Q&A: Ultramarathoners and Paleo

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Here’s a good question from a pretty serious runner I thought you all might be interested in.

Runner1-200x300.jpgI have a question… my husband and I are ultra marathoners. We are wondering if eating Paleo is safe for us? We ve been on it for almost 5 weeks, no cheating at all. Stuck to the diet but unfortunately, we felt so weak and fatigue. Not to mention crankiness! We have a race this Saturday running 50K…. We try to eat sweet potatoes in small portion, a couple times a week. Upped fats into our diet (coconut oil, bacon grease, EVOO).

We run an ultra marathon once a month. Any suggestion? I do feel lightheaded and out of shape even though we ran GREAT before starting PALEO now we feel like crap and tired. We struggled to lose weight before Paleo and then tried paleo and we did lose 10 lbs (each of us) in 4 weeks but that’s it.. im sure it was just the water retention. Feedbacks would be appreciated!

Thanks

Answer from Neely:

Great question.

If you guys are doing an ultramarathon once a month, you DEFINITELY need to be eating more carbs. Like sweet potatoes and squash and fruit every day. It doesn’t surprise me at all that you guys are feeling terrible. Here’s what I’d do. Put your food intake into an online journal like fitday.com or myfitnesspal.com or one of those. Figure out how much food you’re eating and how many calories you should be eating, given your size, desired weight, and activity level. Then from there, here are some guidelines for changes to make.

Protein
1 gram of protein per pound of LEAN body weight. So if you’re 150 and you have 25% body fat, you’d need to get 112.5 grams of protein a day. 4 oz of meat has around 25-45 grams of protein, FYI.

Carbs
At least 100 grams of carbs a day plus about 50 extra grams per every hour of cardio you do. You’ll need to get that from sweet potatoes, potatoes, tapioca flour, nuts, fruit, lots of veggies, and honey in your case since you’re running so much. HOWEVER…

Fat
The thing is that the more fat you eat, the better your body will get at using it as fuel rather than carbs. Try for like 1 g of fat per pound of lean body mass just like the protein. Especially medium chain fatty acids like coconut oil. Some runners and cyclists will actually take coconut oil or almond butter out with them on their long workouts instead of gu or other sugary things because their bodies get so good at burning it. You’ll have to work up to this in your training. So put extra coconut oil in your food and eat coconut milk curries, don’t skimp on the avocados or bacon fat (within caloric reason, that is) – things like that.

Calories
Make sure you’re eating enough calories for the work you’re doing. If you really want to keep running well, you need to eat enough calories. If you’re trying to lose weight, then maybe lay off the running for a little while so you can have a calorie deficit and not feel totally terrible.

If you want specific help with this, I do personal Paleo coaching. Just let me know if you’re interested by emailing [email protected]. Also, Nell Stephenson at www.nellstephenson.com has some awesome info on this topic. She’s a Paleo nutritionist and successful Ironman athlete. In the meantime, read this post for more information about how to deal with being an active Paleo eater.

Anyone else have any insights as a distance runner who eats Paleo?