Losing Weight by Low-Carbing without Cramping

Audio Transcript

Sinead: Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. We’ve got a great question from Mary on cramping when on a low-carb diet, and how to lose weight when trying to run fast.

Mary: As a runner I need to lose weight. I have tried the low-carb and had great success for dropping weight, but I suffered from debilitating cramps when running and exercising during the process.

What can I do to continue the low-carb diet, and also continue running and working out? I am trying to drop weight and improve my times.

Sinead: This is a really interesting question, and it’s something that seems to be a phenomenon when it comes to the low-carb diet. A lot of people experience cramping.

Mary has seen a lot of success in terms of weight loss on the low-carb diet. These cramps are clearly disrupting training and making it hard to perform at the optimal level she wants to perform at, while also losing weight.

While there hasn’t yet been a lot of research on this phenomena, there is a very interesting theory that seems to make a lot of sense.

When you are eating a standard American diet, your main source of calories is carbohydrate.

This is the most easily accessible form of energy. Your body converts carbohydrate into glucose, and that is the body’s preferred form of energy.

Any glucose that you can’t use right away is stored as glycogen.

When you switch to a low carb diet, your body has to learn to make energy from fat, which takes quite a while.

It takes a few weeks in the very least, for this adaptation to occur. What happens is, ketone bodies are a by-product of fat metabolism, and so in ketosis, you have a higher than average number of ketone bodies in your blood and urine.

What are ketone bodies? Ketone bodies are three water soluble molecules that are produced by the liver, from fatty acids, when you are going through periods of either low food intake, or limited carbohydrate consumption.

What happens is that, in the first few weeks of a very low-carb diet, your body will pull out all the glycogen that it can find and convert it into glucose.

Glycogen is stored with water, so as you start to use the storage form of energy, you will release a significant amount of fluid.

By consequence, this is a large part of the reason why weight drops so fast in those early weeks of a low carb diet.

If you aren’t careful, it can also disturb your electrolyte balance, making you dehydrated and more susceptible to these debilitating leg cramps that you are experiencing.

In order to combat that, you need to make sure that you are hydrating properly, and also getting electrolytes in.

It’s not all about hydrating though. You also need to make sure that you are maintaining a good electrolyte balance.

The key electrolytes that you want to focus on are potassium, and that one’s a no brainer when it comes to preventing cramping.

You also want to focus on sodium, calcium, magnesium and chloride. Something to keep in mind is that when you switch to a low-carb diet, you might be eliminating some food sources where you would get these minerals.

You need to either supplement or find other food sources that fall in line with your low-carb diet, that have these minerals in them.

This can be as easy as throwing a little bit of salt on your salmon or your steak at night and taking a daily multivitamin or maybe even some Runners Beans daily tonic.

Pretty easy solution there; just make sure you’re getting these minerals in your diet to maintain your electrolyte balance.

Also, be sure to avoid diuretics for the most part. I am not going to tell you not to drink coffee, because I am a coffee addict myself.

In fact, the thought of never having coffee again is a very sad one indeed. If you don’t want to cut out your diuretics completely, make sure you are balancing them nicely by drinking plenty of water alongside them.

One more thing I’ll say, is that cramping can also be a product of over training. Even if you aren’t exercising more than normal, make sure that you are getting enough calories in to meet the demands of your training.

When people transition over to a low carb diet, they don’t always get enough calories in for their training.

When you’re trying to lose weight, but also run fast and get some PRs, you want to make sure that you are deducting your caloric intake by just enough to lose weight, but also fuel your training.

We recommend, when you determine your total daily energy expenditure, to deduct no more than 300 calories, if you’re within 12 weeks of an important goal race.

If you are not training for anything specific, you can use this time to deduct closer to 500 calories.

We don’t recommend you subtract any more than 500, as you’ll be left with insufficient fuel for exercise and day-to-day activities, leading to sluggishness and cramps.

You want to make sure you’re being careful and that you practice nutrition periodization, where you are only deducting about 300 calories or less, if you’re within those 12 weeks before a goal race, and no more than 500 calories any other time.

If your body is not given sufficient fuel, it will go beyond using fat, as a source of fuel, which is obviously a good thing, to using muscle tissue.

This is where you start losing muscle mass instead of fat, which is not ideal. In short, staying between a 300 to 500 caloric deficit, will allow you to lose weight in a healthy way, so that you preserve muscle mass and feel energized and avoid these debilitating cramps.

Mary, thank you so much for submitting that question. I hope what I’ve said today helps you get rid of those cramps and help you reach your running and weight loss goals.

If you have a question you would like one of our coaches to answer in an upcoming episode, you can submit it to runnersconnect.net/daily.

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Thank you so much for joining me today, and I hope you have a fantastic day, till next time.