s3/e22 Let's Talk About Low Carb Diets for Endurance Athletes with Holley Samuel, RD, MEd, CPT (@holleyfuelednutrition)
The Running Explained Podcast
Running Explained
4.6 • 534 Ratings
🗓️ 15 June 2023
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Let's talk about low-carb diets for endurance athletes! Sports dietitian Holley Samuel, RD, MEd, CPT (@holleyfuelednutrition) joins the show to talk about low carbohydrate approaches for endurance athletes. Good? Bad? Let's discuss!
- Intentional vs unintentional carbohydrate restriction
- The purported benefits of a low-carb approach; does it translate to performance gains?
- The current state of the research on low-carb approaches for endurance athletes
- What "fat burning"/being fat-adapted actually means
- Is it the carb restriction or calorie restriction that creates the risk?
- The limitations of the research and what we still don't know
- The risks of a low-carb approach from a health perspective (especially for people with a history of disordered eating)
- What about body composition?
- The relationship between carbohydrate restriction and Low Energy Availability (LEA)/Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S)
- What's going on with the small subset of (mostly male) athletes who seem to thrive for years on a low carbohydrate approach?
- And more!
Holley Samuel is a dietitian, personal trainer, master of education & eating disorders, and podcaster at her virtual practice Holley Fueled Nutrition. Holley works with runners and helps them learn to fuel their bodies without restriction, make peace with food, and prevent injuries to become stronger and faster runners for life. https://holleyfuelednutrition.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Running Explain podcast. I'm your host, Elizabeth. I'm a marathoner, coach, and answer seeker. |
| 0:07.3 | When I first started running at the age of 29, I had so many questions and what felt like nowhere to turn to for answers. |
| 0:14.1 | And now I'm here to answer all your running questions about anything that you might want to know. |
| 0:18.2 | If you're a new runner or you've been doing this for a long time, |
| 0:21.0 | there's always something more to learn about running. So let's get started. My guest this week is |
| 0:26.3 | Holly Samuel of Holly Field Nutrition. If you have been around the running explained world for |
| 0:32.6 | a while, I'm sure you're familiar with Holly's work. She was also a guest back on season one, |
| 0:37.4 | talking about carb loading and glycogen in the context |
| 0:39.9 | of sport and race performance. |
| 0:42.2 | And today she is back to talk also about carbohydrates. |
| 0:44.8 | But in this episode, we're talking about low carbohydrate diets. |
| 0:48.8 | Now, there have definitely been parts of other episodes with other dietitians and sports |
| 0:54.1 | physiologists and nutrition PhDs, |
| 0:57.7 | a variety of guests on this show who have talked about the benefits and importance of eating |
| 1:03.4 | enough carbohydrates as endurance athletes and also talking about issues that we might run into |
| 1:07.9 | with low carbohydrate diets, but we've never actually talked about specifically the whole low carb thing. And today, we're going to talk about it. Now, obviously, |
| 1:16.0 | I feel like this topic could probably be multiple episodes. We didn't want to go so long that |
| 1:22.8 | you just ended up getting bored and turning it off. So we did cover what I am pleased to say is a fairly |
| 1:30.6 | nuanced but intro level conversation to low carbohydrate diets for endurance athletes. |
| 1:36.8 | Now since listening back to the episode, I realized I've never actually defined what low |
| 1:40.2 | carbohydrate means. I'm going to give you the definitions now. So according to the research, |
| 1:50.3 | going to the literature, a very low carb diet is considered a diet that contains, and diet just means way of eating, right? It contains less than 10% of your calories from carbohydrates and or |
... |
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