Designing your Ultramarathon Nutrition with Meredith Terranova | Koopcast Episode 118

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we have a sports nutritionist that i have come to appreciate more and more over the years and one of the most respected people in her field in ultra running today and that is meredith terranova and i realize that her name is not going to jump off the page or jump into your earbuds as somebody that you immediately recognize and that is for a very good reason it's one of the reasons i appreciate her practice the most meredith is very humble she's very humble about who she works with she's very humble about the results that those athletes have achieved and she will be one of the very last people to take credit for those athletes success and that is a philosophy that i agree with wholeheartedly with people who work with athletes whether they're in a nutrition capacity or in a coaching capacity we should always be in the background and the athletes should always be in the foreground but make no mistake meredith is a killer she is great at what she does she's very practical and one of the aspects of this very practical uh approach that she takes to nutrition and giving advice comes out

throughout the course of this podcast and i hope it starts to become famous and takes the world by storm and that is her gas station nutrition protocol where she has athletes go out on a run go out on a ride and go to a gas station and really see what comes to mind what jumps out at them from the shelves in order to get a fix on what their nutrition requirements and what their race day nutrition plan should actually be i'm i was really delighted that meredith took the opportunity to come on this podcast like i said she's not very big in self-promotion but i have always appreciated her counsel over the course of years and with that as a little bit of a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here is my conversation with meredith terranova i didn't put two and two together so you and i you and i have known each other for a really long time but i never put two and two together why your most recent round of schooling was such a cram job until i was getting ready for this podcast and i was like oh wait a minute that's why she crammed like a four-year advanced degree into two years it's because covid came down and it's just like well whatever like this is kind of what i'll do anyway it was amazing like what timing right because i was gonna spread it out forever because you have races you have training and then it was amazing it's like covid everything's canceled let's get this shit done i think that that is a brilliant use of your

time and i'm once again i'm kind of embarrassed that i never put two and two together but i remember like having interactions with you or interactions with paul and just thinking man meredith has really got her head down and in the books like what in the world is like going on with this it's like she's doing a four-year program in 18 months it turns out exactly what's going on right i think it's yeah i think in essence it's like a two and a half three-year program you know because by the time you do your thesis and you do everything it's long right but it was like i felt like the world was gonna haha the world was going to open up after december of 2020 so i was like this is my window and then i can get back to racing like this was great well good for you for using that time i think there are a lot of people that were like sitting on the couch watching netflix now they're like looking back at this going man i really should have done something without listening those last 18 months so you're one of the few that did something positive with it so good job yeah well it i got i got very lucky because i had started but again it was going to be a long life program you know it was going to be like oh my second iteration program kind of thing let's turn out let's back up a little bit for the listeners uh because that's a little bit inside baseball since we've known each other for a while take take the listeners through just to set up like who you are and kind of what you do what you do as a practice from a nutrition perspective and then where this like most recent cram advanced degree kind of folds into the whole equation yeah so um i got my degree is actually i was

a double major nutrition and chemistry which they go hand in hand um i actually had in college very little interest in nutrition it just was like such a big overlap that it made so much sense from an elective perspective and everything my interest was actually in chemistry and um that's actually what i did out of college because at the time it was really you're a hospital you know you work in hospitals as a nutritionist or you don't there was no talk of private practice this was in 1998 and so there wasn't this push for a private practice and then when we moved to austin all of a sudden i noticed this need in the athletic realm and i saw that that just like athletes weren't being met you know so my degree so i was like all of a sudden i was already we were already runners i was already getting into the ultra running scope and i just saw that no athletes had an opportunity to really focus on their nutrition you know we had nancy clark at the time who was writing books but really aside from that there wasn't an opportunity for people to get meal plans and to get um really performance plans there was no opportunity to get a performance plan to really help people be successful so it's like you heard the western states nausea and those were the years i was trying to get into western states in the 2004 2005 world and so you just heard of people

having disasters there from a nutrition perspective i was like this could be where i'm going and this is where my passion is anyway my um my graduate degree was going to be in sports psychology actually my kind of i did chemistry and then i was like oh i'll go back to school and do sports psychology with eating disorders in mind and then i kind of was like oh wait a minute there's this hole in the world let me go here um and so i fit myself in and i got very lucky because it was early right now that's the degree to have um you know go back and have a nutrition degree there are people who even go back for a nutrition degree who have had whole careers now so i got very lucky and this was my degree this is the and then i got to take it where it is now well and now we've seen the pendulum swing to the whole opposite side where people with no background and no degree are now opining and giving advice and having nutrition consultations and things like that with athletes that's a whole nother kettle of fish that maybe if we go down a rabbit hole deep enough we will tackle that but here's what's always fascinated uh me about what you and people like you do is you are all you are typically coming to the service of an athlete when they are in need when they are in dire straits they have had some sort of epic failure at the western states 100 like you just mentioned and they're puking all over

themselves at mile 60 and they can't fix their nutrition problem you are very much a fix it type of profession very rarely do you see people who are like yeah my nutrition is all good like what can what else can you help me out with that's probably a small sliver if if a sliver of your entire athlete portfolio well and like i said i mentioned to you there's very few people who are like oh i'm doing my first race i'm interested in nutrition normally people have kind of experimented a little on their own or read you know forums or books of what other people's trial of one have done and like well this doesn't work and so then and quite frankly now i'm seeing a number of clients who get that golden opportunity of western states and they're like okay my nutrition has been pretty good but i'm only gonna get one shot at western states it's gonna be really good for western states yeah that pressure of being and you just made me think about this now um that pressure of being part of an athlete's team in that type of situation you know not to like over make it make a uh too too generous of analogy towards the olympics but it really is something where you get one shot at it maybe you get two shots at it and you gotta make you kind of make them count so with that as a little bit of a backdrop right with your nutrition as your nutrition practice is a little bit of a backdrop i think that provides a framework for what we're going to talk about and and what i want to do is put

ourselves in the seats of the listeners right now that are out there sitting around and they they just got into western states or they have had that epic nutrition failure and they're trying to and they're trying to kind of course correct things because i know that's what you deal with a lot i know that's that's how you help consult people a lot and what i want to do is is take the listeners through what you would do when you're faced with that because you are faced with it so often and i think that will be continued to continue to have to face these things for you know for forever and ever and ever maybe we're going to get better at them but it's it certainly is one of the long-standing issues uh with within ultra running specifically so where does it all start right you get you have an athlete they've had these issues they you know they want to do something really big where how do you start to pinpoint what direction you're going to take them down to improve their their overall nutrition program so i like to start with what works and what doesn't that's always pretty black and white there and that could be a time frame that could be a product whatever that moment is there is a moment where some some things have worked and some things have really not worked and so we kind of start with like let's paint that picture and any person can do that they've gone and trained and they've taken a gel and it tastes terrible well then don't plan to take that gel for 100 miles right

just because it's some magic bullet gel doesn't mean you should take it it's not right for you there's not a magic bullet gel i hate to burst any bubbles there right but people read you know ads and see things and like i'm supposed to be taking this and i'm like but do you like the taste of it yeah and typically the answer is no right so i always start with what's worked what hasn't worked and then i send people off to go play a little bit we talk about the numbers we talk about kind of less is more is where i start from you know i you can always add more but once you've done too much the unwinding of that gets tricky you have to know how much of what you've overtaken how your body's going to process it and then unwind that and so i always start with less is more and you can always add so even to the point for some people who've had like huge stomach problems i'm like take half a gel at a time yeah if you're using shoes to chew one at a time you know and every 20 minutes take another one like so play that game and then i send them off to go buy product you know um not to again no affiliation with anything but i really like the feeds kind of situation because you can buy every single flavor and one of them and you don't have to have a whole tub of something that you're stuck with if you didn't like it so i love the fact that you can basically go one-off shopping there and you can

pick out flavors that are interesting to you you can pick out whatever because sky is the limit the other thing that i always find fun is if you have a long run and you're running it in an urban setting go to the gas station you know mid-run go to the gas station see what looks good what's craving like if a soda is amazing to you then that can be part of your plan if every time you go you go and pick up combos or you get doritos like then make that part of your plan you know so you can kind of let that shopping experience and your stomach and your brain connect in what do i want and then because you can make numbers work with anything you know if a pop tart sounds amazing to you we can make it work um but you have to start with what do i want first because late in a race when you don't want anything maybe that's a nuggets that's delicious or maybe that just changes the scope maybe you are such a salty person that all your stuff should be saltier and less gels less sweet things you know so you have to you can you're the only each individual is the only one that can say that you know there's no i can i can write a plan but i will say that almost a hundred percent of the time my super sweet desire is totally different than everybody else's i can do sugar everything and the sweetest sugar everything that makes most clients

you know lips pucker at the thought of what i personally can consume so my personal consumption does not match anybody's here's what i really appreciate about that framework meredith is that you're taking this old anecdote this old adage that we that everybody has heard in the ultramarathon game for a long time is that that is you are your own and of one and whenever i hear people say that i want to bang my head against the table because while that is true we are all still humans and that does not mean that we can bring an organized framework to whatever problem we're trying to solve and that's what you're doing is you're bringing an organized framework of let's go and let's titrate up the amount of calories that you're taking in at any one point in time titrate it up or titrate it down take in half a gel take in one block let's go to the gas station are you feeling salty are you feeling sweet are you feeling savory are you feeling you know luxurious uh type of texture or whatever it is you're taking that that n of one whether it's a lot of calories a little calorie sweet savory or whatever and you're and you're making it into in your and you're bringing like almost like a scientific method to it which is a far better way than just guessing and using this we're all an end of one excuse is to go about like thing things have things very haphazardly so what i'm hearing from you is is like lean into some of your own intuitions what has worked what has not and then and then use that as the experimentation framework for later one of one of the things that

is inevitably going to come about because of that is the time frame that is necessary to do so and you're laughing your ass off because you're probably thinking of some some athlete that has approached you four weeks or maybe even one week before race and asked you what like what should i do one of the things that i know that you uh have have done a really good job with the athletes that i know that you've worked with is you have used as much runway as possible to dial in these nutrition habits why is that particular aspect so important i actually won't work with somebody we we might have a dog presence um i won't oh there he is that's all right people are used to it these are coveted zoom days still um i won't work with somebody right before their race so you're just like non-starter like i just can't i ain't got nothing for you i can like offer some last minute advice but i know i can't be successful in helping them if i haven't given them an opportunity to test and try because i can give somebody numbers but what if those numbers you know we have textbooks we know what the numbers are we know what our body can utilize great that may not work with that in of one person and so if i'm two weeks out basically they're tapering they can't even go test stuff how can i how can i help you you know again i can look at the weather i can say okay the weather's

going to be this here's some general advice but i actually will only offer general advice will not take a client on for a rate for a race specific plan um because i can't be successful for them and for me that's everything like i don't want it i know how important races are and so i would never want somebody to say your plan was the reason for my failure because when people are looking for the reason for their failure it would be my plan um and so no so the further out always the better because it's like then when you go out for long runs you can go play we can and so my goal is typically by your last long run it is really a dress rehearsal to say wow we've got it because when you feel confident about your nutrition plan even if you have a plan b and plan c part of that going in and feeling confident then you'll never say i'm sick of this i don't want this because you'll be like your your brain is already tuned into saying actually this works and so if your brain says this works works then we've already started with success i've got i got this uh question on instagram the other day that i'm just going to spring on you that uh that that i'm sure you have answered a lot of times but if an athlete is going through this race day nutrition trial and error process and let's just say

they have a long you know runway to work with they're doing all the things that you're asking them to do they're trying this they're trying that they're going to the gas station how do they or and how do you go about trying to mimic the things that might that are an extension of the training process that are longer and harder than the actual training process so their longest training run might be 40 miles or something like that for a hundred mile race but you know that they're going to experience some sort of gi symptoms 70 miles into the race how do you go about the trial and error process planning for that unknown piece so i have two approaches one i like to call the peter reed which was the peter process i'm pulling out the old school peter reed who is a multi-time iron man winner um i don't know if you ever read it's actually one of my very favorite articles he used to eat big huge plates of nachos and basically in truly like gut bombs and he would go to do hard workouts in the afternoon in the heat and he said that that best mimicked how bad his stomach would feel or worse than his stomach could possibly feel at the end of the iron man and so when he was almost intolerant to wanting food he would be running hard and so some of that is if you run in the afternoon or you have a hard workout that's actually some of the best times if you're kind of crunched to plan is take a fuel go run a hard workout and

if you feel like you're going to puke that might not be the food for you um if you have a belly full of food and then you feel terrible on a run that tells you that having too many calories in your stomach is not going to feel very good you might have to slow down digest the food for a while especially in this game of all the 200s if you're eating a proper meal and then you go out and you you know get your heart rate up maybe you're climbing harder than you should or you're bombing down a downhill when your gut's shutting down and you have all that food trying to digest that's never going to go well so there's like little lessons this over full stomach this gut bomb that peter reed created um really rings true to the ultra running even though he was not ultra running and he was doing shorter you know in the grand scheme of ultra running he was doing shorter races but the intensity that he was going yeah matches late in a race of ultra running and i know that that was similar to your response i did see your your response on that and so all my brain said was oh the peter reed that's so funny that you mentioned that but that brings up like a little bit of an extension because this is big this has come up more i would say more recently in not a controversial way but the way that i don't think we're really kind of like flushed out is there an adaptation that occurs by doing an over full run or doing a run that

you're intentionally taking in more fueling than you anticipate during race day because there is a school of thought that there that that is trainable that's a lot of costas in fact like when when we get off the phone i'm gonna get on i'm gonna get on the phone with a guy from costa's group who just came up with this paper that kind of indicates this but there's a school of thought that that is trainable but then there's another school of thought that well we really kind of don't know what the adaptability is on these things over long haul because we haven't really studied what what is your what is your take on that i mean i realize there's a sensation right a perceptive aspect of this that you could adapt to running on an over full stomach but in your estimation is there any sort of adaptive process that's going along in conjunction with that um i don't know is the easiest i would say if anything it's a psychological adaptation of i can run through like if you can finish the workout right it's psychologically like if my stomach doesn't feel good and i can still get my 10 miler a tempo in or a track workout in i know that there's another side to this or if your stomach is so fuel full and let's say you run to puke but yet you puke and you feel okay there's a psychological adaptation to say i can puke and i can keep running um so i think if anything it just psychologically prepares you for those moments

because what happens when people get sick they panic yep right they they panic they either feel like i need to replenish immediately and then they go about over replenishing and then they continue the cycle of being sick or they go into i'm just not going to eat or drink and then that's its own you know kind of dumpster fire of you know failure because you can't keep moving if you're not drinking or eating so it's like you create this scenario but if there's a confidence of i can move through this how do i work through this and if i just slowly put things back in or i just let things settle it's amazing that psychological aspect is so interesting because i remember having this conversation with uh patrick wilson who wrote the athlete's gut who i'm sure you're familiar with as well and he's been kind of leaning towards the same opinion as well that a lot of the gi distress that we see is med is mediated by psychological factors not exclusively mediated by psychological factors because certainly there's a yeah we know we can overload with what nachos or whatever you want to overload with but but we can absolutely impact things by being able to kind of psychologically tolerate them better and going through the experience of having the gut bomb and working through it or going through and puking we all know puker like people who puke a lot in races it's like no big deal to them they're just like literally

puke and rally because they've been through it again they've been through it time and time again and they don't panic and it's just a part of their whole their whole race philosophy so i think you're on to something there where the psychological uh aspect of this and getting through it is a bit is a big big part of that did you ever take that do you ever take that like full circle with your clients as well that have like really consistent gi issues one of the things that we kind of talk about is the fact that you know if somebody has an extenuating circumstance like ulcerative colitis or ibs or any of those things most of those things are triggered you know acutely with stress right so if you just kind of peel that onion back so if we don't even think about a disease state if we just think about a stomach issue state during a race if you're thinking about that then you say okay what do we do we'll remove the stress when you get very stressed out about your stomach angst during a race you are amping up your situation your heart rate's increasing you know if you think about so then when you are running you're slightly closer to anaerobic which such blood's moving away from your stomach like if we think about all those things that have you know physiologically happen if you think about those things that are happening well the stress is actually making that worse and so if we think

about just kind of how do we find peace in that or how do we trust our plan b or plan c very calmly when we think about those things like oh i'll just move into plan b i'll just move into plan c like really calmly you can find resolution it might not have been the food that we're finding resolution in it might just be in the calm approach to finding resolution you know i there's no scientific behind that but it's like if we really think deeply into that maybe there's something more to that as we kind of think of our problem solving techniques in races well the more i think about this though and the more i actually like see it flush out in practice it just comes down to repetition and working on it during training i mean it's almost like anything else that the wrinkle to it is is the sessions have to be long enough to be conducive to the to the trial right and you know a lot of the sessions that are 90 minutes or even kind of like two hours in length just don't offer the best proof point but still going through the motions of going through your quote unquote race day routine which i hate that because it just should be a an extension of what you're doing in training right i mean it shouldn't be you shouldn't change a whole heck of a lot maybe you're doing things in a different order with a different rotation but it's just a different combination of your of your training routine really is what is is what it ends up being but i've always found that the athletes who are the most successful on race day with their nutrition plan are the ones that just simply practiced it more very very very simple right but and that

also comes down to trusting and feeling confident with it right and say i also side note to that though because people do get taste and flavor fatigue i'm like if you know your plans working really well when you go out and train like you can you know eat other things and that way like for me for instance i know my race day nutrition and so most of the time when i go training i actually am either trying other stuff or i'm utilizing other things just because when it comes to race day i actually want to look forward to this really good stuff that i have on race day but i've also been using this say or very similar race day nutrition since like 2010 and so you know does it get old it might if i'm using it all the time but it hasn't changed all that much that's the point of that is i found my successful fueling plan when i did western states in 2010 and you name the race or event that i've done since and it has been part of my plan since then yeah but really even if you think about it from a food technology standpoint it hasn't really even changed that much you know and that's why you can interchange right like that's why i know what works and so instead of using the same flavor the same product i can use really similar stuff get the same result in training and not be sick of my favorite race flavors yeah so if we if we kind of like we could probably end the podcast now but we're not going

to i'm not letting the hook that quickly with do the things that you anticipate during the race and training try a variety of things figure out what works for you and systematically figure out what doesn't work for you over long periods of time that's a pretty darn good framework to go from we didn't even touch the amount of calories amount of fluid or anything like that let's just get the framework right first and that's i that's what i say every time is the numbers are the numbers right we know the science we know what our body can utilize like period we we can't we can't stretch like you can't take somebody who you know takes in x number of calories we'll call it 200 calories an hour should be at least if they take in 100 calories like they're gonna feel bad they don't have enough if they take in 800 calories an hour which your body cannot do anything with 800 calories an hour um you know so it's like the science is there so you just have to find the framework of what you like and what works within that and then you can play with it right like there's so much playroom once you find that collection in there that's what i mentioned earlier the n of one is not within the the numbers right because that has a range and that range is i mean yes let's let's be honest that's not it's really not that big at the end of the day it's not good it doesn't go from one to a hundred you know it's certainly not it's certainly not a hundred fold it might be twofold at the very most right but the range of of food stuffs that's where you can get into the ends of ones like i like cheetos instead of

doritos like great okay go ahead have cheetos all freaking day i like a traditional goo maltodextrigen gel great go ahead and do that you know what i want something that is not a gel go ahead go that's where we're talking about having flexibility for the n of one not necessarily in the number side of it and the only thing i will say to that is within the dorito versus cheeto world or whatever chips know your numbers like you know i will give nick patatella a huge nod right now because he counts the amount of swedish fish he needs in his baggie right but that's essential is i don't care what the product is but know that you can't sometimes they're not a one-on-one match and so just be very aware of like what's in your baggie don't just grab like four chips and say oh this is the equivalent of this that those numbers do actually matter yeah people run into that uh problem all the time at eight stations right because the portioning is not under under their control anymore and they're dealing with the quesadilla right it's classic eight station food yes that could be 100 calories or it could be 500 calories depending upon how big it is how much stuff is in it and all that kind of other stuff and if you're not used to sizing that up pun intended if you're not using the size that sizing that up time and time again you can get in in trouble in terms of having caloric overload well and i always caution people if you're preparing for your a race that aid station food the variability

whether it be aid station food the way drinks are mixed yeah what drinks are is it caffeinated uncaffeinated i said do you want to leave your aid do you want to leave your a race to all those variables or pack a drop bag or you know have what you know i don't know how many people rely on the drinks on an aid station for their like most important race and then they say oh it was caffeinated or it was too concentrated and i couldn't drink it and i'm like but this was your aid race why didn't you have a single serve of whatever or you know why didn't you pack because that's all that it came down to was you making your needs the priority yes grab the quesadilla but that's just added bonus right or grab two pretzels but two pretzels are not your fuel source well and even the aid station volunteers are all well intended but you're right a lot of it totally goes astray i i can i can tell the story because it's old enough now that all the principal players will not mind me you know throwing them under the bus a little bit but in 2011 i think it was 2011 when i did the western states 100 i can't even remember i've only done it one year is is is it was over 10 years ago so that that that dates it i went out to the training camp and they had goo as their nutrition sponsor and so i was planning on using goo products goo gels they had just come out with their chomps at the time which is like a novel like that at the time was a novel product right having a chewable and i was going to use

their electrolyte drink which was whatever came after goo to oh i can't remember remember it was called goo to oh a long time ago it was pre-rock-tane it was kind of rock-tane but not rock-tane yeah i was i was planning on using that and so i go out to the i go out to the training camp because i was you know i wanted to mimic the race day stuff they're going to have everything out there on race day and i'm going through the aid stations and i'm taking the goo the goo electrolyte drink out of the gator out of the big gatorade uh jugs and i'm like this tastes really light i'm like what is going on with this and so i get to the end of the day and i asked the head aid station volunteer at uh forest hill or something like that i'm like hey why is the why is the goo goo brew that's what it was called why is that why is the goo bruce like why does it taste so light is this a different flavor whatever she's like oh we cut it in half i'm like why did you cut it in half and she says oh it's in our aid station manual so the aid station manual that the volunteers get and i saw it i she brought it out in front of me and i read it with my own two eyes said to intentionally dilute the goo brew to one half so this is where the foot story gets funny so we just happen to have a relationship with brian vaughn who's who's former ceo of of goo at the time he was the ceo and so i called him up the next the very next day and i said hey brian you guys are the sponsor of this race western states 100 did you know they're intentionally diluting your group which at the

time it was a new product for them so they kind of wanted it to like shine through you know they wanted to put a good light on it and he's like oh he was kind of mortified right because they were adulterating their product that they had spent how many hours of research and development on once again no fault to goo no fault to the great aid station volunteers it just happened for whatever reason it might have been left over from 10 years prior to that it just happened to be in this manual that said intentionally dilute the concentration by half of whatever it says on the bag so to your port meredith that's just a long-winded story to say you have to be careful when you're relying on the aid stations you still have to be you have to be mindful of what you're taking in and what people are giving you and you have to own that right like if you had done western states and you said i'm going with that you that's you making the decision of whatever they're serving up i'm going for it um you know and that's it's like if the race is important enough to you maybe don't chance that oh even even now when i when i or when i have athletes use the same product that the race is sponsored by i still have them bring their own stuff like 100 yeah because you don't know what flavors you're going to get you don't know how it's mixed you don't know who's touched it all that kind of stuff is you know once again the aid station volunteers are all trying to do a great job and they all do do a fantastic job when they're all very well meaning but when it comes down to sometimes these really

precise things on performance you got to take ownership of it as you mentioned and to the point that like if you're thinking oh x number of gels or chomps or whatever what if that aid station didn't get any delivered to their table right like there's your race right there because you couldn't put four gels in your pack you know yeah exactly what's the weight penalty that you're really all that worried right so yeah i actually have that conversation a lot that's great and it's a perfect backup plan to that you know you can count like if you drop everything out of your pack it's there but to have that be your first priority of like oh i'm just going to grab everything at the table it's like you've worked so hard yeah exactly this is so simple exactly it is a simple thing okay okay since since you're in nutrition and i've got your ear and you and i know each other we can be kind of we can be colloquial and chummy about this next section that i wanted to bring up with you and that is some of the misconceptions that you see in the nutrition space and the reason we all like cheekiness aside the reason i like to bring this up with people who are in the nutrition space that i know is because i know for a fact that the professionals in this space have been pulling their hair out for the last four or five years trying to trying to combat that and i'll tell another kind of anecdotal tale to to lead this in since the olympics are going on uh right now as we're as we're recording this

i had this conversation with one of their one of their head dietitians uh maybe three or four months ago or something like that uh here in in colorado springs in the way that the their nutrition services work is they kind of pool the athletes so that are the different sports and so they'll have three or four sports come in all at the same time and they'll have one registered dietitian work with them and they'll have another three sports come in all at one time and they'll have another one kind of work with them so they can maintain some sort of continuity and um this this this gal that i've known for a very very long time who's extremely well qualified professionals very very good at what she does she just she was having a bad day let's put it that way and i asked her i was like hey what's going on they just gotten a new group of athletes in and she goes i spent 80 of my time whenever a new group of athletes come in debunking stuff on the joe rogan podcast and i did not spend my professional education and my professional career doing that i want to take things forward not bring them to par and so and i use that as a story that it's just becoming prevalent in the in the space where there there has to be a lot of re-education that is being done in the nutrition space because of of a lot of the misinformation and misconceptions so i left it up to you what are the biggest ones that you see and you have your thumb on the pulse of this or your finger on the pulse of this very acutely because you're getting athletes in just like my friend at the training center and what do you have to go

through what are the things that you initially have to unwind with those athletes well i'll stick to where we were talking about kind of race preparation race nutrition and it's that one golden product is the only product you should use right um that's kind of number one that's in people's marketing i've seen that in nutrition companies marketing yes and i wish companies would actually the best marketing plan that a company could have would be to say you can use our product in conjunction with anything you know if used properly maybe you use less whatever you do if you use this in a different way you could also use this with many products and all these products could work together aside from hammer perpetuum and anything with sugar asterisk the only product that does not play nice with other products right what's the matter with hammer perpetuum why does it not play nice with other they have if you flip over hammer perpetuum which i learned in 2004 at arkansas traveler i was crewing it was the product the new product um it is not to be used used in conjunction with simple sugars they say that on the label it says that on the label um well but if you don't read the label you don't know that um our friend i was pacing a friend and he

had been consuming perpetuum and gatorade together imagine how that went for his stomach okay well so aside from anything that has a specific you know doesn't play nice with other products i think that that's a misconception is that people are saying our sole product is the only product you should use it's the only product you need this is it and it makes people so inflexible if they're using x product because they don't realize i could dilute this down a little bit and mix other things i don't have to take this at x strength you know and so we become a slave to the marketing of these products in taking them as some marketer wrote them not a scientist wrote them to be taken um and so my concern is more that the instruction of how to take product in this take only our product scenario is that it really limits people and traps them into this bubble of a single product that shouldn't be the case yeah i'm 100 on board on that and it's actually been a little bit bizarre to seem to to see that intentionally pushed out over the last few years and i just look at it and i go well who came up with this like it's is it because that's the only product you have i mean why don't we just limit it even further and just say well it's got to be orange orange flavor is the only flavor that you're allowed to take or it's

not going to play nice with others it's the only flavor that you can take during your race is the only flavor that you need like you would never say something like that like so it's i'm totally on board with you that that is a certainly a bizarre one and it's hard because you know people want to take what this elite runners taking and oftentimes these elite runners are taking multiple different products you know and they're really they're open to utilizing different products mixed in with their one product and so that is really that is something that i work through and i to hammer i don't think anybody from hammer will listen but perpetuum is their only product that does not play nice with others so here all their other all their other products do um so i just want to note that um because i don't you know i never want i have no affiliation with products but i never want to be um i like products i like people to have that open feel to be able to find what they like and the marketing of companies has limited that i i tend to full admission you know this about me meredith i'm just gonna admit it to the audience i tend to throw the baby out with with the bath water on that meaning if the marketing is shit i'll also discard the product even though it might be a viable product it's just because i'm getting so fed up with a lot of the nonsense marketing particularly in the in the nutrition realm that it's an easy way for me to filter down recommendations right if you're if your marketing is total nonsense then all right you get put on the

shit list once you come up with good marketing then you can come back into the real world so but that i feel like oh well maybe because of my position is that i want to make these products work like until somebody says this product does not work for me and a lot of times it comes down to i get feedback like i've tried these that doesn't work great let's move on um but there are ways to utilize the product you know and that's where you have to totally not read their instructions or their marketing is okay yes you have a single sleeve of something whether it be a chew or whether it be a powder you can use half of it it's totally okay to use half of it and roll it up and probably for your personal application half of it is better um so you know i'm not helping sell anything because i'm cutting products in half but you know but why does that happen maybe you're not the best person to answer this maybe i need to bring on somebody from goo or whatever like i don't understand why it happens that products are designed with dosing that doesn't make sense and you and i have seen it before and what i mean by that is a gel that's like 40 grams of carbohydrates it's been that's been that is intended to be taken in one shot that doesn't make any sense based on anything that we know about nutrition and science that and that is the issue right so i'm and then i'm over here suggesting to people to take a

third or a half of a gel at a time and roll it over in their pack that is literally my suggestion like it's like this is how i'm making it work if this is your favorite gel yeah i'll find a way yeah exactly um but i wish that they would have like a mini version of their gel or little mini packets you know some bar companies have made like little bites and minis and i'm like this is genius because this is how you should be consuming your bar during an event you know you should never eat an entire cliff bar little cliff bar bites that's a great approach well once again the genius of the chew where you're getting 15 or 20 calories totally in one little bite i i think that from a dosing perspective i don't i don't know how much of that has been intentional with the those companies over the years but that is the right way to do it in smaller nibble nibble sip sip as we always say okay let's move on let's move on before we piss off anybody else in somebody's marketing department i've said no company all right the next one meredith i'm gonna leave it up to you what is the next biggest misconception that you're typically dealing with with new athletes um the just the restrictive eating um the i will say that the people who have gone through the weeds with eating disorders have really people who are out there have done a beautiful job of saying eat you need to eat the

approach to being healthy is to eat and i'm so grateful that there is just i'm i'm sad that there's a population that exists but i'm so grateful that people are vocal about we need to eat and we need to eat to fuel for training and recovery um because the misconception is if i want to be at some magical race weight that i need to diet while i'm training and you know i take the word race weight that means nothing to me the word race weight to me means the weight at which you feel your best you can go out and train every day you recover well you can sleep well you have good energy your stomach's not growling that is race weight to me and so i don't know what the scale says to equal that but there is an amazing feeling when you have felt your best and you are always fueled when you feel that way there is no time that you are restricted and you can say across the board i'm training well i have great energy i'm recovering well i can go out and do this every day that never happens when you're restricted that also means eating a balanced plan and like i don't care how you turn it but you need all the things to feel that way so i have a couple follow-ups to that the the first one of which is there there has been a lot of movement as of late

to you to utilize nutrition strategies with the very express outcome of enhancing fat oxidation nutrition and one of the hallmarks of any of those strategies of which there there are many one of the hallmarks of any of those strategies is your try is you're restricting caloric intake at some point you're either restricting it during the day or you're restricting it during the workout or you're sticking it after workout or maybe in between workouts and i'm not going to go through all of those different strategies i'll link an article that i wrote about all of them in the in the show notes if somebody wants to somebody wants to actually go and check those out what i want to know though as a practitioner right you you help people manage this and more so than i do more so than any of our coaches do this is kind of what you do this is your bag for a living are you ever deploying any of those types of strategies with that express outcome no i i would say the only not fat oxidation the only time is if i have somebody that has a super squirrely stomach and they feel their best again i drive toward feeling your best they wake up at five in the morning and they're starting running at 5 30 in the morning like if i eat i'm going to feel like crap and i'm going to be searching for bathrooms my entire run that is the you know those are that's one time i would say that but then the minute they finish running i'm like it's all about recovery it's all about eating the minute you finish you know so

there's and if the run's long enough then you need to be fueling and i don't care if you're looking for a bathroom you know so there's a tactic to that like yes you can go out the door with an empty stomach but then depending on what you're doing there's a whole different scenario that may be taking place during your scenario never towards this fat oxidation never towards this purposely limiting or skipping meals because the reality is i don't care what magical thing we're happening we're going to eat and chances are it also creates a scenario where we open the door for this potential for binge eating because if you get hungry enough and you start going towards your your kitchen starving even the most balanced and best intended person is going to eat differently to solve that feeling of starvation so not even fat oxidation aside not even like healthy eating aside it's how do we just keep our bodies and brains happy right and that's getting in the meals we need getting in the recovery we need taking care of our workouts like all those things fall beautifully into place when we're eating in a way to support all of that i've always viewed it as one up ten by the way it's super boring and i'm sorry and i always you know i love to say like i have no plan that's sexy it is all super boring all the all the

all the spot-on practitioners that i talk to on this podcast and i work with reiterate that this stuff is not boring it's not sexy nobody's gonna you know put it on the front on the cover of anything no but it's what it kind of what is kind of what works um to to the point that to this back to this fat oxidation point i've always treated as one up ten down like i can get the one up on the fat oxidation side like i can read the literature and i can look at that and go okay yeah sure there's there there there's a little something there you could say that with almost any intervention the 10 down is everything that you just mentioned to and i can't put it in i can't really put it any better so that's always been my answer to well you know why don't you do this why don't you do that what i thought you were going to actually going to say is is not so much in the the morning scenario where they can't eat anymore of where they just be they're just so intolerant to to calorie intake that you have to start to deploy some of those tricks to increase fat oxidation and i've been trying to find practitioners who who who kind of run into that scenario but it's it's actually really really hard it's such a small fraction of people that can't train themselves to consume an adequate amount of calorie that they have to deploy the tricks yeah no mine is more of whether it be a paranoia also when we talk about people who are typically training early in the morning they don't have the luxury of if this run

doesn't go well if i spend all this run in a bathroom i can just do it in a couple of hours or i can do it later in the day like this is their moment right most people have jobs families think about their reality and so my goal is how can we make this opportunity the most successful pop you know possible and for some people that's hey just go out the door you know and always carry a gel with you or carry a waffle with you or carry some shoes with you if you start getting hungry during your run or if your energy is not great but sometimes people just need to go out the door you know and that's what it's about for them i don't run into people scared or so in and maybe it's the population people i see but the only people are unwilling to fuel in the morning has more to do with kind of the extraneous things that you know real life things that they run into during their runs yeah i'm really glad you mentioned some of the disordered eating uh pieces of it i don't want to i don't want to berate that to to to any to any further point between you and i i'll direct people to two podcasts that i did with the fabulous dr kate bennett who's a long-time colleague of mine in a book that she wrote uh treating athletes with eating disorders the links to that will be will be in the show notes if you are a coach out there or if you are an athlete out there that are looking for resources i would encourage you to check those two out

and it's something that i know that in the nutrition world and also in the psychology world and i did not know this before i got on the horn with kate several months ago they don't even teach this how to work with athletes with eating disorders it's like not part of the it's not part of any recognized curricula right now which is absolutely fascinating because we see it so prevalent in and not just endurance endurance sports but in all sports yes yeah it's um well i went to school where in 98 it was so science-based that was not you know we we had one class on you know nutrition and athletes and it was an elective so i think half of my friends took it so that we were just in a different world then but um even now going back for an advanced nutrition and human performance we had nutrition and athlete courses but there was nothing about eating disorders yeah it's crazy how it and i shouldn't i shouldn't use that phrasing it i think it's been really enlightening and um i'm very thankful that just as you are that more and more athletes have been advocates for this so i encourage more even more athletes to come to the forefront about this stuff because the more it is out there in the open the more we can talk about it and then ultimately help people absolutely absolutely absolutely and i think that the stigma about it is disappearing um you know i i've worked with

high school elite swimmers and um high school elite runners and there's a huge stigma you know when when i've seen and talked to those athletes some of what the parents and coaches don't understand so just like an athlete that eats healthy they get pegged that they have an eating disorder yeah and then some of the athletes that are you know binging and really having a problem the parents are looking at them like you're overweight yeah and so it's like it's just a very coach parent misguided and this is for younger athletes you know so that's the formation though of how we become adult athletes um you know and they just it perpetuate some of these issues yeah it's something that i've come to realize is we don't realize that a lot of times the influence that we actually have and i tell the athletes i work with a lot this that you people whether you realize it or not because you're successful because you're good people are going to look up to you and absolutely you've got to take that for better for worse but it is absolutely a responsibility you can't just post all this nonsense about what you're doing without the right context and realize that they're downstream you know effects and all those other things that's neither here nor there nobody wants nobody wants to hear us talk about these types of social issues i'm going to give you the floor for one last one though that is a little bit of a tangentially uh related uh uh aspect and this is this concept of fad diets which i know that you have interaction with

through the through the people that you are working with i have known you and you just mentioned it to take kind of like a no bs approach with things like if you don't know what the outcome is ultimately going to be you don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole we'll let other people experiment and we will let the research kind of tease itself out and if that means you're at the end of that bell curve so be it why have you intentionally kind of like taken that directive though because there are a lot of practitioners out there in the space that will say the opposite that i want to be on the leading edge of these things and be in the i'm going to use the word fad group but they wouldn't use that i want to be in the fad group because we're pioneering things right that's the that's the that's the word that i literally hear out of some of these people's mouths when they're undertaking whatever it is the carnivore diet or whatever we're pioneering the next wave of nutrition science or whatever specifically with you though why have you tried why have you taken this i want to i want to figure out what the long-term consequences are first before i will start to recommend something um i have said this forever my clients are not guinea pigs are not my guinea pigs and they didn't sign up for a research study when they signed on with me um and so because of that i feel a huge responsibility that any recommendation i make is based on something with a long-term result that i'm not going to leave them you know question mark

10 years from now with vitamin deficiencies question mark you know is their body going to you know break down are they going to be more likely for stress reactions you know osteoporosis like i just refuse to do it just i can't you know i can't feel good about myself if i'm doing something like that i also make i've made the choice that you know there was um ross tucker wrote an article article and at the end of our and this was many years ago and this was about the fat you know fat you know fat utilization going on these fad diets and he felt very strongly he said nutrition is you know eating healthy is not sexy you know he said eating balanced nobody wants to hear that but that's what i'm gonna tout you know this is what i'm gonna talk about i have seen long-term success with athletes and athletes that come back to me you know i have one athlete that i haven't talked to since 2010 and he's back to me because he knows that when he comes back to me what we're gonna do is gonna last 10 years right he needs to tweak his nutrition for a new race 10 years later right so like i didn't do something so pioneering and cutting edge that i need to talk to him every six months to you know revamp this system

my goal is to actually have people find their way and not need me yeah you know and to just be able to share every couple years wow this race went really well this is still working i'm so happy that for me is successful business like i'm not looking for people who need me to hold their hand like i tell a client i don't want to live in your kitchen right you can laugh to yourself and say oh is this meredith approved but i actually don't want you to have to talk to me so often that i'm living in your kitchen with you right like if you're eating balanced and you're eating right and you are eating foods you like then i don't have to stand over your shoulder and so like that's been my approach um it's it just is like this is where this is where i land this is who i am so you know this is what i would want and so i give people what i would want one of my colleagues uh put that sentiment this way it's your professional obligation to become largely obsolete over long periods of time 100 percent if you're doing your job the athlete can take control they know everything yeah they're going to come back to you for one percent or ten percent or whatever when previously they were usually utilizing 90 but if you're doing your job right it's your professional obligation to ultimately become largely obsolete there's all the caveats so you can probably guess who gave me that answer yes but that's that is it right like there it is um i want people to be so successful they don't need me

um and i want them to utilize things that are so long term or create a plan that's so long term that they don't need me to hold their hand to to do it every day and to eat they want they look forward to what they're eating they like what they're doing their nutrition plan is working that's success like if i see you out i'll be happy to see you but you don't you know yeah and that's just been my approach i know people sign people up and they want people to like oh we're going to do this every week and we're going to do this every however long and when honestly when i meet with somebody i'm like okay well we're going to start and then here's the plan for us to get out or you know here's what that progression looks like or quite frankly you probably just need this plan and you're good to go like you know and i'm fine with that that's a good flexible approach i appreciate that right i just refuse to sign somebody up and then because i always joke i said what are we going to do talk and like talk about the weather like you're paying me to talk about the weather what a brilliant place to end it mera like i said uh on the onset i always appreciate the way that you not only approach the advice and the counsel that you're giving athletes because we work with a lot of mutual athletes and anytime i send anybody over to you i know it's going to be spot on i don't have to to double check it i can trust it for everything that it's worth but more importantly from a practitioner perspective i appreciate your framework and how you approach approach this as a profession so

for those for those people that are out there that don't want to talk about the weather with you and i want to talk about nutrition whether that's once or a hundred times meredith where would you direct them to go um they can find me at eating and living healthy dot com um that the benefit of getting into the business very early is you get a great i was about to say that is good i never realized how good that was yeah so and that you know that kind of fits fits exactly everything so yeah that's awesome we'll go check mayor out also if you follow her on instagram you might get some good baking tips i will throw that in there for anybody out there who's interested thank you for what you do lots of baking on instagram lots of baking and dogs there you go mara thanks for coming on the podcast i really appreciate it thank you all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to meredith for coming on the podcast today as i mentioned during the intro she is very humble but make no mistake she is one of the best at what she does and she has achieved some of the highest results for somebody in her field and i've always appreciated her approach of using the science to really create the guard rails around the nutrition program and then let each individual's preferences take over from there i hope that you guys came away with that at least that one little nugget of wisdom always appreciate the heck out of each and

every one of the listeners out there if you do have a moment go ahead and share this podcast with your friends or training partners you can give it a rating or review on apple podcast that helps the podcast out tremendously in reaching a wider audience and if you have any questions coming up for a future podcast that you would like me to address my direct messages are always open via twitter or instagram i always appreciate getting those in and i try to bring those to the forefront as much as possible when we bring these expert guests on that is it for today and as always we will see you out on the trails video