[laughs]

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about nutrition stuff and requests to do just a nutrition podcast so I might make it a regular thing. We’ll see how people respond to this but basically I asked for your questions through email and Facebook and I got a lot of questions, which was awesome. Thanks for that. I’m going to go through and do about 5-10 of them, depending on how long it takes, and we’ll see how long you can stand the sound of my voice and how long I can stand the sound of my voice.

Before we get into it I have to let you know that FrictionLabs is awesome. I’m good friends with those guys. I think they make amazing chalk and I use it exclusively at this point. They’re giving you guys discounts, so if you want to try out the chalk or you want to get it for the second, third, tenth time with the discount, go over to www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta and you’ll see some goodies over there.

Okay, so back to the interview. I’m going to get started now.

 

The first question – I’m just going to read these questions off and then answer them as I see fit. The first question came from Dan and first of all, I just want to say something before I get started here. That is that I have worked online exclusively for my career/my business with nutrition stuff since 2011 and in that time, I have had a lot of emails and comments sent my way. A lot of them have been really mean and vitriolic and hateful, and a lot of trolls out there. Since we’ve been with TrainingBeta, or since we started TrainingBeta, I’m just constantly amazed by, first of all, how well-spoken you guys are in your emails, how thoughtful, how objective you are, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that because when I open up the TrainingBeta emails I’m usually excited to see what you guys say, whereas when I open up a lot of my nutrition emails it’s kind of dreadful.

There are some nice people in the nutrition world, too, but I just want to commend you guys. I think that we’re such an awesome community and I love talking to you guys. Having said all that, thank you. I appreciate it. It makes my life easier.

 

Okay, from Dan. He says, “I absolutely love your podcast.”

Thank you.

“You do our community a great service. I would love more nutrition content. I gave up gluten and dairy six years ago at age 17 and in one month I grew an inch and went from climbing V7 to V8. It felt incredible.”

I wish I had grown an inch when I gave up gluten…

“It felt incredible, however, the better I feel I still find I am tweaking my diet. Questions: I’ve read Healthy at 100 by John Robbins, a book that studies long-lived cultures, which found that many centenarians eat grains. This was a reasonable argument for me against Paleo and for simply fresher, seasonal food. What do you think? Could these centenarians live even longer eating Paleo?”

Maybe. It’s possible. I have a lot of thoughts on this and I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years because I’m Paleo. I’m coming from a Paleo place so I mean, you know, because I’m Paleo I will say that my answers to these questions are going to be probably very different than if I was vegan or if I was vegetarian or if I was raw foods or something.

We all have our own philosophies and the truth is that different diets work for different people for different reasons and I’m fully aware of that. I don’t think that Paleo is the only way for everybody to eat. I’m definitely not like that.

The question about why these centenarians can eat grains. Number one, the way that we eat grains now is different than the way we did a long time ago and possibly the way that these healthy centenarians eat them, so there are different species of grains which may or may not contain more or less gluten, the GMOs might be having something to do with this, but also the way that they prepared them was different. They would soak the grains, they would sprout the grains, they would ferment the grains, and those things make them so much more digestible and easy for us to assimilate whereas now we just take the grain, we take out all the nutrients, and we eat this empty calorie thing, basically, with tons of gluten in it.

We also have much more stressed out lives which makes a huge difference on our digestion. We have other chemicals in our everyday lives that affect our bodies in different ways. We don’t sleep very much. We don’t enjoy our meals with other people, which can be really relaxing. I mean, some of us do but when I’ve studied these centenarian groups it’s like their lives are much easier. They spend time with friends and family every day. They drink wine and enjoy the company of people. They don’t have, you know, 8:00am-7:00pm jobs and then try to go train at night, so it’s much different and I think that the way that our digestion is and the way that we’ve come into this world having immune-deficient mothers and nutrient-depleted mothers, and then we come in and we’re just trying to work with what we’ve got, we’re at a disadvantage to a lot of people.

I see, you know, my grandmother is super healthy. She’s 94 years old and my mom is definitely healthier than I am in a lot of ways. Then there’s me. It’s like there’s this generational thing as we keep eating crappier and crappier foods and putting more and more chemicals into our body and being more and more stressed out, the generations to come are really suffering. You’re seeing more autism, more Celiac, more all of this stuff so I think there’s a lot to do with the whole centenarian thing. I do think that there are plenty of people who can eat grains and be totally healthy but I do think that we’re doing a disservice to ourselves by eating grains that are super refined, GMO, and not varied in their species.

 

The next question is: “Thoughts on the ancestral diet philosophy and the blood type diet philosophy?”

I get this question a lot, about the blood type diet philosophy. The blood type diet thing is, like I said, you know there are so many different factors now with how our digestive systems and our immune systems and hormonal systems are all, sort of – a lot of us they’re kind of damaged. No matter what kind of blood type you have you’re going to be working with these things and a lot of times that means when you’re damaged and you’re sick and you’re inflamed, you just have to do whatever you can to get the inflammatory foods out and repair and heal your body.

The inflammatory foods are the grains and the sugar and the gluten and the legumes and the dairy. All those things have toxins in them or things that we just can’t digest and so it just, with a not-super healthy body, it’s just taxing on your system. So, having said all that, I think that the blood type diet does have a little bit of merit and it kind of goes back to: where did we originate as people? And that’s where the blood type diet sort of gets its roots. Where we originated, maybe that determined what we evolved eating and where some people in Pacific islands or something, they might do really well with not super amounts of meat but more fish and more root vegetables and things like that and other people, like from eastern Europe, might do better with a lot of meat and not a ton of fish and not a ton of vegetables, even.

I think that it does have some merit but we’re working with such compromised systems at this point that yes, maybe it’s something that you can look at but we all just kind of need to optimize our diet as much as possible.

Thoughts on the ancestral diet philosophy? I mean, I’m assuming what you’re talking about there is Paleo and what that means, what I think, I mean obviously I espouse that. I think that the ancestral diet philosophy is basically this: that you/we evolved over the last several million years as humans, right? In that time we were, in general, hunter/gatherers. As hunter/gatherers we were eating mostly meat, vegetables, fish, eggs, seafood, fruits, nuts, seeds, and then some legumes and grains, as we could find them. We didn’t start to have agriculture, where we were growing grains and legumes until we, for some reason, needed to and wanted to sit down and form civilizations and that’s when we started growing things, which was about 10,000-30,000 years ago.

Over the millions of years the theory is that our bodies have evolved eating these other foods and not the grains and legumes, and so that means that over those 10,000-30,000 years ago, you know, we started seeing more obesity. Our bones started to get more brittle, we started to have more cancer, more heart disease, the bones of our face structure started to get weaker in ways, and all of this evidence leads us to believe that the foods that we were eating before – and you can see this in the bones of people from tens, thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, where they’re just more robust. You can tell how much muscle they had and how long they lived and what their teeth looked like. In general, they were dying of diseases. Not chronic diseases but viruses and bacterias, or they were dying of blunt-force injuries.

I think that, in general, we should be eating those foods or at least mostly those foods, and making it the bulk. If you can tolerate grains and legumes, make them less a part of your diet and process them correctly by sprouting and soaking and fermenting them.

 

Next question: “Okay, why not quinoa and legumes, presoaked?”

I’m not going to talk about Paleo this whole time. I think there are plenty of people who can deal with quinoa and legumes that are presoaked and, like I said, sprouted. Quinoa, though, a lot of people have question about that. They say quinoa is not a grain so it shouldn’t be off the Paleo diet and it should be good for me, right?

Well, they say that quinoa is a seed, it’s not a grain. All grains are actually seeds and quinoa is considered a pseudo-grain and in my opinion, if it looks like a grain, it tastes like a grain, and it acts like a grain, meaning that it has a lot of the same properties, then it is a grain and we should treat it as such.

The thing with grains is they all have these antinutrients in common, so the lectins, the enzyme inhibitors, the phytic acids, and these other things that compromise your digestion, they compromise nutrient absorption and they generally can be inflammatory. Quinoa is the same way. It has the same things going on with it so I don’t see it as any different.

Now, like I’ve been saying if you can seriously tolerate quinoa then go ahead and eat it, however the symptoms that you are going to look for with an intolerance to grains and gluten are immune symptoms, which we don’t really know that they’re immune symptoms unless we’re taught that so, like, acne is an immune response, eczema is an immune response, joint inflammation is an immune response, headaches can be an immune response or they can be a response to your digestion not liking what you’re eating, bloating and constipation and diarrhea – those are all digestive responses to foods that your body doesn’t like.

All of those things, if you’re having any of them or if you’re having any autoimmune diseases like if you have psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or fibromyalgia or MS or things like that, or hashimoto, those are all caused by gut issues so it starts in the gut and I can get into that but I’ll go to the next question now.

 

“Sugar or less sugar or no sugar?”

Okay, now we’re going to talk about more athlete-focused things. Obviously I want you guys to be in the best health possible and that’s why I started with the whole big picture inflammatory, make your body as optimized as possible. I could do hours and hours on just that and I have in the past, but suffice it to say that we want to get the toxins out as much as possible, the inflammatory foods, like I mentioned, and eat enough protein, enough carbs, and enough fat to fuel our activities on top of that.

What that means is for us, as climbers, we’re not doing low intensity running, we’re not doing low intensity swimming, we’re not also just sprinting all the time. We’re kind of doing a mix of aerobic and anaerobic work which requires carbohydrates so for us – yeah. I think that sugar, when you’re working out, can be extremely useful and I don’t think that Gatorade is necessarily the best option. I think it’s sort of gross. Anything that has weird food coloring, like, why do you need to drink something that’s fluorescent yellow? That’s my question. Why did they do that? It didn’t always look like that. [laughs] There are other sports drinks out there that aren’t colored like that and they don’t have the weird preservatives in them and they don’t have the fake sugars and stuff like that.

You can also make your own. You can get glucose powders and just make your own drinks out of them. You can also use honey to make things. It’s not going to have as much glucose in it as, say, just a pure glucose drink but because Gatorade is made with high fructose corn syrup, you’re not getting pure glucose in there, either. I would get one that is made from – I would just get something that is more natural, and I don’t even know the names of them because I don’t drink them but I don’t think it’s a bad idea if you’re working out really hard, if you’re doing a really big day of climbing. I’m not talking about cragging where you’re spending an hour in between pitches. You’re not necessarily going to need it then but if you’re on a push up a multi-pitch thing or you’re bouldering incessantly and things like that, then yeah, go ahead and use those and keep your energy up by having the sugar fuel you. It’s not a bad idea. You just have to sort of monitor how you’re feeling and if you do that all the time, if you’re gaining weight because if you’re taking in too much sugar, you’re obviously going to start gaining some fat.

 

Okay. “What supplements do you and Seth take/recommend?”

Right now, I am looking at about 10 bottles of supplements that I take, unfortunately, because I’m going through my own health struggles right now. I was diagnosed with mold biotoxin illness, which I don’t need to go into right now.

Basically, I’m taking stuff to just support my system while I’m trying to deal with that but in general, I tell people to take the supplements that they need and I think it can be super dangerous to take supplements in general, even the benign ones that we think are okay like the B-vitamins. The omega-3’s you can’t really overdose on although there are studies out now saying that having too much omega-3, like the fish oils, can actually sort of be an indicator of heart disease or it can do nothing after a certain point. You don’t really want to take more than 1,000 milligrams of fish oil a day unless you have a doctor who is like, ‘You have this specific thing and you need to take this much for this certain amount of time.’ In general, I wouldn’t take more than about 1,000 milligrams of total EPA and DHA.

Vitamin D is another thing that a lot of people are low in but not everybody. I mean, I would highly suggest that you go to your doctor and get a check-up and say, “I want you to do all of the blood work that you can do and that you’re willing to do,” and ask them if they’ll do a thyroid check-up, if they’ll do a Vitamin D check-up, if they’ll test your B12, if they’ll test your basic immune system and anything else that they’ll do. Then, get those results back and if your vitamin D is below 60 then you’re going to want to start supplementing with vitamin D3. You can do – I do 5,000 milligrams every other day but you can do 2,000 milligrams every other day, or not milligrams, it’s IU. Sorry. 2,000IU everyday up to about 4,000IU everyday and that’s about as high as I would go, and then you start sort of messing with other blood markers.

I’ve done that to myself. I’ve taken too much vitamin D and it messed with – I can’t even remember what it was. It was like my potassium or something but anyway, the other thing that I would say that most people do need are vitamin B’s, however, I actually just overdosed on vitamin B’s and I was having severe nerve issues, like electrical shocks through my body, which is part of what I’ve been dealing with for the past seven months but they got worse and worse as my vitamin B12 and folate went up and up and up, because I was like, ‘Well, the more the better and vitamin B’s are water soluble, there’s no upper limit, technically,’ but I got my levels tested and it’s like: normal is between 350 and 900 and mine was over 2,000. I was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to cut down on the vitamin B’s,’ and as soon as I did that, some of those symptoms went away.

Even vitamin B’s you can overdose on, you can over do, so I would just do not a super high dose. Get a B-synergy type thing, where you get a complex of all the B’s because they work together, and monitor. Go to your doctor every six months, every year, and just have your blood work tested. Maybe you’re not as crazy about that as I am but it’s good to know where you’re at so that you are not overdoing anything.

The other thing – I’m sort of looking around my house to see what I take. Probiotics can be extremely necessary, especially because we’re so stressed out and that can deplete probiotics, it can deplete B vitamins, it can just sort of hurt us in general so probiotics. I take Inner-Eco, which is just a fermented drink made from coconut water and you just take a swig of it everyday. You get it in the refrigerated section of Whole Foods or any grocery store, actually, that is sort of progressive. It’s great. You can also take a capsule of probiotics and I would suggest taking no less than, like, 25 billion a day and make sure that it’s a good, high quality one. You can get all of those on Amazon. You can also get them through Designs for Health, which is a good company for supplements. I don’t remember the brand of probiotics that I take now but I will put it in the show notes.

Then what else? Glutamine – L-glutamine – can be great for climbers. It helps us recover and repair and it’s just a powder. You put it in water and it tastes just a little bit sweet. That can also help heal your digestion if you have issues like that, and it’s not going to do any harm.

Seth also highly stands by BCAA’s, which are branched chain amino acids. When he was at his strongest he was taking, the brand is Bluebonnet, and he was taking the BCAA’s from them in capsule form and he would take two capsules before working out, two capsules while he was working out, and that included days out climbing, and then two capsules afterward. He could climb the next day much more easily without as much fatigue or soreness and he was stronger than, like I said, he’s ever been. That’s another thing that you can play around with. Those BCAA’s just direct our amino acids and they directly impact your ability to recruit muscle strength and creatine and they just help you recover, in general.

 

Alright, moving along. Anthony says, “Love your podcast.”

Thank you.

“I’m writing to ask how you feel about intermittent fasting, aka eat-stop-eat, Warrior diet, etc. I’ve been on the Warrior diet for almost three years and although I follow it as much as I can, I sometimes wonder if it’s a detriment or less beneficial to hold off on eating immediately after a workout or after climbing. I would love to hear your thoughts.”

So this one, intermittent fasting basically means that you are fasting intermittently – to be a jackass here – basically you can do it many different ways. You can fast for an entire day and then eat regularly the next day, you can fast for eight hours a day, you can fast for 14 hours a day. For instance, you might start off doing, and hopefully I get my math right here, 14 days – sorry, 14 hours of fasting and 10 hours of eating, which would look something like you would start eating at 10:00am and you would stop at 8:00pm. You wouldn’t eat after 8:00pm and you wouldn’t eat the next day until 10:00am. You would do that pretty much everyday. Sometimes people give themselves a break or you could do more like a 14-hour window, even, of eating and 10 hours of fasting. It can be as simple as that, even.

A lot of people are eating all morning, all afternoon, all evening until they go to sleep and that can add up to be a lot of calories. It also means that your body is not having much time to rest and when you don’t have food in your stomach that’s actually when growth hormone is secreted and growth hormone is what helps us build muscles, repair, and sleep, just basically recover. It’s a good idea to have breaks with your eating.

I actually experimented with this and my schedule is just kind of all over the place at this point so it’s hard. It’s kind of hard to keep it up if your schedule isn’t pretty solid but I was doing 10:00am-8:00pm and that doesn’t seem like a big deal but for whatever reason, I did lose weight. I lost fat and I slept better, and I had more energy, and that’s kind of the basic things that you’ll see when it works for people. They lose weight and they feel better.

My opinions on it are that it can work. The bad parts about intermittent fasting are that it can make you super low blood sugar, like if you’re coming into it with hypoglycemia to begin with, if you’re super cranky in the morning, you get dizzy and lightheaded when you don’t eat, your stomach starts to hurt, you get sweaty – things like that throughout the day, then that’s hypoglycemia and that’s something that you need to fix before you start starving yourself. Not starving yourself but fasting, basically.

If I had tried intermittent fasting five years ago I probably would have passed out, literally, because my blood sugar was so low between meals that it would have been dangerous. I feel like more women than men deal with this. This has just been my experience; I don’t know if that’s actually true. For women, I never suggest that they just go into it full force. I always suggest that they play around with a 14-hour eating window or a 10-hour eating window and see how they feel, because even sometimes for a lot of women, if you wake up at 6:00am to go to work or to get ready for work or something and you’re not eating until 10:00am, that can be a long, long four hours. It can be really bad for productivity, for your mood, for everything, because when you get that low blood sugar you start to secrete cortisol and adrenaline and you’re just kind of messing with your hormones, which can mess with your adrenals in general and your thyroid and cause some long term damage.

It’s not something that I would play with if you have hypoglycemia until you get that hypoglycemia under control. The way that I got my hypoglycemia under control was by eating Paleo, basically, because the grains were actually giving me what’s called reactive hypoglycemia, so that my blood sugar was shooting way up then it would drop way down. Now that I don’t eat them there aren’t very many foods that do that to me. I’m not eating so many refined carbs so it helps me stay much more even, to the point where I can go hours and hours without eating, finally. It’s amazing.

The other thing to look for, there are two other things I want to mention about intermittent fasting: a lot of people will turn to coffee to get them/to power them through those fast hours, or the fast days, and they’ll do workouts and they’ll not sleep very well, just like normal. They’ll do their normal 12-hour workday and when you’re doing that and you’re not fueling yourself properly and you’re just giving yourself a stimulant drug, which is caffeine, to power you through that, that, again, over time can definitely lead to adrenal fatigue and thyroid issues and it can even lead to weight gain because your body sort of starts revolting. I would caution against using caffeine. If you’re that hungry and tired because you’re not eating, then just eat. That’s kind of what Brad Pilon, who wrote ‘Eat Stop Eat’ about this whole philosophy, his whole philosophy is if you’re super hungry and you’re not feeling it, just eat. There’s no reason to torture yourself.

The other thing I would caution against is if you have blood sugar issues at all, and even if you don’t, if you’re fasting in the morning and then you’re working out super hard on an empty stomach, your performance is probably not going to be that great. I mean, there are some people who are really hardy and they can deal with that and their workouts are actually really great, but if your’s aren’t and you’re not that kind of person it’s okay. We don’t have to fit into a cookie cutter. If you’re finding that you’re fasting, you’re working out and your working out is sucking, your climbing is sucking, you’re shaky, you’re weak, you’re getting pumped more quickly, then just make sure that you change your schedule so that you’re eating something before your workout and after.

His concern about recovery, because he’s not eating right after his workout, is I think spot on. You need to eat after your workouts in order to recover properly and heal those muscles. You kind of have to play around with it and see what works best for you but don’t do it because it’s this cool thing to do and it works for other people and it should work for you, too. Play around with it, see if it helps, and listen to your body.

 

Okay, are you sick of me yet? I’m going to take a break here and tell you more about FrictionLabs because I love them and they are a great chalk company. The reason that they are so great is because they use more magnesium carbonate than the other companies. You really can feel the difference with the chalk on your hands so when I climb with their chalk I put the chalk on my hands, I go up the wall, I come back down, and there is still chalk on my hands whereas with every other chalk that’s never happened to me before. At least not like this.

They’re also making this new liquid chalk, so that’s pretty cool. If you want to check out FrictionLabs and, funny enough, the owner of the company is Kevin Brown and we went to high school together and never spoke again after high school. Then, all of a sudden I find out that he owns FrictionLabs. Anyway, check them out at www.frictionlabs.com/trainingbeta and you’ll get some discounts over there.

 

Okay, so hopefully my voice will hold out for a little bit longer here. We’ve been going for about a half an hour. I’ll go for just a couple more questions, a few more questions.

 

This comes Mark and he says, “Hi, Neely. I think your podcast is great.”

Thank you.

“I think you are doing a great service to the climbing community along with putting out great content. I’ve been curious as to how you feel about sugar, processed and natural, and how it affects our body’s ability to recover and feel good. Based on personal experience I have felt much better energy-wise and inflammation-wise after cutting almost all sugar out of my diet. I was wondering if there was a good reason for this and if it’s worth not eating fruit, dates, natural sugars, or just focusing on added sugars/sweeteners. Thank you for your time.”

Alright, that’s a good question and I don’t know what he means by sugar. I’m assuming he means that he’s taken out white sugar. That’s what I’m assuming here, so he’s probably taken out cereals and candy bars. I don’t really know but I do think that a lot of people have, and some people even have sensitivities to white sugar where their immune system will respond to it and give them fatigue or other symptoms, headaches and things like that. That’s one thing about white sugar.

Now, having said that, you can have a sensitivity to any food. You can have a sensitivity to honey and dates and things like that but I have seen that and I’ve definitely worked with a lot of people where when they take out white sugar, their allergies get better, their asthma gets better, their eczema gets better, they lose weight, it just all falls into place.

Like I was saying before, though, as climbers we do need carbohydrates so if he’s feeling better, he said he’s feeling better energy-wise and inflammation-wise after cutting almost all sugar, then keep doing what you’re doing. There’s no reason to go super low carb with your climbing schedule. If you’re training and if you’re like every other crazy climber you’re also running and trying to have a full time job, we need carbs for energy to do the powerful things that we’re doing. So no, I wouldn’t say to cut out the honey and the dates and the fruit and the natural sugars and the starchy veggies and I don’t know what else he’s eating but no, I would not. I would listen to what your body is telling you, which is that it’s happy right now and to continue doing what you’re doing.

 

I actually have another question here that I want to address while I’m on this topic, and that is about ketogenic diets. Ketogenic diets are basically super low carb. In general, people are below like 15% carbohydrates, sometimes down to like 5% and very, very high fat and moderate protein. Somebody else asked about what I think about these diets and if it would work for climbers.

The reason that people do it is so that their body becomes fat-adapted, they start using their body fat as fuel really efficiently, and they start using dietary fat – the fat that they eat – as fuel really efficiently instead of the carbs. When you deny your body carbs you start creating ketones. Ketones, and this is different than diabetic ketoacidosis, this is totally different and it’s not dangerous – you start creating ketones and your body can fuel itself on ketones, your brain can fuel itself on the glucose that your body naturally creates in gluconeogenesis from your liver, and so everything can be totally fine. However, the people who are using ketosis are – like, it can be really therapeutic for Alzheimer’s and autism and other brain issues and it can also be beneficial for seizure disorder and certain kinds of cancer really respond well to it.

The other people who are using it are long distance runners and bikers, so low intensity sports where they’re calling on their body fat. They’re going on these long runs and doing races and they’re fueling themselves with packets of coconut oil, for instance. Coconut oil is a really good source of fat. It promotes ketosis because it’s medium chained fatty acids, but whatever – we don’t have to talk about that. Basically, that’s low intensity and I have personally talked with several of these athletes who yes – they get really good at fueling themselves with fat but they actually end up/it’s common for them to end up having thyroid issues and adrenal issues and fatigue because it is hard on your body. It’s stressful on your body to not have those carbohydrates and the glycogen to fuel what you’re doing.

Now, it can work for plenty of people. I tried it and I was like, ‘Oh, this is awesome. I want to try this. I want to see how lean I can get and how good I can feel,’ because people are like, ‘I sleep so much better, my brain works so much better, I have so much energy,’ so I tried it. I did this whole – I think I said I was going to try it for three weeks. Well, I lasted six days because I literally thought that I was going to die, that I was dying. I was eating the same amount of calories that I was eating before. I was eating tons and tons of coconut oil, coconut butter, avocados, bacon, bacon grease, olive oil, just any fat that I could get and I remember I did a workout during that time. A workout that I could handle and I couldn’t walk up the stairs for the rest of those six days without moaning, audibly, because I was so sore.

I had muscle spasms, extreme nausea, I was extremely depressed so I was crying on a whim, let’s see what happened – I lost about five pounds, I think, in those five days or maybe it was six pounds. Something ridiculous. I got really lean. I don’t know how much of that was muscle wasting away but I definitely lost weight so that worked but after six days I was like, ‘Screw this. I’m out,’ so I ate a bunch of carbs. I’m not joking, within hours, the soreness was gone.

This man, who runs this blog called ‘That Paleo Guy,’ I think he changed the name since then, but if you Google www.thatpaleoguy.com or ‘thatpaleoguy’, all one word, and then the word ‘Neely’, he wrote a blog post. He’s a nutritionist in the Paleo world and he wrote a blog post about me because of my failed experiment with ketosis. He had this picture of me in short shorts and a sports bra and he was like, ‘This girl cannot do ketosis because she’s muscular and you can tell she’s built her muscles doing powerful exercises, like lifting weights, climbing.’ So he was saying that because my muscle fibers were fast-twitch muscles that I needed carbohydrates to fuel those, whereas a runner or a person who is obese can certainly get away with ketosis, or overweight at all, because they have the fat to fuel them and slow-twitch muscle fibers, for some reason, and you can read it for yourself, do better with being fueled by fat.

If you have a body type like me, which so much of us do in the climbing community, I don’t think that ketosis is something that’s going to work for you. If you have a lot of weight to lose then yeah, I think it’s a great way to lose weight, for sure. It can be hard. You can find out more about ketosis all over online, like how to do it, what to eat, how much to eat, etc.

So anyway, that’s my spill on ketosis. It didn’t work for me. Who knows, maybe it will work for you, even if you do have a body type like me. Weirder things have happened but I just think that with our work load as climbers, it’s not the best idea.

 

Okay, I’m going to do one more question. This is from Maria. Thank you, Maria, for sending in a question.

“Hi, Neely. I have a couple of questions I was hoping you could answer during your nutrition podcast. What macronutrient ratio would you recommend for climbers? Do you recommend high protein diet for recovery and muscle building? Is it physically possible to build muscle while losing weight or would one of these oppose the other? I think many small female climbers struggle with this. My thoughts are if I put on muscle mass I would get stronger but also weigh more. Wouldn’t that mean strength-to-weight ratio would adjust and mean the same? Any thoughts on this?”

I’m going to start with the first one, “What macronutrient ratio would you recommend for climbers?” I mean, I think everybody’s different but I would go more with zone, so 40-30-30, so 40 carbs, 30 protein, 30 fat. Something around there and that’s what CrossFit people were using. I don’t know how much they’re using it now but it’s because we do need carbs to, like I said, to fuel what we’re doing so what does that mean?

If you take 40% carbs – I don’t know if I want to do this right now but maybe I’ll try to shorten this. Say you’re eating 2,000 calories, okay? If 40% of 2,000 is 800, I think – I’m just doing this in my head – 30% of 2,000 is 600, and 30% is 600 calories. Does that make sense? Yes. So 800 calories in carbs, 600 calories in protein, and 600 calories in fat, and to figure out how many grams that is there are four grams of carbohydrate per calorie – sorry, four calories per gram of carbohydrates. I’m really sorry guys. [laughs] So you would divide that. 800 divided by four and you would get 200 grams of carbs, okay?

Then for the protein, you would do 600 divided by four because it’s the same thing, and that’s 150 grams of protein. 600 calories worth of fat divided by nine is – I don’t know – something under 150, I’m going to say something like 80 because I can’t do that math in my head, so you would be getting, if you’re eating a 2,000-calorie diet, which you know that’s for an average sized woman, working out a lot. That would be good. For an average sized man who’s not trying to lose weight, it would be something around there.

So, 200 grams of carbs. What does that even mean? A cup of grains/a cup of rice is going to be about 45 grams, a banana is going to be 25, some sort of sports drink is going to be around 45, a sweet potato is going to be between 25-40 grams, so it’s easy to do that, especially if you’re eating and drinking carby-things during your workouts. In general, I would say to people see how you do, and that’s especially for women. I work mostly with women and we’re not necessarily going to be eating 2,000 calories. For me, even when I’m working out a ton, I’m a 100-pound, five foot girl and I don’t really ever need to eat more than 1,800 calories but sometimes I do eat those 200 grams, especially on big workload days.

Anyway, I would say start with 100 grams and see how you feel. If you feel fatigued or you know your workouts suck, then up it. Go up, especially during your workouts and after your workouts. If you are still still gaining weight on 100 grams of carbs, if you’re climbing, that’s going to be really rare but just cut it down a little bit, by like 10 or 20 grams a day.

Anyway, I just want to give you an example of what 600 calories worth of protein might look like, so 150 grams of protein would look like, for me, I usually eat around 100 grams of protein and that’s what I suggest for people in general, to eat about as many grams as you weigh in protein. A 4-ounce serving of chicken is going to be 35 grams of protein. With beef it’s going to be about 40 for a 4-ounce serving. An egg is only about seven or eight grams and a cup of grains is going to be about 15 grams. Things like that, so those are going to be your main protein sources and then like a tablespoon of oil is going to be about 100 grams of fat and – no, it’s 100 calories, so if you have – and I’m not super sure on the fat.

This is the kind of thing where I think he’s asking this question about macronutrient ratios and I’m having to explain, or I’m explaining this all to you because most of the time, people don’t have any idea what they’re eating or how much protein they’re eating or how much fat they’re eating. That’s because we’re not taught that. It’s not a priority in our culture, so I usually suggest to people that they get to know what they’re putting into their mouth and you can do that by using free online nutrition trackers. I suggest www.myfitnesspal.com because it’s super easy to use and it’s free. You just go in there and you’re like: this is my gender, this is how much I weigh, this is how tall I am, this is how active I am, and this is how much weight I want to lose, if you’re trying to lose weight. It will spit out: this is how many calories you need to eat. Then you can record everything you’re eating and it will tell you: this is how many carbs you’re eating, this is how much fat, this is how much protein, this is how many calories. Then you can figure out from there: what’s my macronutrient ratio? Then play with it.

If you’re feeling tired then you eat more carbs. If you’re feeling like you’re not recovering, then you eat more protein. If you’re feeling hungry all day, then you eat more fat. Those are pretty big generalizations but that’s kind of what I would tell you, so I suggest to everybody that you do that for at least a week. It can get a little crazy-making for sure and it can make people be a little bit eating disordered but if you’re just looking it as a short term, I’m going to get to know my diet kind of thing then yeah, please do that and get to know what works for you.

 

I think that’s all I’m going to do today. I guess I’ll keep doing these. If you guys want to, email me at neely@trainingbeta.com and let me know what you thought of this and if you want me to do it again. If you have nutrition questions I can do this once a month or once every couple months or something.

The other thing is I can always do live webinar type things where we’re just doing Q&A’s. For some reason, you guys don’t really show up to our Q&A’s so I’m not sure that I want to do that but your feedback is welcome and if you want to know more about my nutrition stuff you can go to my website at www.neelyquinn.com, which doesn’t have a super ton of blog posts on there but I do have some and I have a ton of resources, like a ton of tools that can help people lose weight, overcome emotional eating, things like that.

I guess that is it, guys. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate all your questions and for you sticking with me through this, even though I’m losing my voice.

As an update on me, just before I check out, I’m actually not climbing right now. I’m just trying to heal my body. My shoulders are feeling fine, I have a little bit of an arm issue but I’m kind of just taking a break from climbing, voluntarily, for the first time in a really long time. It feels good in ways. I’m also jealous of people who are at my favorite climbing areas but it does feel good to just chill, watch tv, and go for walks, do some yoga, work, but in the meantime Seth is still recovering. He’s kind of having a hard recovery himself with his shoulder. He had to take some time off doing everything but he did do his first 5.10- four months after his surgery, his shoulder surgery, yesterday so that was good.

We’re still in Boulder. We’re actually thinking about moving to Salt Lake City and thank you guys so much for your – I got some emails about what Salt Lake City is like and everybody basically agrees that it’s amazing so we’re going to go check that out in two weeks. It’s much more affordable there than in Boulder, but anyway, that’s about it.

As always, if you guys need more help with your training we do have a nutrition book, a guide, that Acacia Young – she’s an RD[N] – she wrote it. You can find that on TrainingBeta and we always have our programs for boulderers, our programs for route climbers, power endurance, endurance, and we also have Jared Vagy’s book on injury prevention so definitely check those out.

Whenever you guys purchase those programs it helps us keep doing this and it helps us eat and, you know, do what we need to do so we really appreciate your support. Email me with any feedback about this. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you soon.

 

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