What exactly is a "Fat-adapted" athlete?

                 

Yesterday we introduced you to the Cereal Killers Movie.

If breakfast is the most important meal of the day then should we be eating high carbohydrate cereal?

Many endurance athletes have considered a high carbohydrate diet to not only be healthy but essential particularly when racing.

If you are an endurance athlete, that’s anything greater than an hour and a half then “hitting the wall” is where you effectively run out of carbohydrate.

Don’t “Bonk” on the bike is the biggest fear of all endurance Triathletes.

Because of this fear, many endurance athletes are consuming so much carbohydrate that they have Pre-Diabetic blood glucose levels!

The higher level the athlete, the more insulin resistance that is being measured.

                       

The world’s top endurance athletes are changing the way they eat and burn fuel. 

Even if you are a conditioned endurance athlete with 2,000 calories of stored muscle glycogen, if you are burning sugar, at the rate of 1,000 calories per hour, you will run out of fuel at events longer than two hours.

So, can and should we run on fat?

Visceral fat is the fat that surrounds your internal organs.

Having high levels of visceral fat has led to a new terminology, "skinny fat." This refers to people who are thin on the outside but are effectively "fat" on the inside. 

A low carbohydrate diet causes a cascade of events to occur:

Stable, low and non-fluctuating blood glucose 

Decreased inflammation around the internal organs

Increased Metabolic Flexibility:

Metabolic flexibility is the capacity for the endurance athlete to adapt fuel oxidation to fuel availability. The inability to modify fuel oxidation in response to changes in nutrient availability has been implicated in the accumulation of intramyocellular lipid and insulin resistance.

Improvements in metabolic flexibility resulted in an increase in the energy production derived from fat and ketones, which reduced the energy derived from external carbohydrate sources. 

How do I transition to becoming a “Fat-Adapted athlete?”

A general guide is a total intake:

15% carbohydrates, 

20% protein, 

65% good fats per day.

In addition you need to start "fasted" or "empty" training.

When practiced in training (ideally in the ‘off-season’) for 8-12 weeks, this enhances your fat utilisation and decreases your reliance on exogenous fuel sources (i.e. gels). 

To begin with, start with lower intensity sessions of 60-90 minutes in duration. 

As your fat adaptation progresses, gradually extend this out to two or two and half hours, but no longer.

Hopefully, you will notice an improvement in both performance and health!

For 30 years Dr Stephen Phinney has been preaching about low carb diets, it turns out that he may have been right all along!

Dr Phinney the Bulletproofbodies Team salute you!