fuel appropriately around it, depending on the training session. And then have a think about the evening time, particularly if you train in the morning, as to how you can reduce your calories then. Like it is actually better to ensure you're well fueled during the day and then

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eat less at night, even if it means that you're waking up hungry and ready to eat in the morning, that's not a bad thing. Because it's the opposite of that other model I was talking about that then resulted in that sort of downturn of your physiology. You are fueling around your training and then you are eating less in the evening and that's where you're shaving off the calories. And don't forget there are lots of things which have calories that of course you don't even think about. You know like olive oil for cooking.

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or as a dressing on salad. Throwing nuts and seeds into a salad or always having cheese and avocado and dressings. You know, like making changes there to sort of calorie rich foods can go a long way to reducing your calories without necessarily thinking about it. I would also say not only sort of surround your workout with food as I talked about, but...

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You know, it's not always appropriate to go super low carb. And this is a mistake I see lots of people make. And indeed, I mean, for some people, it's totally fine, right? But if you are struggling with going super low carb and you've got really dead legs and you're not losing weight, and that's a sort of primary goal of yours, then that tells me that you're likely not able to recover properly from your workouts.

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you know, the dead legs. So you'll then unable to train effectively, but then you could also be overdoing calories in other areas, like for example, fat calories. So actually, and this is no surprise, if you follow any of the stuff that I talk about, think more about getting carbs in after your training to help recover from the session. And that will prevent you having dead legs. So you'll then able to work effectively in your next training session. And...

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I think you can still be a low carb athlete with having sort of substantial carbs in your diet actually and focusing on having really good quality ones. You know if you think about a 2000 calorie intake, and this is just a number I'm pulling out, if you have 25% of your calories coming from carbohydrate, that's 125 grams of carbs. And let's say that after a heavy training session, you have a cup of rice, cup of cooked rice in your lunch for example.

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That's about 60 grams of carbs right there, which still leaves you about 70 or 65 grams of carbs to have throughout the day, which might be a piece of fruit and greens and any carbs that come from dairy and things like that. So you're still running on a low carb intake, yet you might have enough carbs to help recover from that workout. And of course, think about fueling for the work required, because on some days, if you're out there for

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say three to four hours, then your carb intake might be as high as say 250 grams, yet you're still probably running on a lower carb intake compared to the number of calories that you're taking on board for the entire day. So your low carb intake as an athlete is going to look quite different from a low carb person in the general population who isn't as active as you are. So don't be afraid to put in carbs after your workout.

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when your muscles are receptive to taking them on board, and it doesn't require an insulin response, because I know that some people are mindful of that. And also don't be afraid to take carbs in during your sessions to help maintain that blood glucose level that allows you to work harder and maintain a pace. And again, it doesn't have to be 90 grams of carbs an hour. Even having like a gel an hour is like 25 grams of carbs, but that might be enough.

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to help maintain your pace across the session. So you're able to get what you need from that training session. And of course, this may be something you're able to work out yourself, or it might be something you need to work with a sort of sports nutritionist with, but don't be afraid to fuel your workout and recover from them. And in doing so, you're actually able to get what you want from your training and also recover from your training well as well.

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And I would also say that having carbs after training is often the missing thing from a lot of athletes, which then helps satisfy them and then leads them to being much more in control of their food intake later on in the day. Running too low carbs can impact negatively on cravings, particularly if you train a lot, but also alcohol cravings. So we can have a substantial amount of calories coming in from other foods because we feel we need something.

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because we haven't had carbs at the appropriate time. And I would also think it's important to mention that, you know, Jeff Rothschild's work on pre-training fuel and its impact on sort of fat oxidation really highlighted that for people who are doing long training sessions, it doesn't impact negatively on your ability to burn fat if you have carbs prior to training. However, if you're doing a short session,

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it might just be that you have some protein and fat before you go out. So it's not that carbs pre-training is necessarily a bad thing. It just depends on the duration of the session and the overall goal of the session. And I would also say for athletes who are wanting to lose weight, that sometimes if you have a higher intensity session, having carbs beforehand is actually again going to help sort of fuel that session, particularly if you are running in a calorie deficit. So

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This is again another reason why it can be really good to sort of bounce your ideas off sports nutritionists who will then be able to sort of help you come up with a plan that really suits what you know your goals and what you're trying to achieve. And for people who are really wanting to try to lose the last few kilos, some sort of guidelines around that for those people who are counting calories might be that you are targeting around 2 to 3 grams of carbs per kilo of body weight.

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2 grams to 2.5 grams of protein per kilo of body weight, and about 1 gram of fat per kilo of body weight. That might be how you want to structure your daily diet. And then I would say for those who have extended sessions, maybe if you're training for an Ironman or an ultra marathon, you might want to add in about 150 to 250 calories for every couple of hours that you might be out there training on the weekend.

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If you've got a four hour run, for example, adding in an additional up to 400 calories on that day in training might help fuel the training and also help you recover from it too. So there are just some sort of calorie guidelines for those people who count calories. And if you do count calories, have a think about dividing those calories up into four eating or four sort of.

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of the day if you like. So you get up and you train, you might have one to two hundred calories pre-training and then you might have say three to four hundred calories for breakfast. And then your lunch might be about 400 to 500 calories. You may have another meal at about say three o'clock and then you may have dinner. So you're sort of structuring your food to be distributed across the day to help

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offset any hunger that might come from going for too long without food. And remember, as an athlete, you do need to focus on that recovery and that refueling process and your body does like routine. So knowing that you're having breakfast and then you're eating again, you know, four hours later may also help offset any of the cravings and overeating that can occur if you haven't really got a plan in place.

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because I know a lot of people like try to hold out on eating and then end up caving and sort of going for it. So having a bit of a structure can be really helpful. And then if you've fueled throughout the day adequately, then you may get away with eating a little bit less in the evening time and you've recovered from your training session. So you may just get away with a lighter dinner and then drinking sparkling water, herbal tea.

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things like that or even having like a sort of a protein shake made with water or something super light in addition to dinner, but it doesn't impact negatively on your overall goal of creating that calorie deficit. So in conclusion then, I think the major take home from this is plan accordingly to fuel properly for your training and plan your meals so you have structure around them and they have adequate amounts of carbohydrate for recovery.

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enough carbs to help fuel your higher intensity sessions. You've got good fiber to help keep you satisfied and you're not running a super high fat intake. Do be mindful that it's okay to feel hungry but you don't wanna be ravenous. So that's another thing which I think is really important. And make really good food choices too because it is important to help fuel your recovery and give you the nutrients you need. One last thing on that.

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I would actually go for a broad spectrum multivit if you're an athlete training who also wants to lose body fat because you're working harder than the average person. Your body is under a lot more metabolic stress and sometimes these cravings can come from not having nutrients on board. And you guys know that I love the NuZest Good Green Vitality and that would be my pick for you in order to meet your sort of multivitamin.

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and mineral requirements and help sort of offset some of that stress that occurs through training. Anyway, hopefully that's helpful. Let me know. You can catch me on Facebook at mikkiwillidennutrition, at Instagram, Twitter and threads @mikkiwilliden. Head to my website mikkiwilliden.com and book that session with me to talk through your fat loss goals if you're an athlete who's got an event coming up. All right team, speak soon. Bye.