How to Eat After a Long Run

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Hey everybody.

Today’s question is from Jeff.

Jeff: I started tracking my eating on my fitness pal. I noticed a couple of days in a row that I don’t consume enough calories. My concern is especially on the days for my long run; my calorie totals would be my T.D.E.E.

How do I consume enough calories when I’m not even hungry? I’ve been about a thousand calories short even as I try to increase my intake?

Coach Jeff: Basically, your calorie expenditure without any exercise is 2,120. My intake is 2900 but his exercise for a long run day adds 2400 calories. I know that’s a lot of numbers but basically what he’s asking here is that he is basically short, 1700 calories for that day.

First off, I want to say Jeff, I’m glad that you’re being aware of this process. This is something I think I touched upon a couple of daily episodes I’ve done.

I know I did a talk on the injury summit about it. I think tracking is something that every runner should do. Regardless of if you want to lose weight, if you are happy with your body image, or your weight.

If that’s the case, I still think tracking is essential, at least for a couple of days or at least for a couple of weeks. If you are trying to lose weight or if you’re having trouble recovering from your workouts, I think it’s important that you track your calories.

I don’t think it’s possible to achieve those goals, recover better, and lose weight without tracking calories. I think it’s still good for every runner, even if they are happy with their weight.

The reason is that as Jeff is discovering here, it really opens your eyes to what you’re putting into your body, and what you’re expending because that number needs to be in a certain range based on what your goal is.

If you want to ensure recovery, you need to make sure that your calories in, equals your calories out. If you’re trying to lose weight, you want to be sure that your calories in, are about 300-500 calories less than what you’re expending.

With that said, getting to the meat of the question and that’s big, like I said. I did about a 35-40-minute talk on that for our nutrition summit. We will be doing another nutrition summit probably coming up next year, maybe in the spring.

You can join us there but also the recordings are available as part of our master’s membership, if you’re interested in that talk.

To answer the specific question, the easiest way to make your caloric total equal your expenditure, if you’re not hungry and especially on long run days, is to use shakes.

A shake is in a sense like putting in a blender. My favorite things to put in are peanut butter, protein powder, fruits like bananas or frozen berries and yogurt. I always have trouble eating vegetables and I eat a lot of meat and I like carbohydrates.

Veggies and fruits, for me, are a little difficult and I know some people that are not, but for me it is.

That’s this is where I look at shakes and say, not only do I need to get the caloric intake, but where can I add those things that I know I need to get more of and in this case, it’s fruits and vegetables.

Then also add some things in like wheat germ or chia seeds or those little things where scientific evidence shows that there’s some minor or potential performance health advantage etc.

It’s not something you’ll remember to eat straight so I like putting it in my shakes.

I’ll make this combination and maybe you can add in some oatmeal as well, but basically any combination of those types of things that you like, that are going to add calories.

It’s still easy to track because you can combine all the ingredients.

Half cup of oatmeal, half cup of yogurt, a serving of fruit and peanut butter. You know all the calories and macronutrient totals for that, so all you do is add it all together and you drink it all. If you drink half you just cut it in half.

That is the easiest way. One, you can really pack a lot of calories into the shakes because as you’re condensing it together, all these foods in general are just going to be eventually high calorie.

If your goal is high calorie shakes, you can add more high calorie foods like peanut butter. Second, it’s fluid. It’s not going to feel as heavy in your stomach.

It’s not that you’re not going to feel full after a shake, but given the volume of food; let’s say your shake is 900 calories which is not hard to do, if you did like they say, all the ingredients that I put in there and if you did a couple of servings of each.

That’s not going to be a huge volume of food for 900 calories.

If we’re talking about eating healthy and you’re talking about a meal like chicken breast, brown rice, and broccoli, I know that sometimes I have eight ounces of chicken breast, half cup of rice, and two servings of broccoli is only about 500 calories.

That is a lot of food. Eight ounces chicken is a lot. Basically, what you’re looking at doing is in a healthy way, being able to get in a very small volume but high caloric total number of food.

Shakes are really the easiest way to do it. Jeff, to answer your question specifically, especially on long run days, I would be consuming some type of shake. They are also delicious so that’s cool too.

The other thing I’ll say in two aspects. One is, try not to fill yourself up with empty calories. This gets back to my thing when I said I like to add my fruits and vegetables.

Even though it’s a high calorie day for you, I think there’s still opportunities there for you to get in quality foods that your body needs generally.

Whether it be vegetables, fruits, vitamins and minerals, protein powders, or high-quality carbohydrates to make sure that you have enough energy.

It’s a good opportunity to make up for your shortcomings or weaknesses. Don’t try to just like eat a sleeve Oreos. I think along the lines, this is where you can probably I don’t like to call days where we eat more calories cheat days.

I think if you are tracking calories then you can eat the things that you like.

This could also be the day where, if you are struggling in other areas of your diet, you can potentially add in those foods that generally make you struggle through the week.

Whether it be cookies, pizza, cheat foods, they can be foods where you can put them in here and just don’t go in excess. Make sure that you’ve hit your macronutrient totals.

Ensure you’re getting good quality carbohydrates, enough protein, vitamins and minerals, and then if you’ve established that, then we can add in the cheat meal stuff.

I hope that helped answer your question, and gave you some good ideas and that’s my favorite way to approach it thank you guys for listening to today’s episode.

I hope you have an awesome weekend, hope the weather is great and you have awesome long run or maybe final taper race for anything coming up in the next few weeks. Twin cities, Chicago that kind of thing.

Best of luck and I’ll talk to you guys soon.