What could possibly be unhealthy about your meal timings as you have described them? Makes no sense to me. Some people will do intermittent fasting regimens and claim all sorts of overblown benefits. But on the flip side, I don’t think there is anything bad about it (at least anything proven) and for many it may improve compliance.
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yea i never get a coherent criticism but my research has suggested it probably isn’t harmful. some people say it’ll trigger your body to store more fat or something. for me, it just hasn’t been true and I get to have huge meals still so it’s win win. i dont notice any real “benefit” i guess other than i feel i think better when slightly hungry
I try not to eat less than a few hours of sleeping because of acid reflux stuff, that’s it
I love the intermittent fast with a 5 hour window. Growth hormone increases during the fast staving off catabolism. Once you beat the ‘HUNGER’ feeling, intermittent fasting can’t be bet for convenience and calorie regulation.
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interesting i may have to research a bit, yea that hunger feeling took 4-6 weeks to become unnoticeable
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Probably one of the bigger benefits of intermittent fasting is that it is a plan about when and what you’re going to eat. Many people that have problems with their diet just have bad habits about getting hungry with no plan, and lo and behold capitalism has the perfect solution - cheap processed “food” everywhere.
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I don’t even know if you’d call not eating solid food after 6pm intermittent fasting. But it seems to help a lot with heartburn and I just seem to feel better all around not snacking at night.
That Peter Attia guy I linked to earlier is huge on fasting. He fasts for weeks sometimes, and swears he can still lift just as much weight, which I can’t imagine. But the dude is one of those ultra-driven people.
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I’ve gotten good at pounding some no fat cottage cheese for late night cravings. Then a little dark chocolate to finish. Works well for me.
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From the time I injured my knee to post-surgery about 6 months later, as a result of the subsequent inability to exercise or even walk I gained about 12 pounds. After the third person commented that “you’ve put on a bit of weight, haven’t you?”, I decided to do something about it.
That was about 8 weeks ago. Yesterday I stepped on the scale and am officially back to my pre-injury weight of 71.5 kilos (157 lbs).
I still can’t really run or do intense exercise involving my knee, which is still undergoing rehab. But here’s what has worked with me:
-Daily moderate no-equipment strength exercise (pushups, pull-ups, squats, core work, etc.)
-1 to 2 daily walks (30 min to 1 hr each)
-No breakfast or light breakfast (like a bowl of miso soup)
-Ample healthy lunch (basically, lunch is my one main meal of the day)
-Cut out most sugar and simple carbs (brown rice, little to no wheat)
-No dinners (only fruit to snack on after 6pm)
Feel as healthy as I’ve been in ages, minus the still-weakened knee, and I plan to keep going with this approach and see if I can get in the best shape of my life.
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Depending on exactly how “ample” your lunch is, I think a lot of people would have a hard time maintaining such a low calorie intake for a long time. Even competitive bodybuilders that are cutting will allow for “cheat” days. But overall your approach hits on what is one of the most important weight loss principles - you can’t outrun a bad diet. I think a lot of people have some weight loss false starts because they go from eating a lot of calories and not exercising a lot to eating about the same amount of calories and trying to run on the treadmill to lose weight. That’s a tough battle to win even on the first order calorie in / calorie out level, which is a necessary (but not always sufficient) hurdle to get over for weight loss. Even worse, a lot of people that eat too much food will keep eating too much food and then eat more food when they ramp up their exercise because the exercise makes them hungry!
I have always been kind of lucky because my “normal” diet is a bunch of healthy foods, plus I love to indulge in ice cream, beer, and snacks. If I ever want to lose weight, I just stop eating the ice cream, beer, and snacks and my weight will start to drop because my core diet plus regular exercise routines are a slight calorie deficit. I am lucky to have such a clear path - if I just adjust my junk food everything else takes care of itself.
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You hit the nail on the head. I am purposely exercising less than before because full, hardcore workouts stimulate hunger and drive us to actually eat more–not what we want when we’re trying to maintain a calorie deficit.
As for my diet, I live/work from home and my lunch is quite ample, and healthy. Typical Japanese home-cooked fare of rice, miso soup, main protein course, 2-3 veggie sides. I also allow myself generous healthy snacking throughout the afternoon, but come evening, I eat fruit or nothing.
I haven’t eaten full dinners in years, after realizing that there’s no reason to fill myself up with food just to go sleep for 8 hours. Nowadays, the few times I do find myself eating dinner either while traveling or at a social gathering, I literally can’t sleep on a full stomach anymore. So I eat just enough to not feel like I’m starving. Fruit seems to work best for this.
As for mornings, a bowl of soup or something light is honestly all I need anymore. Forgoing any breakfast puts the weight loss into overdrive, but once I reach my ultimate weight loss goal, adding light breakfast back into the mix will keep me in maintenance rather than loss mode.
Like you, my overall diet has long been predominantly healthy. So losing weight has been primarily a matter of just eliminating the few junk outliers I find myself indulging with throughout the week. Not too huge a change from the norm.
Finally, I do allow myself a bit of “cheating” on weekends, provided I hit my weight loss goal for the week.
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Well week 1 in the books. Very little in the way of side effects. I think it’s making me a little constipated, but nothing some coffee, fiber and water can’t take care of.
Down 2.8 lbs, almost certainly some water weight. Zero percent chance I’m at a >1000 cal/day deficit.
I’m definitely eating less. Mainly basic things. 3 slices of pizza instead of 5. Half quesadilla instead of the whole thing. Got enough for roughly 11 more weeks.
What is “When Americans go on a diet?”, Alex?
That’s correct!
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My last marathon was in 2016, and I bonked pretty hard around mile 18. When I got home, I told my wife I was never doing another one.
Welp, I was never really happy with my time (PR around 3:44), and now I’m signed up for the Indianapolis Marathon a week from Saturday.
I feel like I should be strong enough to finish the race without a problem. I’ve done 4 decently long runs:
8/28: 17.2 miles
9/25: 20.1 miles
10/9: 22 miles
10/21: 20.5 miles
The real question is what pace I should be aiming for. My watch has a pretty absurd race prediction of 3:21:30, which means I’d need a 7:40/mile pace. I don’t think I can do that. But I do think I should be able to go 8:00/mile or faster:
- On the most recent 20.5 mile run, I did miles 6, 12, 19, and 20 at between 7:40-8:00/mile without much of a problem.
- I did a 6-mile progression run this past Sunday (on pretty tired legs) with mile times of 8:18, 7:59, 7:31, 7:11, 7:07, and 6:58.
Really not sure what to expect, but quite nervous about it.
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imo simplest way to get an idea would be Yasso 800s. They’re not perfect but they’re good for your exact situation.
Idk if you’re a specific goal-time guy, but are there any times in that ballpark that would make you feel especially great about the day? Sub 3:30 marathon? Sub 8-min pace marathon (3:29:31)??
For many people, Yasso 800s aren’t a perfect predictor of marathon race time, but they can tell you if a race goal is just plain out of reach.
I sorta remember you’ve run these before? But if not and you decide to take a swing at this workout, then go to a track, like today or tomorrow, and after a decent warmup, just run ten reps of 800m at 3 minutes 30 seconds per rep, also taking 3 minutes 30 seconds rest between reps (doesn’t have to be a jog rest, i.e. during the rest interval it’s fine to just shuffle 200m forward and then bounce around in place before the next rep). When you’re running the reps, focus on staying relaxed. And keep the laps relatively even, i.e. don’t run the first lap in 1:35 so you can float the next lap in 1:55. Also don’t start each rep from a standstill, jog into each one.
If the whole workout feels doable for you—especially if it feels clearly doable—then you can consider going for that time (i.e. 3 hours 30 minutes) in the race.
but there are lots of reasons yasso 800s aren’t perfect, for example if your VO2 system is undertrained relative to your pure endurance system then you could underperform in the workout. Also I’m not a huge fan of doing a savage 800m interval workout eleven days before a marathon, but eh, idk, eleven days is honestly plenty, and anyway you don’t really need to run all ten reps of the yasso 800s, especially since you’re just doing this diagnostically and not to build fitness. One thing you might do is just run seven or eight of the reps—you’re mentally dialed into your fitness by now, so at that point you’ll know how the workout is going and how it would end up.
But in a larger sense, if I were you then in deciding my race strategy I’d be working backwards from what times make you happy and/or what times you could live with. Like, if going sub 3:40 in the race would make you 98% as happy as a sub 3:30, then imo setting out for a 3:30 is awfully high-risk, the last six miles could be a complete horrorshow to the point where you miss the 3:40 too.
whatever you decide, just please don’t run the first x miles too fast; obviously this is by far the easiest way to fuck up your whole day. But it’s still very tempting! Just be honest and make a good plan and totally commit to it and then let all the frontrunning weirdos go galloping away at the start, goodbye you happy mob of loping dopes, au revoir and who cares, you’ll see them again later. If the first mile of the race doesn’t feel slow then you’re doing it wrong. And lastly, everyone has their own physiology and style vis-a-vis whether negative/positive/even splitting is their best strategy, but if you positive split it (which is absolutely fine and for many people optimal), then man just don’t make the splits very lopsided. That’s a flat course but you still want to feel super optimistic through those tiny uphills in miles 17-20. And of course some runners do best when they just slot in behind the 3:30 pacer dude at the start and fall into that group and turn their brain off and let the miles tick by. Not my style but if it’s a windy day then having people to draft behind can make a big difference. Good luck!
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My preliminary response to this very thoughtful post is a gigantic WTF
Now that I’ve showered and refreshed, I think what I experienced was a real gap in expectations - what you wrote was very clear, but I think motivated reasoning led me to a very different expectation.
My distorted takeaway from your post: I should run a series of half mile intervals at my target marathon pace just to make sure that the pace feels comfortable.
That seemed like a very fun and easy thing to do! So in my mind yesterday and this morning, I was thinking, “Ok spidercrab, you have one last speed workout before shutting down completely. You can do that silly Yasso thing that empireman wrote about just to see if a 7:45/mile pace or whatever seems comfortable. Should be a very pleasant 30-40 minute workout.”
But obviously that wasn’t what you actually wrote. What you suggested was a set of 10 half-mile intervals where the minute:second TIME of the interval matched the hour:minute target TIME of the marathon. That’s very different from what I had been expecting!
So I hopped on the treadmill and did the following:
- 1 mile warmup around 8:50.
- 10 half-mile intervals at a 6:40/mile pace (based on an aggressive 3:20 marathon target)
- A 3:20 (mm:ss) rest between each interval where I jogged at roughly a 10:00-11:00/mile pace
I did the whole thing, but it veered much more towards challenging and savage than pleasant and fun. (A 6:40/mile pace is not much slower than my estimated 5k pace.) The only accommodations I made were that I did the first 8 intervals at a 1.5% incline and lowered that to 1% for the last 2, and the rest intervals got a little slower towards the end.
I think it was actually a really good speed workout, and I’ll probably keep it on my schedule for the future. But I’m not really sure what to take away from it in terms of target pace for next weekend.
Week 2 in the books, took my weight this morning, down 4.4. Errr seems to be working?
GERD is a bitch though.
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yep exactly, to say it more clearly:
Yasso 800s were a speed/VO2 workout that used to be standard marathon prep. The idea was that if you could run a workout of ten 800m reps, where both the running portion and the rest portion were your goal marathon time—but with the units changed from hours:min into min:sec—then the marathon goal time was reasonable. So if someone wanted to run a 3 hr 10 min marathon then they could feel good about their chances if they could run 10 x 800m @ 3 min 10 sec per rep, with 3 min 10 sec of rest between reps
The most common thing was to run yasso 800 workouts a handful of times over a training cycle, for example someone might start eighteen weeks out from the race by doing 5 x 800m, and then add a rep or two every few weeks working towards 10 x 800m.
The training + predictive value of this was (surprisingly) solid, but it could over/underestimate someone’s race time depending on what style of runner they were. In my experience the most common way it went wrong was by being too optimistic, e.g. someone in 2hr 50min marathon shape might run their yasso 800s in 2min 36sec. When I used to make training plans for folks I eventually stopped including these, just bc there were more precise & fun options out there
But it sounded like the range of times you think you could race in ten days is still pretty wide, so trying a yasoo 800 workout was one idea to help narrow those down a little
In general the best gauge of marathon shape is how someone is doing in their long runs. An awesome workout in marathon prep is running a ~16-18 mile long run, setting out at your normal long run pace, but then steadily ramping up your speed for the last 5-10 miles of it. Folks who can finish these workouts feeling strong are in a great spot for their race. If I ever make another marathon training plan (gross) then I’ll schedule at least three of these kinds of long runs in the last twelve weeks before the race.
You’ve always seemed thoughtful about your running training and I’m guessing you’ll know what to do next Saturday. And I’m sure you’re right that you have the pure endurance/strength to get through the race. That said, only doing four long runs of >17 miles in the two months before a race seems a little light, and I’m thinking the garmin predictions (like most prediction calculators), are saying “ok, voila, here is the time you can run—provided you’ve done the distance-specific training.”
And if you are a little undertrained volume-wise, then blowing up at the end is the outcome you’re trying to fade, which is why I said the thing that I always say about not starting the race too fast.
in short: I’ll bet your watch prediction is fair but you’re slightly undertrained for the distance. But honestly man that’s a good place to be; it’s a zillion times better than slightly overtrained. If I knew nothing else then I’d say: go for a sub-8 min/pace marathon, trying to run the first half maybe a minute ahead of schedule, while also being ready to slow down and change goals if too many warning lights are coming on. Then after the first half try to latch onto a group and grit out the next ten miles on autopilot, while mentally steeling yourself to snuggle deep into the pain cave for the last three miles of the race. But big deal, three miles? You can do anything for three miles. Left right left right. Just think of the dopiest coach in high school who lived off locker room stencil wisdom like PAIN IS TEMPORARY PRIDE IS FOREVER…and make that ardenthearted moron proud
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Did you follow a specific training plan for the marathon, or just do your own thing?
I just did my own thing, and at this point am regretting not following a more structured plan.