Aidan:
Hello, and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition podcast. My name is Aidan Muir, and I’m here with another new co-host. I’m here with Tyler Brooks, who was on multiple years ago. I don’t know how long ago, but Tyler was the first person I hired through Ideal Nutrition. So he’s been with me for many, many years now. And the reason we’re doing this episode is partly to give Leah a little bit of a break because we do 52 podcasts a year.
I like people to have four weeks of holiday. So we’re doing some filler episodes, and Tyler is going to be helping me out with this one. The format of this one is we’re doing a Q and A episode, and I’ll probably read the question, and then we will go back and forth in terms of the answers in each one. Probably with some of them, one of us will have more of an answer to go through, but we have a bunch of questions, and we’ll just do as many as we get through in the time we have for this. So the first question we’ve got is, do you need to have pre-training carbs for a short high-intensity session? For example, less than 30 minutes of sparring.
Tyler:
I reckon this is a pretty good question and it would depend on whether or not you’re after a specific physiological effect or maybe more of a psychological effect. In terms of something like a 30 minute session or less then, it’s not a particularly long session. There’s no chance you’re gonna run out of energy or muscle glycogen or carbohydrate reserves if you’re relatively well fuelled going into it.
So from that perspective, it’s not like you’re gonna run out of fuel but there are other benefits to having some simple, easily digesting carbohydrates before a session. We often talk about those as some of your more central effects, as in they might act on your brain or your central nervous system. For example, there has been research done. Some of the findings are mixed, but there tends to be this trend of a reduced perception of effort when you’re exercising. If you’ve had some simple carbohydrates before that session, that might mean you train a little bit harder because you feel a bit better. It might mean because the perceived effort is lower. Again, you might work out a little bit harder or push a bit harder in the session and get a bit more out of it. Or you could just feel a little bit better than you otherwise might without having had those carbohydrates.
Aidan:
I agree with all of that. And I’m really big on that feeling good aspect as well, because the way I look at it is either there will be a little bit of benefit or there won’t be. The only way you mess it up is by not feeling good. And that could involve eating way too much, way too close, or just not eating for ages before and just not feeling as good, because that comes back to that reduced perception of effort. If you feel good, you can probably train harder.
Question two is, I’ve started running. At what point does nutrition need to be planned more carefully around runs? My two cents on this is you could take that in many ways, but I would say I will always focus on good solid nutrition, et cetera, et cetera.
But for specific running nutrition, somewhere over 10 kilometres is where I start looking at it, or somewhere over an hour of running, depending on the pace that somebody’s going at. If somebody was going slower, but an over an hour run is very, very hard, for example, I would be looking at planning nutrition around that. Because that’s when I’d start looking at little things like do we have carbs during the run?
That probably doesn’t matter as much earlier with that. I’d start looking at stuff like, do we need to carb load, particularly if it’s far over that amount or it’s high intensity and everything like that. I will always focus on hydration. I would consider electrolytes for longer runs. I will typically look at pre-workout nutrition, not always, but in some cases I’ll look at it. But the longer it gets, the more I start looking at whether you adjust it during the run, before the run, and even the day before the run, particularly if it’s very long.
Tyler:
Something I’ve probably experienced, I know obviously you have a lot more running clients than I might, Aidan, and a lot more experience probably running at this point, but something I think that has crossover between not just running, but lifting or any other type of training. When you first start training, something I commonly get with clients is, I’m feeling tired, I’m feeling sore, I’m feeling fatigued. Maybe I need to eat more or should I eat more?
And at some point, the answer is yes. And eventually, you’ll cross a line that’s kind of no. At some point, yes, making sure you’re adequately fuelled, eating enough protein and things like that is going to improve your performance and your recovery. But if you’re just starting running, you’re going to be fatigued and you’re going to be sore. And it’s probably going to give you some aches and pains that you might not have had before and food isn’t always necessarily the answer. You also do just to need to give your body time to adapt and adjust to that new exercise modality or to that new training modality. And it’s not always the case of, or I’m feeling tired and sore, eat more food. Cause sometimes that, you know, it’s just not necessary and it’s not going to come down to a fuelling issue. It’s just an adaption to that exercise.
Aidan:
Yeah, I really like that. And for lower kilometres, lower duration runs, sometimes the stimulus just isn’t that much. Like, even if you’re looking at calorie burn, even if you’re looking at from like a building an aerobic base kind of thing if you’re really new to running, sometimes it just takes ages for those adaptations to kind of build-up so that you can build up to higher kilometres. Whereas there are other forms like, for example, like cycling and stuff like that. Like even without these adaptations, you can cycle for ages as well.
Tyler:
I remember when I moved up to the 100-kilo weight class from the nineties in powerlifting and tried to start running again after a period of zero running for 12 months plus, I could barely run a kilometre. And my like tendons and ligaments, my muscles felt like they were getting hit with hammers every kilometre I’d run. And it took me probably a month to build back up to even running three to five kilometres just from a tissue adaptation standpoint. Obviously, if I’m running one kilometre, I’m not burning that many calories and don’t need too much in the way of additional fuelling. But again, it comes down to a little bit of adaptation, what you’re doing and how new you are to the movement as well.
Aidan:
Yeah, it’s a classic powerlifter story. And I’m also like, I’m obviously very nutrition-focused, but I have so many clients who are in a similar situation at taking up running. And I go pretty deep on that stuff about being like, you will have to build up so much slower, most likely than you would expect.
Anyway, the next one we’ve got is how do you feel about the correlation between fixing gut health and autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. Tyler and I were talking off-air, and I’ll take this one just because it’s a rabbit hole. I’ve gone pretty deep down with a bunch of clients. There is clearly a link.
This is complicated in that people will often go to extremes in terms of some people act as if it’s the answer to everything. There are other people who say that there’s no link at all. If you do look at the research, there are clear differences in gut health between people with and without a lot of autoimmune conditions. In terms of fixing gut health, that is complicated, though. There has been no individual approach that I’ve ever seen that has a huge, huge success rate for all autoimmune disorders. If there was, we would see it.
So from that lens, I would really be thinking that if something looks way too good to be true, then it probably is. Using an example, there’s a diet called the autoimmune protocol, which focuses heavily in the writing and talking about it on the gut health side of things. And there’s randomised control trials for the autoimmune diet protocol that it does look relatively promising. It’s not one those things that like covers, it’s not something that completely improve symptoms in all people to a large degree and everything like that. But it outperforms a lot of what you’d call standard dietary approaches. But first red flag is not improving in everybody.
Second red flag is are these improvements related to gut health or are they related to other things? For example, we know that if you increase micronutrient intake in general for a lot of autoimmune conditions, there is often small improvements that you see associated with that. And then the third one is in the four studies that I’m aware of, they had the participants like, read the books that hyped up the autoimmune protocol diet, which is a small variable in there too.
But I know it’s a bit of a tangent, but the way I’d look at it is I think it makes sense to look at improving gut health-related stuff through doing a lot of the good things like a micronutrient-rich diet, having a good amount of fibre, maybe having some fermented foods and or potentially probiotics as well. But I’d also be looking at the big picture of everything else as well and not necessarily thinking if I fix this, this will be the answer, but it’s still worth looking at as well.
Tyler:
Yeah, the absolute worst case scenario is you improve your gut health, which improves other metrics, digestion, IBS type symptoms, general inflammation, all those sorts of things that are also responding to your gut health and all those things improve and the rheumatoid arthritis doesn’t, but you get some other benefits. That’s the worst case scenario of trying to improve obviously gut health. Best case you get all those things and it might improve symptoms. So, you know, I don’t see the downside.
Aidan:
Is it normal to gain weight if you start strength training but don’t really increase calories?
Tyler:
I think it probably would be, depending on the timeframe you’re talking about. Maybe not in the first couple of weeks, but depending on the timeframe you’re doing it for, I think the increase in calories can obviously drive weight gain a bit more effectively and muscle gain a bit more effectively. But at some point, you probably will see a weight increase from some of the behaviours that probably go along with weight training, even if you are aiming for maintenance calories, typically, something like some increased creatine supplementation might increase a little bit of scale weight initially if you do that.
But I would probably suggest that in the longer term, if you are adding muscle mass, you will see that weight eventually creep up. Increases in muscle mass might or exercise might drive increased appetite and you might unintentionally increase intake. That could increase weight if it came right back down to calories in calories out. Probably not.
You might see a shift in what we might call nutrient partitioning. You might have less fat stores and more muscle mass stores as you recomp at the same amount of calories. So you can see a redistribution of body weight, but I think it’s not impossible to see increases in scale weight, but if calories remain the same, you know, they’d probably be modest if anything.
Aidan:
Yeah, if we take the question super literally and say you actually do not increase your calories at all, keeping in mind that, as you said, most people like inadvertently will change some stuff as well. You don’t increase it at all. I think it’s unlikely to see large increases in body weight. I tell a story all the time about how I got into nutrition, and the story basically goes, I started lifting weights.
Thought I was going to solve all my problems. I thought I was going to get jacked. Immediately jacked and tanned. Yeah, I thought I was going get tanned for sure. That was definitely on the cards. And first thing happened, I didn’t get tanned. And the second thing that happened is I didn’t get jacked. What actually happened was I lost about five kilos within about four weeks of me starting to lift weights. And from a dietary perspective, I always came from a background of healthy eating, et cetera.
But I was very committed to making as much progress as I could early on in my lifting journey, so I, quote on quote, cleaned up my diet. So I reduced my calorie intake, like I reduced my intake of added sugar and a few other things and I increased expenditure by adding in strength training on top of the other activity that I was doing and I reduced my calorie intake and my body weight went down quite quickly, quicker than, yeah. I was like, I saw the number on the scale and I’m like, this never happened again. This like made me read about nutrition, which is something that I often think about with this. Like I like to tell that story a little bit to kind of be like, strength training doesn’t inherently increase body weight. If you start strength training and your body weight does increase, there is a potential that you did enter a calorie surplus is what I would potentially think.
Tyler:
Yeah, I guess looking at that question again, in a literal sense, is it normal to gain weight if you start strength training but don’t increase calories? I don’t want to say then, like if you actually legitimately did increase calories and you started strength training and weren’t before, you’re burning more calories. So it’s probably more normal to lose weight from your story.
But yeah, I think obviously you can fact check me on the numbers Aidan, because I know you quoted all the time. Is it 1800 calories that it takes to create kilogram of muscle or more? Somewhere around that. So the numbers I’ll quote is a kilo body fat is made up around 7,700 calories, a kilo of muscle debatable, but I would say 1200 to 1400, you can go a little bit higher than that potentially as well. And it may take around five times that amount to build a kilo of muscle, keeping in mind that once you’ve built it, it’s already there. Which I think one thing might be where you’re heading with this is if you think about that, theoretically,
If you just recomp and a kilo of body fat stores 7,700 calories and a kilo of muscle stores 1,200, 1,400, theoretically it’s possible for your body weight to go up a little bit technically at maintenance calories. Way more advanced than I like to talk about with a lot of people, but technically true.
Tyler:
Yeah, it’s a fascinating one. Yeah, I think the moral is sorry with that one is. If you do gain weight is probably due to an inadvertent increase in calories. But if you don’t increase calories, you probably won’t gain muscle as effectively as you’re probably trying to do. Like, you know, if you’re trying to gain, like, start training, you’re probably trying to gain muscle. So it does mean you’re to gain weight if you’re not. Kind of just spinning your wheels with training to a degree.
Aidan:
Potentially, yeah. So now we’re going to talk about what do you think about the correlation between ADHD and eating disorders. So there is a lot here. At a minimum, binge eating is heavily linked with ADHD for so many reasons. One is forgetting to eat during the day. We know that that doesn’t cause binge eating, but if somebody was predisposed towards binge eating, and then they also went a long period of time without eating, it increases the odds of a binge occurring.
We know that if somebody was on medication, that medication suppress their appetite that compounds that as well. Taking the forgetting out, there also could be some hyper fixations involved that could reduce intake throughout the day. And there could also be hyper fixations leading to restriction. For example, like how we’re talking about somebody getting into running before, like if somebody got a hyper fixation on running, that then led to them thinking, if I avoid X, Y, Z, that will allow me to improve as a runner, that restriction could also contribute to binging as well.
And then we have the other angle of dopamine-seeking behaviours slash impulsiveness-related types of behaviours also linked to binge eating. So that like there’s so many angles there that you can see, that’s part of why it makes sense that statistically speaking, people with ADHD are far more likely to also have binge eating disorder. Other forms of disordered eating could also potentially occur and that could also be related to hyper fixation and a few other things as well. But in terms of what I think about the correlation, there’s clearly a clear correlation.
Tyler:
Something that I’ve often touched on not just in binge eating or ADHD, but in sort of general hunger cues and satiation and feelings of fullness or not, that might be, you know, leading down that path towards a binge eating disorder or at least uncontrolled, you know, excessive intake would be some of those mechanisms that are linked to what you said, such as suppression of appetite and things like that from medication or, you know, forgetting to eat those sorts of things. One of the ways the body does regulate, you know, your normal hunger and satiety cues is through hormones. So there’s, you know, there’s hormones that are produced by the stomach from the stretch receptors in the stomach wall, detecting whether the stomach has been stretched through food intake.
When it has, those mechanisms will trigger the release of hormones that reduce appetite. Similar sort of thing if you had nutrients in your small intestine, carbs, fats, proteins, those things can be sensed in the small intestine. And if there’s been a long period of time with no intake, there’s gonna be hormones produced that are gonna act on your brain to increase appetite. You may not feel that at the time, but at some point during the day or later that night or whenever it is, it might come all crashing home and all of a sudden you have this uncontrollable urge to eat or your appetite signal is so ramped up that you don’t feel satisfied from eating. And that can potentially contribute to the process as well.
Aidan:
What are your thoughts on carb cycling for deficits, maintenance or bulk protocols?
Tyler:
This is something anecdotally, I know you told a story before that you’ve done. This is something I’ve done before. I’ve actually done quite a lot of carb cycling over my time. Many years ago, I was experimenting with ketogenic diets and putting myself through those. And a protocol that I eventually found that worked quite well for me was a carb cycling approach where I would do three quarters of the week or Monday through Saturday in a ketogenic diet. And then I would cycle on a very high carb day on a Sunday. I’d position all my sprints and strength training the day of and the day after the carbs were in to push out my higher intensity sessions and then lower intensity sessions throughout the rest of the week. For me, that worked quite well for not just maintaining a higher level of exercise output, but also managing body weight. I enjoyed eating that way.
My thoughts on it probably would be that it can be effective if you do it right if it suits your lifestyle, and if you enjoy it. But I would suggest that there’s no benefits over it compared to any other way of eating, whether that be for a deficit, maintenance or a bulk. For bulk, it might make things a little bit tricky in terms of the other types of nutrients you are putting in. If you’re doing lower carbohydrate days, and we know carbohydrates do fuel high-intensity exercise better, and you’re trying to put on muscle mass, training at a high intensity is probably a prerequisite requirement to sort of, you know, build muscle. And if the carbohydrates will help you train at a higher intensity to do that more effectively, it’s probably not optimal to remove them in terms of removing them on a rest day or a non-training day.
Typically, the human body is designed to store those carbohydrates until you need to use them again. So unless you’re eating an excessive amount on a non-training day, you’re just gonna store them as muscle glycogen and then use them in that next training session. Typically, it’s not something that I use as a default strategy, nor do I recommend it, because I don’t think it has any benefits over not carb cycling, but it can be made to work if somebody is insistent on it. What are your thoughts?
Aidan:
Yeah, so I like the bit about how there’s no inherent advantage for body composition or anything like that. But the lifestyle stuff is huge. A great example of this, and we’ve spoken about this on the podcast before, but a great example is like what if you just want to have more carbs on the weekend? Theoretically, you would get the exact same results by making those higher-carb days and then taking away some carbs from the week. And theoretically, that’s a carb cycling approach. What if you’re somebody who has certain training days that you want to have higher carbs for, like you had the sprints example, what if somebody has a really heavy lower body day in the gym that goes for like two hours, but then the upper body days are easy?
Why don’t we distribute some more carbs here and take away some elsewhere? Same results, but in one version you might feel better and or train better. There’s a lot of situations where I’m like, it could even potentially be theoretically better, be better or just see people’s lifestyle more. In many cases, I will just go with like a simple approach of keeping it steady and or changing a little bit just by like putting in some pre-training carbs or intra-training carbs in some cases, which technically would be carb cycling as well.
Tyler:
That’s definitely my most common way of managing it. I wouldn’t necessarily even call it carb cycling. I would call it maintaining a general standard approach throughout most of the days. And then on a specific pre-training protocol, we add in pre-training carbs, intra-training carbs, some post-training carbs, depending on the person and that’s kind of carb cycling, but you just added it on training days. And that’s just inherently a bit less when you’re not training. And that’s, guess, technically carb cycling, but yeah, whatever fits the person.
Aidan:
Let’s try and rapid fire three questions. And if we’ve got time, we’re to do a fourth question, which we might go a bit deeper on. So first question, creatine gummies. Yay or nay?
Tyler:
Nay. Less controllable dose, more likely to have gastrointestinal side effects from things like sugar alcohols that are often used to make a gummy, at least a low-calorie one. And then way more expensive. You’re looking at three to five times the price for the exact same thing that’s more side effect risk and less measurable or controllable dose.
Aidan:
Yeah, for sure. Literally the only people I consider it for are people who have too much money to know what they do with it and who just are very inconsistent with creatine and gummies should be the only way they’re going to be consistent. I love the, what I often say to my clients with supplements is like, these don’t taste amazing. I’m like, well, we’re not taking them for the taste, we’re taking them for the performance benefit.
If I keep protein high, can I still keep cutting after surgery? My two cents is, that’s probably a bit of a recipe for muscle loss still because you likely don’t have a stimulus because you’re not training depending on the specific injury, like if there’s immobilisation or depending on the surgery, of course if there’s immobilisation, you’re so prone to muscle loss that I would be cautious. That’s not me saying be scared of going to any size deficit at all. I’d probably keep towards maintenance if you can with protein high but I wouldn’t do an aggressive deficit is my own opinion.
Tyler:
Yeah, I’d typically avoid a deficit post-surgery, especially if it’s in that acute recovery phase, as in, you know, potentially the first two, four weeks, depending on the surgery in that acute recovery phase, you’re also what we call hyper-metabolic. You have increased calorie needs to put towards healing and put towards recovery, especially from any acute trauma. So that combined with the deficit has the potential to slow that, you know, recovery phase down potentially inhibit, you know, tissue repair or, know, whatever the surgery was for. So usually not a good idea. Wait a couple of weeks to pass that acute phase.
Aidan:
What’s the difference between artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols?
Tyler:
Yeah, this one comes up all the time. Just briefly, the way I would probably explain this easiest is one has calories, one doesn’t, and one has sort of a different compound, they’re two different compounds. Artificial sweeteners are what we typically refer to as non-nutritive sweeteners. So they’ll have a chemical structure similar often to a glucose molecule that will trigger a glucose receptor so it tastes sweet, but it doesn’t typically have any calories. Sugar alcohols are a different chemical structure they have carbon and hydrogen atoms in there they can be broken down and used for energy not have as much energy as carbohydrates, but they do have a caloric value.
They’re also more typically used for food production or stabilisation. We mentioned the gummies earlier. You’ll often see them in things like protein bars and that will give things a bit more texture. Whereas your artificial sweeteners typically just, you know, they can be used for anything, but you’ll typically find them more in drinks and beverages and things like that that won’t really add much texture either.
Aidan:
And our final question is why do people say that sleep is important when trying to lose weight? So I’m going to start this and then I’ll just get you to cover anything that I don’t really cover. So, firstly, if everything is matched, which it never will be, but say calories and exercises completely match, there is pretty compelling research to show that people lose more muscle and less fat if they are sleep deprived or not getting enough sleep versus if they have a really good amount of sleep. We also see that goes with other stuff like injury risk and a bunch of other stuff too. Beyond that though, let’s take out the calories-matched thing. We know that there are clear changes in hunger and cravings.
We know that there is an eating window that is longer, that gives more opportunity to eat, particularly combined with the fact that people are typically seeking higher carb, higher fat combo foods as well. And then my favourite one, I’ve probably talked about this on the podcast before, I heard somebody else say this and it’s like, the exact wording they use was, when I’m sleep deprived, I just care about my goals less. It’s so valid.
Tyler:
Yeah, I think again, important to reiterate, being sleep-deprived or having less sleep, won’t stop you from losing weight. You’ll lose the weight, but the type of weight you’ll lose will be very different. A lot of the research suggests, for example, you’ll lose a much higher percentage of that weight as muscle compared to fat. And you know, if you have two people and they both lose eight kilograms and one loses six kilograms of fat and two kilograms of muscle, that’s probably a relatively good intervention. But say the other person loses, you know, five kilos of muscle and only three kilos of fat. That’s a terrible intervention. And you actually end up fatter than you started with, or at least at a worse composition than you started with potentially. So if being lighter is the goal, it probably doesn’t make a huge amount of difference, but usually that’s not the goal. Usually losing fat is the goal. And if that’s the case, know, sleep has a huge, huge impact. Even one hour sleep will make a measurable difference on those type of weight lost comparisons.
Aidan:
Perfect. Well, that’s us for today. So this has been episode 180. Thank you so much for coming on Tyler. It’s been a while between drinks.