Am I Over fueling?

[Dr_Alex_Harrison]

@Crosshair

just that training your body to prefer to utilise carbs at lower intensities is going to hamper your ability to burn fat for much of the day at all!

Hmm… I hadn’t considered this. Let me think on it.

Okay… so here’s where it probably breaks down. There is pretty robust evidence that if a study holds protein intake and kcal intake the same, there can be substantial manipulations of fat or carb consumption, with no overall effect on body composition change. If anything, a higher-carb diet probably very slightly wins out for body composition change. But essentially they’re equivalent.

Timing of those consumptions also tends not to matter. (ie. 2 meals per day or 7 meals per day). So long as kcal expenditure and intake are matched between groups, and protein intake is matched between groups, it takes enormous differences in carb vs. fat approaches or dietary timing shifts to cause any difference in body composition over time. This holds true for periods of kcal balance and

Now, many things change in T2D and T1D. Going high-carb when T2D and relatively sedentary is probably a recipe for disaster. But for folks who don’t have current blood sugar dysregulation, high carb or high fat, probably has no real outcome differences on body composition. There will be differences in training performance, favoring higher carb, or equivocality, depending on study design. (always assuming same kcal and same protein intake between groups).

@Crosshair

I think it was a Fascat podcast with Alexey Vermulin where he describes noticing that he needs to return to fasted rides periodically as he can feel his body craving carbs too often at low intensity.

I posit that this is a sign of likely advantaged performance and that what feels bad, is actually just his body signaling “if you eat more carbs, I’ll give you a better threshold and VO2max performance!” … in very scientific terms.

@Crosshair

Likewise Adam Hansen talks about his fasted ride protocol (despite being high carb for interval training) in his great interview with Brendon to maintain that metabolic flexibility.

I remain unconvinced that this is advantageous. This is just the kind of protocol I’d love to exploit. I don’t think it does anything other than make you psychologically more resistant to neurogenic hypoglycemia, maybe physiologically more resistant to hypoglycemia too, but importantly never by a greater magnitude than you are sacrificing max exogenous carb absorption and oxidation ability. That is, what you gain in fat burning ability is often outweighed by loss of carb-burning ability.

@Crosshair

Uric acid production (causing oxidative stress to mitochondria and indeed presumably the reason I get gout when fuelling with SIS!)

Hmmm… gout with SIS seems interesting to me. Do you mean SIS beta fuel? Beta fuel 1 or 2.0? If not beta fuel, I’m surprised SIS would be the trigger for gout if it’s indeed fructose-triggered, because SIS is relatively low fructose. Problematically low, for a lot of folks, actually! They use a 4:1 glucose fructose ratio in SIS GO Electrolyte which is their primary fueling-oriented powdered mix. Typically folks end up having substantial GI distress from overdosing glucose with that product, long before fructose causes an issue.

I am nowhere near SME re: gout. FYI!

This comment from @timpodlogar paired with my general skepticism has me wondering if I 100% trust all the uric acid claims Attia makes.

@timpodlogar

And no, uric acid levels don’t really go up after exercise because of a high fructose diet… Dehydration is a bigger problem when it comes to uric acid concentrations for instance.

I don’t know what exactly Peter Attia says, but I have noticed a trend of subtle alarmist type thinking from him… which often leads to the sale of some product he’s profiting from.

Super smart guy. Ahead of the curve in optimizing health for sure. But also need to watch for motives carefully there. COI disclosure for me here: I’m going to be profiting from an app I made, soon.

@wake

for those of us coming from a high-intensity athletics background (for me, ice hockey and skiing) with a history of high sugar consumption, is there anything we can do during our training (especially base, which is coming up for those of us in the northern hemisphere) to improve our fat burning capabilities at low intensity?

Volume on volume on volume. Don’t manipulate fueling strategies to alter metabolism. Train to get fit. If you’re a natural sprinter, train to increase fitness and volume tolerance. Eat the carbs as needed/desired during training.

@wake

thanks in advance for your continued contributions here!

My absolute pleasure. You all keep me honest and force me to be current on the research. Too many gol’darn smart folks on this forum to speak out of the side of your mouth. @redlude97 (and a dozen others) will call you (me) out on it immediately.

@Crosshair

I want to stress how important I think fuelling with carbs is for performance - and how exciting I think @Dr_Alex_Harrison ’s projects are.

Wow. That’s awfully generous. Thank you.

@Crosshair

I’m going to the British Gravel Championships at the end of September

Good luck!

@Crosshair

But I do think people are ignoring/down playing/ missing the effect it has on fat metabolism/fat loss for some people- especially for life long carb monsters like myself.

I still posit that the only effect reduction of intra-workout carbs has on chronic fat loss is to enhance one’s ability to consume higher volume carb sources, on average, over the course of a fat loss diet phase. This manages satiety better, and facilitates easier adherence to a kcal deficit diet plan.

Regardless of mechanism at play, I hope you have an amazingly successful fat loss phase, and even more, that the weight maintenance phase that follows is permanent and easy to settle into.