Weight Maintenance on a Ketogenic Diet - Part 1

So in the two months after my finish at Old Dominion, I took a little time off running. The original intent was simply to recover thoroughly, then start back into training. In addition, I went back to a "normal" diet, as a reward for finishing my first 100.

And then, a miracle happened! My wife got pregnant with our first child!

And I really do mean a miracle. We experienced some issues getting pregnant, and had been trying for a couple years without success. But, things took a turn for the better, and off we went on our new path to parenthood.

And, of course, we both started eating. A lot. Sarah had a good excuse. She was eating for two.

I was eating for two as well. Me and my mid-section.

I gained about 20 pounds over the course of 3-4 weeks. Seriously, 20 pounds. I went from around 160 to around 180 (about a 12.5% gain in body weight). And at this point, I decided to go back on a ketogenic diet.

This 2-part post is really about the use of a ketogenic diet to obtain and maintain a healthy weight. I'll talk in detail about my personal experience with the diet, and tips and tricks the make sure that you stay healthy and feel great while transitioning to this diet.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, there's some great information out there, including the books by Phinney and Volek, along with good websites like eatingacademy.com. I highly recommend doing your own research into the nitty gritty stuff to get a better idea of how this diet works, as I'll be talking primarily about my personal experiences.

So, I have actually tried to "diet" before. And by "diet", I really mean that I've tried to control my weight through controlling what I eat. This usually meant some sort of calorie restriction. And that makes sense, of course, from a logical standpoint. Calories in must equal calories out, right? But one thing always got to me. One thing I hated.

Hunger.

And no matter what "diet" I followed, I'd be hungry. Which made little sense to me. If we assume that ultimate objective of our brain is to have a healthy body (which I think you have to, although this is something that's up for debate, and perhaps will be discussed in a future post), then why would our brain continue to tell us we're hungry even after we've had a satisfactory amount of calories to fuel the body?

Or for that matter, if we're overweight, why doesn't our brain simply tell us we're full after a restricted amount of calories to facilitate weight loss, and help to achieve a healthy weight?

The answer? Insulin. In short, insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas which causes the liver, skeletal muscles, and fat tissue to absorb glucose from the blood. Glucose is the broken down form of carbohydrate, and can be toxic if its levels in the blood are not controlled. So in that sense, insulin is a good thing. It keeps us from dying.

However, insulin significantly interferes with our hunger reflex. Specifically, if we eat a high glycemic food (such a something high in simple sugars), our body releases a significant amount of insulin to deal with the spike in blood glucose levels. After all the excess glucose is cleared, we quickly feel hungry again, even though we may have just ingested quite a few calories.

So what does this tell us? Well, it tells me that insulin is a great thing that keeps us from dying, and that the body has the ability to produce insulin in order to fulfill the task of occasionally clearing the blood of excess glucose. Notice I said "occasionally". If our bodies had evolved to ingest significant amounts of carbohydrate, causing regular releases of insulin, then why does insulin interfere with our hunger response? Perhaps because we did not evolve to ingest significant amounts of carbohydrates. I'll talk about evolution and my personal theories in a subsequent post. For now, back to dieting...

I hate being hungry, so I found the best solution to losing weight was to adopt an eating lifestyle that allowed me to eat when I was hungry, and stop when I was full. The answer? Cut carbohydrates altogether. Eliminate the insulin response, and allow my brain to use the hunger response to get my weight to what the brain considered to be healthy.

Of course, this meant some wholesale changes in what I ate, and brought up some serious questions about how such a change in macronutrients would affect the metabolism of my body. Phinney and Volek's book gave me quite a bit of insight as to what to expect, and how to go about obtaining all the micronutrients I need.

I'll go into detail in Part 2.

So long!

-Dave

What Not To Do 3 Weeks Before Your First 100

As you've read, I did achieve some moderate success and improvement while utilizing the Maffetone Method. In fact, for someone who is not on a ketogenic diet, I would still recommend this type of training (though perhaps only for a 3-4 month stretch out of the year).

Again, the basic premise behind the Maffetone Method is to teach the body to better burn fat as fuel, and increase the efficiency of the aerobic energy pathways. The problem, of course, is that when you exceed your Max HR as defined by Maffetone, your body reverts to using some glycogen (stored carbohydrates) and fuel itself through the anaerobic energy pathways.

And eventually, those glycogen stores run out.

In fact, those glycogen stores run out relatively quickly, at least in the mind of an ultra runner. Usually, in around 2 hours, if you're usually primarily glycogen for energy. In addition, since you still race and train above your max HR during certain periods of the year, you still have some skeletal muscle tissue that is optimized for glycogen burning.

But here's an interesting concept: what if we just got rid of all the glycogen? (Well, most of it.) We could force the body to use fat as a fuel regardless of our heart rate. I could run as fast as I want and never run out of fuel!

Sound too good to be true? Well, it sort of is. Needless to say, there are some significant, important details that I just glossed over. But you get the basic idea for now. I'll delve into the nitty gritty stuff in subsequent posts.

And this leads me to the biggest mistake I've made in my relatively short running career.

I switched over to a well-formulated, very low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet.

Three weeks before the Old Dominion 100.

Anyone who's been on a ketogenic diet (especially runners) is experiencing some combination of a grimace and chuckle right now.

Turns out there's this thing called adaptation. Generally speaking, there are several periods of adaptation when switching over to a ketogenic diet.

First, your body runs through its glycogen stores, and then eventually switches over to running on fatty acids and ketones. This takes anywhere from 3 days to a week, and you generally feel a little groggy with a headache during this time. This occurs because your blood sugar drops, but your body isn't quite making enough replacement ketones for your brain to be happy.

Second, the way your body handles electrolytes and minerals changes, leading to a quick loss of water weight, and a flushing of sodium as the body tries to balance sodium and potassium levels. This takes a few days, and can be alleviated by extra sodium intake.

I figured that I had 3 weeks, and that was enough time for these first two adaptations to occur. Unfortunately, there's a third equally important change: your body slowly changes the muscle tissue makeup of your skeletal muscle system. This takes a long time. Like 6-18 months.

Yeah, pretty much ignored that part of the book.

Since I was in taper at this point, I didn't really get in a lot of running while going through these adaptations. So I didn't really know how my body was going to react when I ran further than 12 miles. But, after the first few days, I really did feel great. I headed down to Virginia with hopes of running a sub-20 hour race.

We got down there, I checked in, and got an alright night's sleep, considering how excited I was! My wife's family came down to crew for me, and we all got up early to get ready. Before I knew it, I was at the starting line, and off we went!

My goal was to not start off too fast, so I let the front runners go, and ran along at 9:15 pace. But I felt sluggish. 9:15 actually felt a little fast. I wasn't worried at this point, as I thought I was just warming up.

I got through the first climbs, and started to feel better. I fueled for the race with regular ingestion of Generation UCAN (a product I still use), mixed nuts, and S-Caps. Or at least, I fueled with this combination for the first 50 miles. After that, things started to fall apart.

Yeah, OD!

I was tired. I had gotten lost at mile 22, and ran an extra 6 miles. That didn't help. I just felt sluggish and needed energy, so after mile 50, I went a little crazy with the sugar. At pretty much every aid station from that point on, I grabbed as many mini candy bars as I could fit in my pockets, and drank a cup of coke. I struggled, putting one foot in front of the other, running as much as I could, and power walking when I couldn't.

After 23 hours and 49 minutes, I shuffled across the finish line. And to be honest, I was happy. I had finished my first 100, and buckled to boot.

But I felt like I hadn't run to my potential. I really hurt myself by drastically changing my diet so close to a race. Looking back, I'm actually pretty surprised I finished. I really attribute my finish to 3 things:

1. I'm stubborn as hell. Ask my wife.

2. I have a pretty strong stomach, especially when running. I basically gorged myself on sugar for 12 hours, and never had stomach issues.

3. I spent significant periods of time over the previous year following the Maffetone Method, which probably had allowed my muscles to at least start becoming optimized for fat burning (aerobic energy pathways).

So, I basically broke the cardinal rule of ultra running: never try something new for the first time during a race. But I survived, learned from my mistakes, and moved forward.

My next post will discuss a ketogenic diet in more detail, and talk about what happened after my experience at Old Dominion.

Hint: Sympathy Weight.

-Dave

The Maffetone Method and Me

So, about 8 weeks after my stress fracture, Sarah and I took a little vacation out to Colorado, spending most of our time in Boulder. The idea was to eat our way through Boulder (which had recently been named the "foodiest" city in the country by Bon Appetit magazine), and spend our free time hiking and running trails. Thanks goodness that my foot had healed enough to enjoy the tremendous trails of the Rockies!

While we out there, I stumbled across the Maffetone Method while perusing some Runner's World forums. It was an interesting concept, which essentially amounted to periodized low heart rate training. After we got back home, I ordered the book online, and breezed through it in a couple of days. I was certainly intrigued.

The basic idea is to increase the body's aerobic capacity by running (and living) exclusively below a maximum heart rate, which can be estimated using the formula 180 minus you age (There's a few adjustments that you should make based on history and injuries. If you're interested, Google it!). He also espouses a diet moderately low in carbohydrates (around 100-150 grams of carbs a day), which I initially ignored, but later adopted. The benefits are an increase in fat burning (essentially because you're not exercising at a high enough heart rate to cause anaerobic energy production), along with a decrease in injuries. Why a decrease in injuries? Because it turns out that for most people, running at a HR of 180-age equates to a VERY SLOW pace.

My first run finished out at about a 12:00/mile pace. On the road. On a flat road. Which, surprisingly, is actually faster than what a lot of people end up running.

I did expect to be pretty slow at first, so I kept it up, and slowly got faster. I was religious in keeping my HR below 150 (actually, 145, just to be safe). And I found that I really enjoyed the training. Probably because all my runs were now easy runs. I kept up this training for about 3 months, until I had a couple of races, the first being the Bobcat Trail Marathon. The Bobcat is a very hilly single loop course consisting primarily of single track at Burr Oak State Park near Athens, Ohio. The day of the race, it was mud. I mean, MUD. I still managed to finish in 4:20:xx at 12th or 13th overall, and I have to admit, I was pretty pleased with my showing.

My next race was a return to the Bigfoot 50k about a month later, this time in much warmer conditions which brought about even more mud! Thanks, Ohio. Despite problems with footing, I managed to run a 5:15:xx, taking 30 minutes off my time from the previous year, and placing somewhere around 10th. Again, I was pretty happy, and getting ambitious. It was around this point that I decided I'd try my hand at a 100, and signed up for the Old Dominion 100 in June (about 6 months away).

I obviously raced above my max HR during Bobcat and Bigfoot, so I returned to another three month period of the Maffetone Method. I enjoyed the success I was having, and wanted to set another PR at the upcoming Land Between the Lakes 50 miler in March. The only problem was my normal training pace. It was super boring. I had gotten my pace at max HR down to about 8:30-9:00/mile, but I was getting sick of never running fast. Everything that the Maffetone Method promised was happening: I felt good, I had no injuries, even while maintaining a steady 70-80 miles per week. But I didn't have any top end speed. I rationalized it by telling myself I didn't need speed, as my goal pace for 100's was around 10:00/mile. But it was still boring.

In March, I ended up with a great run at Land Between the Lakes 50 miler, a fairly fast course in western Kentucky, with four loops with a few climbs. I ended up running an 8:19:xx, good enough for around 13th overall and a new PR by over 2 hours.

And I was pretty happy.

But something happened at that race that I just couldn't get out of my head: David Riddle. You might have heard of him. I haven't actually met him, but I know he's a great runner. How do I know this? Because I got to watch him.

As he lapped me.

He ended up running a 5:53, which is about a 7:04 pace. That's quick. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. How did he maintain that pace for 50 miles? How did he fuel himself? I just couldn't comprehend it. That was 3:00/mile faster than me!

And so that launched me into renewed research regarding the body's use of fuel, and lead me to an interesting book by Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek called "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance".

And it was at this point that I made the worst mistake of my running career.

(Well, besides the whole speed work on asphalt thing.)

Stay Tuned.

-Dave