How to Fuel Your Training

Audio Transcript

Coach Hayley: Hey Runners Connect fans. I am your community manager. Welcome to the Runners Connect Run to the Top Extra Kick Podcast. I hope you guys are having a great day and thanks so much for tuning in.

I’m here to answer your running and training questions so that you can train smarter, stay healthy, and achieve your goals.

If you have a question that you’d like one of expect coaches to answer in an upcoming episode, you can submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

Today, we have a great question from Jeff.

Jeff: I started checking my eating on My Fitness Pal and I noticed a couple of days in a row that I don’t consume enough calories.

My concern was that the day I did my long run according to the diary; Goal 2,120, Intake 2,902, Exercise 2,481, and Remaining 1,699. How do you consume enough calories when you’re not even hungry? I’ve been over 1000 short each day as I try to increase my intake.

Hayley: The app is suggesting that he has a calorie deficit of 1699 calorie. Thanks for your question Jeff. You’re right to be concerned about under-eating.

Being in a chronic calorie deficit can have negative effects for both health and performance. I would say that it’s hard to calculate this accurately. Calorie deficit may not be as great as the My Fitness Pal suggests.

The calculations of energy expenditure intake used from My Fitness Pal are only a prediction rather than an exact number. It can be hard to exactly calculate food intake especially if the energy content of restaurants and bought foods can vary.

Similarly, different people but different amounts of energy for a long run. It might not be one 100% correct. However, that’s a pretty big energy deficit. It’s likely that you aren’t quite eating enough.

It is important to remember that one day of negative energy balance that is on a long run day won’t have negative consequences on your health.

Energy balance is really determined over days and weeks and days have fluctuations than normal. For example, one day you might under on a long run day but on a rest day, you might eat more than you need.

However, you do state that it occurred several days in a row and you really don’t want to get into that state of a chronic calorie deficit.

I wonder if you have any of the other signs of under eating or not getting enough fuel. When energy availability is low, some of the body’s systems might not get enough energy to function properly.

For example, in women, menstrual cycles may be lost. That’s a sign that your body isn’t getting enough energy to support reproductive function.

Common symptoms, in both males and females, suggest a chronic negative energy bounce include; feeling tired, sleeping poorly, feeling irritable, and increased instance of illness and injury.

You might also find the energy rate is low and routine tasks are more challenging than normal. You crave bad foods and you might also experience unexplained weight loss.

If you aren’t experiencing any of these symptoms, perhaps your energy calculations aren’t quite right or on some days you do indeed match or exceed your energy output.

With a calorie deficit that big, I’d expect you to be experiencing some of the symptoms. If you are, it’s likely that you need to do something about your under eating.

If you are trying to lose weight, correcting this is important for optimal health and performance even If you are trying to lose weight. Such a big energy deficit is likely to be counterproductive rather than helpful.

Runners can face several obstacles when trying to achieve energy balance. It can be difficult for us to get enough because we might underestimate our calorie needs. Many runners are also restricting calories to try to lose weight.

For example, using My Fitness Pal is a good way to get an awareness of how much you need to eat, even with the goal of weight loss, a calorie deficit of around 500 per day should be enough for most people to achieve weight loss. A bigger deficit can lead to problems.

Another factor is finding the time to fuel with jobs, families, and trying to fit in, how can we also fit in using all these calories especially when we’re trying to focus on healthy foods?

Running can burn a very large amount of calories as I’m sure you can see using your My Fitness Pal, but your hunger levels might not necessarily increase in line with the training you’re doing.

That makes it easy to run into these sorts of problems. This is particularly cheer on longer intense workouts which can suppress your appetite especially initially.

How do you make sure your needs? Planning is key. Just like training, there should be a nutrition plan for fueling especially around your workouts. You should have some idea in mind of when you’re going to eat, what, and why especially when you’re hard training block.

Now that you’ve used My Fitness Pal, you can use it for planning. If you know how far you going to run tomorrow, you can enter this into the calculator to get a rough idea of how much you’re going to need to eat.

If you know you can have three meals and snacks for example, you can work out roughly how much need to include in reach one of these to meet your calorie needs. This can sound obsessive and time consuming and, yet it can become so.

However, by doing this just for a short period of time, you might become better in tune with exactly how much you need to eat and be able to do it more instinctively going forward.

You mentioned that not feeling hungry is your main issue and I totally know how you feel. It can be hard to feel like eating after a long run or a workout.

This is when the type of food you eat becomes important.

A common problem for runners (especially those who focus on healthy eating) is that they mainly are eating foods such as vegetables and whole grains which can be very filling without providing as much in the way of calories some other foods might.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re healthy foods and you need to include them. If you’re struggling to meet your energy needs and requirements experiencing some of the symptoms of low energy, you may need to replace some of them with more calorie dense foods.

Adding healthy fats to your diet is a great way to get more calories. Per gram fat provides more calories than carbohydrates of proteins so it’s a good way to up your intake without feeling overly full.

Think avocadoes, nuts, oily fish, you can also increase the calorie content of foods by adding healthy oils. Adding oil foods to sides or vegetables or a small amount of butter is a great way to get more calories in our long run day without feeling like you’re eating much more.

If you’ve been eating lots of veggies try to get all the awesome nutrients they have in them, it might be worth temporarily reducing the Veggie portion by a third and replacing it with a calorie dense carbohydrate like brown rice, potatoes, or pasta.

That could help you to get more of those carbohydrates you need on those long run days. Drinking calories can be a great way to get them in without feeling full or when you are hungry.

When I don’t feel particularly hungry the afternoon after a hard-long run, I try to make a smoothie. It’s amazing how much you can boost to your calorie intake if you drink them.

This usually includes fruit, some nut butter or coconut oil, or some protein powder or where stuff. You can really boost up your calorie intake by doing that. You can also do this just after runs when you are able to eat meat in the after.

You can add other nutrient dense, calorie dense liquids around your main meals try and boost up your calorie content too. For example, when I’m training really hard, I might drink a protein shake before bed and try and add an extra snack there too, or even just a glass of milk even full fat.

I really had best give me some ideas of how and why you should up your calorie intake even when you don’t feel hungry.

It might seem counter-intuitive to do so when our society is, so concerned with weight loss, but for someone who’s active, they can really benefit from eating enough to match their output.

It’s a good test to see if you do truly need to eat more. If you start upping your intake and weigh yourself.

If you’re able to eat more without putting on weight it gets on your body really does need those extra calories and is using them for good.

I really love that question. Thanks so much for asking.

For those of you listening that want to have your questions answered by one of the Runners Connect coaches, head over to runnersconnect.net/daily and click the record button to send your question over.

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