I was up at four o’clock in the morning last Sunday in order to get my son Mason to the shuttle bus pickup point for the California International Marathon. Last March he decided he wanted to be able to run a half marathon and then three months ago he decided that he wanted to accomplish his goal of running a full marathon. Somewhere along the line he got the message from me that taking on challenges and overcoming difficulties builds character.
While it is true that I do say things like that, the larger message is to take on the challenges that lead you to your heart’s desire and not let difficulties stand in your way. This is not exactly the same message he got, which was more like “do hard things simply because they are hard – it makes you a better person.”
Around nine o’clock I watched him run past the office. The office was at around mile eleven on the racecourse. Up to the day of the marathon, the longest he had ever run was 16 miles, and that was one time two weeks before this run. He had never hit the dreaded “wall.” He was very nervous about how he would react to the wall, as some people are not able to navigate this ugly beast.
What is “The Wall?”
The Wall is that point in a continuous exercise, like a marathon, where your body has exhausted all its stores of sugar energy saved up in the muscles and liver that allows you to run, think, or do anything else. Humans all have a similar amount of complex sugar – called glycogen – stored in their muscles and liver. When it runs out, it feels like you have run into a wall and can’t go on. The amount is so regular, that on the map of the racecourse there is a big mark on it labeled “The Wall” right around mile 20. Almost everyone hits this depletion of energy around this point in the marathon.
This stored sugar energy is our “fight or flight” energy for survival in emergency situations. It is also the main energy modern man has come to rely on for everyday energy needs. This actually is not natural. It is a byproduct of a diet high in sugars and simple carbohydrates. Sugar is actually mildly toxic to the body and as a result it tries to either store it or burn it up right away. The body can only store about 2000 calories of this type of energy. My son had one of those fancy wrist bands that measure how many calories you are burning. By the end of the race it said he had burned over 15,000 calories. He had to eat packets of sugar goop, called GU, all during the race in order to be able to make it through the run.
Everyone has about one days worth of calories stored as glycogen. About three quarters of that is stored in the muscles for the muscle to use. The last quarter is used for everything else, including the brain, which is the most energy hungry organ in the body. This is why we get hungry regularly – we keep running out of sugar to use for energy to run the brain and body. But this is not how we were designed to operate. Sugar energy is for very fast energy to run away from danger. That is why most of it is stored in the muscles and reserved only for muscle use.
In reality the body is designed to burn fats for energy. The average person’s body only has a few hours of stored sugar for use to run the brain and body, but they have enough energy stored as fat to run everything else for weeks. Being obese really just says that you are a big chemical energy battery. An obese person can literally live without food for months. But because of our high sugar and carbohydrate diet, our bodies have “forgotten” how to burn fats for energy.
Human bodies are extremely adaptive and conservative. Everything that happens in the body happens because of the action of specialized enzymes, hormones, and signaling transmitters. If we don’t use any given group of these guys for a while, the body stops making them. When we have an abundance of carbohydrates in our diet any time we want, the body figures we don’t need the enzymes necessary to break down and burn fats. Fat is gentle on the body so the body is willing to store lots of it compared to sugar, which is toxic. Being toxic it will always burn it up to get rid of it as fast as possible. If we are always meeting our energy needs with carbs, the body shuts down the processes needed to burn fats. That is why we “hit the wall” even though we have tons of energy stored on our body as extra fat. We just don’t have a way to access that fat and use it during a run if we are in carb burning mode.
There is a new movement in the world of athletics toward moving back to our more natural source of energy for everything we do – fats. This is called fat adaptation. It is not the same thing as dietary ketosis, though dietary ketosis may be used to help set up a fat adaptation state. Dietary ketosis induced by a very low carb diet will convert the body over to burning ketones for energy in about three days. This is fine, but the rate at which the body can manufacture ketones is limited. They all have to be created in the liver to feed the whole rest of the body.
Fat adaptation is the process of rebuilding the body’s levels of fat mobilizing and breaking down enzymes, hormones, and transmitters. This process takes much longer – at least 6 to 12 weeks. Generally it requires demanding high energy usage by the body to force it to build these enzyme levels up to the fat adapted level, while depriving the body of the sugars and carbs that would shut down the fat adaptation process. Many peak athletes are using this method to hugely build their endurance and stamina. Sports athletes, runners, cyclists, body builders and the like all find that using their body’s fat as their energy source means they just don’t run out of energy like they used to. They have enough fat energy stored on their body to last them for days and weeks. Once they become fat adapted, that energy becomes available for high energy use activities.
What does that mean for runners? It means no more “wall!”
The brain is much happier burning fats for energy. It no longer has mood swings and ups and downs that occur when you are burning sugars for energy. Your body is happy because your energy is even all day long. You don’t get those sugar energy drops that make you crave sugary foods and snacks, and you don’t get overly hungry anymore. Life is calmer.
In a fat adapted state you might still eat a load of complex carbs during the day, but when your body is finished burning the sugar from that load, it immediately switches over to burning fats. This is what is supposed to happen at night when we don’t eat for 8 to 10 hours. But that requires us to have the fat burning enzymes all built up and ready for action. If we always need them every day, they will stay built up. If we tell the body we don’t need them, by providing carbs all day long for many days in a row, the body will shut them back down.
If you are an athlete that needs endurance, you might consider going through the lifestyle change to become fat adapted. If you are a normal person and want to get off the energy roller coaster and onto a nice easy energy ride, you might consider becoming fat adapted. Definitely if you have blood sugar problems, mental health issues, learning difficulties, any sort of brain concerns like dementia, and even a a potential for developing cancer, I would suggest you consider becoming fat adapted.
It takes a big time change in how you think about food. Everything you have learned about fat being bad for you has to change. Healthy fat is only bad for you if you are eating it with sugars. It is the sugars that cause the hormonal shifts that then make fat a problem. Without the sugars, fat becomes our best friend. Fat equals energy, endurance, and strength.
Watch the media over the next few years as more people become aware of this information. Many premium athletes are already on this bandwagon. The health benefits are only now starting to be investigated for all us average folks. This is just a heads up for those that want to get an early start on better health.
So around noon I managed to make my way to the capitol building to watch him cross the finish line. I was impressed with his determination. I would not recommend trying to run a marathon with only three months of training, but he was determined to get the job done. Good job Mason!
Take care,
David