Legoland, fasting and the heat

 An update on things and why I stopped posting so much.

I have not been posting much, well at all over the last few months. I have had an interview at work for a promotion of sorts and this took priority of pretty much any spare time I had and that doesn’t take into account spending time with my family.

I have kept on running and at least maintained OMAD even though the alternate day fasting has taken a step back in the heat and with trips to Legoland meant that staying healthy whilst spending all day in 40 degree heat. I think one of the top considerations when performing fasting is to not be too strict but at the same time don’t flake out too easy.

I think I heard that you should try and stick to things 100% of the time but if you manage 80-90% of the time then that is a success. So mentally I am not beating myself up over not sticking to alternate day fasting, my weight has crept up a little but it is the summer and I am eating fruit, so I am hoping worst case that my urges for this will shift to lower carb alternatives as the weather starts to cool. At the same time one of the things I am enjoying with Keto IF over Keto is that I am not so strict with the Keto, in fact it is more Paleo than Keto.

I am hoping to get back to posting once or twice a month, hopefully with some more details on running style and analysis of gait from myself on the treadmill in different shoes. This should tie in nicely with my club where we might be looking to give better access to this kind of training.

Keto running

As I have mentioned in my first post my wife and I have been on a Keto / low carb diet since the end of 2014. This life-style just twigged for us, it worked so well and we felt so good on it that there was no going back. When doing research you could not help but come across the name of Tim Noakes. As such it only seems fitting that the first paper I review is one of his, to be honest the only other choice was an IF paper I found by Jason Fung).

So the paper I picked to have a look through is:

High Rates of Fat Oxidation Induced by a Low-Carbohydrate, High-Fat Diet, Do Not Impair 5-km Running Performance in Competitive Recreational Athletes

Or in other words, you can still run just as fast over 5k if you are on a high far, low carb diet as if you are on a typical high carb diet. A point I want to get in early is that this only looks at athletes that are already in decent shape (<21 minutes 5k), I bet if you were to look at slower (or at least over-weight) runners you would see an improvement in performance on a HFLC diet due to the weight loss.

It should be noted that, as stated in the paper, an adjustment period was needed and tests after 4 days did not show favourable results for the low carb runners.

If you want to hear more from Tim Noakes, check out the following podcast: 

My Experience: 

As this is an early post I feel it is valid to add my experience. As I have probably stated elsewhere before adopting low carb my 5k PB was 29:29, this was a really hard effort. After going low carb and losing loads of weight I ran many sub 20 5ks (would have been more without buggy running) including 1 with a running buggy containing my 4 year old daughter. 

I have certainly not suffered any issues over the shorter distances and found the weight loss on a low carb diet to be significant enough to allow me to run much faster.