IMO 37 - Losing Weight to Run Faster Updates, Dynafish Going Crazy In China and Attempting The Marathon World Record in Jeans

Good afternoon, into webs and friends, family, colleagues, fans, haters. Do you hate watch? Are you, Hugo, for I talk about this, the fun at funny is like, why do you hate watch? Anyway, I'm not gonna, I'll leave you with that. But yeah, greetings. Welcome back to an in my opinion episode, which is just me talking to the camera and microphone for about an hour about a few different topics with no real structure. But today I'm going to talk about losing weight to run faster, of which I've talked quite a lot about over the last few years, but quite a bit more over the last few weeks, especially if you've been following on Instagram. I've answered like loads of different questions, but yeah, it's all quite a lot about that because Josh Kerr obviously really bought the whole idea back to light, although it's always there. People just don't often want to talk about it, because he broke the mile record and was very clearly lighter than he was before. So I put it on podcast. You might have listened, so I'm just turning notifications off on my desktop, which I forgot to do, because I always do stuff like that. And I'll basically answer a whole lot of just common questions that came through the YouTube channel and podcast, because that podcast that I put out about two weeks ago has had like 130,000 people like watch and listen, which is about three times average for the podcast, maybe 3.2 times average. So definitely a hot topic, and I have become so fascinated in nutrition and weight loss over the last few years due to, in fact, in this episode, I'll share a couple of minutes over a couple of minutes of stories to why I ever came into cinema, because some people would know, but many people wouldn't, because I've noticed some people have a bit of a go at me on Instagram, and they don't really like a physio who's very smart. I've talked to her for years. She might be listening. I'm not gonna say a name, but she was sort of saying the other day, she's clearly against the idea, which many physios and nutritionists are. And she was saying, "Do you see conomance and Clayton Young and Charles Hicks doing this strategy that you're doing?" And I'm like, "Yeah, but they're so lean compared to me." Like, they can't lose weight, really. Look at them. Their BMI must be, I'm not very good with the BMI numbers, but it would already be on that basically unhealthy level probably, like below the, not in the grand anymore. My weight right now is like in the dead middle of the green. So I've got like a lot of weight. I can lose to get faster, but I'll dive into all that, but yeah. I think it's helpful for me to share like why I became interested in it, because there's a story. I'll talk about Eastbound Running, which is a company that I started with a few guys here where we're going to distribute the Chinese brand Dinerfish. We've had a few sort of slowdowns, they'll share some stories. And a couple more things. I've had a private podcast feed for about three years. It's actually been morphed from the website subscribers. So, it's probably started as a website in 2016. Collaborated with a bunch of authors and published a whole lot of, probably 450 articles that were written by my colleague Tate as well. And there were subscribers, and that morphed into the private podcast feed subscribers. But over the last six months, the public podcast has been a bit inconsistent, but also transparently speaking, but also like I've sort of tried a few ideas of which none of them I've been very happy with. So for a while, over the last couple months, there are a few episodes like analyzing pro athletes training. So Rory Linkler, Ellie, could show okay a few others. But I realized that's not very interesting to people, because mostly it's difficult to listen to because I was doing miles in case. So I've decided to basically scrap that idea and just do a weekly hangout every single week online. This week's going to be Thursday at 10 a.m. Brisbane time, Gold Coast time, which is evening in America. It's 5 p.m. for L.A. 8 p.m. for New York. And if you're in Denver, I think it's six. And I'm also going to offer, I think it's 10 slots of 15 minutes, where I'm going to open them up to anyone that's obviously a subscriber that's a supporter of the podcast to just have a chat about their training. Because I know a lot of people listening and a lot of people out there don't have a coach. They either don't want mine or they don't want to, you know, don't account for one or they're running as a group and they don't have a person. But they might benefit from because the subscription for the pro podcast is $10 a month or $9 a year. And I hope for it to be a place where you can get sort of advice from other runners and myself. So that's opening up this week. So if you are a subscriber already and you want to join that, feel free. If you're not and you're interested in supporting because I don't really run ads in the podcast or anything anymore. And there's a reason that I might address that in another podcast. And I get approached every day with brands honestly, so I don't reply to nearly all them. I just, I'm not going to get into that now. But it's basically around the idea of like, I just want, I, this actually came from me sitting in Japan and wondering what I wanted to do next when I left. And I really didn't like the idea of just selling stuff that wasn't helpful. And there's a lot of influences out there right now that just aren't improving. They're not really putting out the best content to actually help people train. But they're just like selling stuff. And I just, I just want to get away from that. I want all the content to be useful either in a comedy way and entertaining way or ideally the ultimate way of actually helping people run faster. So if you want to support the podcast, I would absolutely love that. And you can actually join us. It'll probably be out in 90 minutes in the time that I mentioned before. This Thursday coming at 10 a.m. in Brisbane, so it'll suit Australia and the US. And then the following week, I'm going to do one of the other in another time zone where it suits Europe because you can't do the whole world at once. It doesn't really work if you're familiar with out the time zones work. So yeah, the following Thursday, I'll be doing an evening session in Australia time, which is good for Europe. So please join. I'd love for your support. If you've gotten a lot out of this podcast and my content in general over the years, it would mean a lot. So you can find a link in the description below. And lastly, before I dive into all the topics, I'm opening up five near spots for coaching. Now that I've got a bit more bandwidth for coaching that I'm stable in one location for a while. When I travel around the internet and inconsistent internet, it makes it a little bit tricky to take on more people. But yeah, I coach at the moment I coached about 65 people. It's my full time job. And I'm taking on five more in the next week. So if you're interested in that, that's also in the link in the bio now. I would prefer to take on runners that you don't necessarily have to be a marathon runner, although that is sort of my what I'm probably most experienced in. But I would prefer it to be someone that has a six month runway at least. So you're willing to prepare for a race six or 12 months away. I don't know if there's a huge benefit to training with someone for three months. I think you need to give it at least six, ideally 12 plus. So that's I'll take those people first. But yeah, feel free to inquire at the link below and we can have a chat. Okay, so I want to spend a bit of time talking about losing weight and running faster. And let me start by sharing the stories to why I became interested in it in the first place. Because up until about three years ago, I had no interest in nutrition really at all. Backstory two, like I was a middle-distance runner in 2000, many people know this between 2004 and 2013. I tried to qualify for the 2008-2012 Olympics, of which I did not. And even through that time, I was very heavy and very big for a middle-distance runner because I came from an AFL background. I did a whole lot of sort of weights between 15 and 17, 18 and sort of struggled to lose the muscle. And even back then, I remember being like at least sort of five to 10 kilos heavier than almost everyone else competing against. I just didn't really think much of it. I didn't really do anything about it. Now, that seems wild to me now because I recognize if I did think about that a bit more and did something about kind of like what Josh Kerr has. Who knows, I might have been faster and I might have qualified for some of those teams, I don't know. But if you look at Josh Kerr, he, I said this in the podcast two weeks ago, type into Google if you're really interested in seeing this type of Google, 2020, Tokyo Olympics, 1500 Josh Kerr, and find photos of him in that race and after that race. He, I mean, even at the time I thought to myself, these guys like kind of big. Like, I don't want to put any more names on that, but I mean, I'm just going to say it. He certainly didn't, certainly look fat, but he, he looked kind of chubby compared to his rivals, not chubby in general compared to his rivals because I mean, the isides are a fascinating thing where, you know, someone can look very tall when that's around a blind, very short people, when they're not actually that tall compared to, you know, so on and so forth. So he looked chubby compared to everyone else who's competing against. And between that and now he has just gotten leaner and leaner and leaner and I noticed it probably in 2023, I think for the first time I noticed him after a race like very lean and that's all it meant. Like, I remember telling some friends and he's just gotten leaner and leaner. I've heard from people in his training camp that he's lost around four to five kilos. To me, it looks more than that, but we don't know for sure. And he's hired a chef. He's really gone all in with it. And yeah, I've just heard a lot of stories about people over the last few years that have actively tried to get leaner to run faster. Okay, so why do I become interested in it? So I started running marathons in 2017 and started with a 259 and didn't really think anything at all about my weight for the first six or seven years. I got down to running 220 46 in November 2021. And what was interesting about that particular year, which I've shared as in the podcast before, so apologies if you've heard it, is that I didn't train all that much before that race. I trained for about 14 weeks, about 105 to 110 K a week, 65, 70 miles. And I had about 14 months before that, like very interrupted training within a Achilles problem. But one thing that I noticed when I got to the race basically was I was like, I could just sort of tell in looking in the mirror and like looking at photos of me training when anyone would take photos. I was like, I look very, very lean. Now I don't, I've never really been one to weigh myself very much, even still to stay away myself once a week. And I'll get to the strategy that I'm recommending and how to approach it in a minute, because that way once a week part of thing is important. But back then, I remember thinking like I already one of my friends from the US Ben Briggs, he said man, like you've gotten to shape like really, really quickly. And I said, yeah, I know. But like at the same time, I've lost like at least eight kilos. I wasn't weighing myself, but looking at photos of me through that period of time, those like four months, I just lost so much weight. Now I was in Boulder. It was in the middle of summer. And I know that training at altitude and the heat really accelerates sort of the calorie burn massively. But I was so busy building the YouTube channel. That's what I wanted to do to you channel for that time between May and November. I was so busy that I often like forgot to eat because I was just traveling around and I was rushing around and I was at the end of some days. I was like, I don't eat and like one and a half meals. But kind of long story short, I was around 220, 46. And all I knew was that I was very light. Now then I spent two years trying to break 220 and put out a heap of videos, series is about it, talked about it a lot. And I just kept running 223 224 223 224 222. And in December 2023, two years and a month later, I ran Fukuoka, marathon around 222 10. My best result for a while. And I remember being sent by the race, the photos of the race. And there was a photo of me with a bunch of Japanese guys that were at 25k, of which I recognized that nearly all of them ended up running under 220 because we were on pace for 219. And I fell off in the last 7k with some cramping and round 222. But it struck me just from looking at a photo that I was at least 10 kilos heavier than all of them. I was a little bit taller, but I was much, much bigger. And so I thought to myself, maybe like, I thought to myself, how much do I weigh? Wait, I really wasn't weighing myself really at all. So I got on a scale at a gym that was measured, that was calibrated. And I was about 73.5, I think it was. And then I thought to myself, how much did I weigh when I ran 220? And I just happened to find a photo. Now again, I know it's different scales, so it's hard to know for sure. But I went back and found a photo of my feet on scales about, I think it was eight days before I ran 220. And I was 70.0. So, and that photo also was in the afternoon, I noticed. So that's probably a kilo more than what I was in the morning or half a kilo. So I had gained about 5% of my body weight over that time. And I just started to think, I was like, 5% of my body weight did some crunching in Google and asking AI apps, like, what's that mean for a marathon on them? You know, you get some numbers. Now, then I thought to myself, okay, well, maybe next year I'll just sort of keep doing the same thing, that in a bit of speedwork, which I did. So I changed a few things. But I'm absolutely convinced that the weight was the biggest thing. But I actively tried to lose four kilos to get back down to 69, of which I believed I was at Indianapolis in 2021. And I did that. And then I comfortably ran out to 220, a fair few times in the space of a few months, around 219, 218, 219, 3 months in a row. And when I ran 218, that day, I reckoned that I had a few couple more minutes up my sleeve if I just had a bit more help in the race. I was in a pack. I mean, I'm, you know, no slidging, but no one else wanted to lead. I was leading the nearly the whole thing. And if you're really trying to put your maximum time, you know, you want to have a little bit of help ideally, at least personally, I find that useful. Now look, I didn't run any faster on 218, but I really do believe that I shifted my sort of performance from, well, I mean, in the actual numbers, let's not play around with what ifs, but I went from consistently running 223 to 24 to consistently running 219. And I also think that I had a couple more kilos, I could have lost comfortably without a problem. And so then I started to talk about. And what I really noticed when I started to talk about it was there's definitely stigma in that space. There's a lot of especially women out there that think it's a terrible idea to lose anything at all during a marathon build. But I just kept coming across all these examples of prieflites that like actively tried to lose weight and then like started killing it. And so I'm like, what's the go with this thing? So I'd die deeper and deeper, such sharing more and more and just came across a whole lot of people, which most people were pretty polite, but I didn't have a fair few. Like one thing I don't understand is like, and I probably is maybe 10 times in the last three weeks, is when nutritionists that don't follow you, it's just like start typing on your posts, calling you out, saying, and then you look at their account and they, and they you realize they don't, they're not fast. They don't coach anyone to run fast. And I'm like, okay, like you're coming at this from the standpoint of being as safe as possible. But like I said on my previous video, a lot, two weeks ago, what exactly is safe about reaching your absolute limit in a marathon? There's about five different things you're doing there that is not exactly safe. So yes, it has, comes with risks. But what I've also noticed, I'm going to have a little bit of a take a big risk here by saying this and I might get canceled, but that's fine. I've been canceled a few times before and I'm still here doing podcasts. Is that I think one thing I've also noticed is that oftentimes the people that criticize the idea of losing weight to run faster, most of them I realized have had red S or have had an eating disorder. Now I'm going to flip the switch here, flip the paradigm and go total reverse and say, if you've had an eating disorder or red S, of which I'm aware, the very serious conditions are extremely dangerous and people die from having eating disorders, I read a shocking story the other day about a girl at Garden Japan who was detained for a while. That's a whole other story. It almost put me to tears. It was devastating. And with that said, I just thought about that story. It was, yeah, unrelated. But if you've had an eating disorder and you've had, or you've had red S and you're telling the world not to do this, isn't that selfish? Just because you are susceptible to it, I'm just going to be honest. Like it is, because I've searched through AI and I've searched through as many things as I possibly can, the majority of people, there's no number you can put on this, but the majority of people are not susceptible to that. So if they want to lose weight and run faster, let them, and let them listen to this and let them listen to the things that I put out. And if that's not for you and you've had red S or you've had an eating disorder or you know you can be a bit OCD, don't listen. And I put on every bit of content that I put out if you've had these conditions, do not pay attention to this. People still do. Anyways, so I think it's personally a little bit selfish if people that have had red S because there's YouTubers out there, which some of them are awesome, that have had red S or have had an eating disorder and they say, do not ever try and do this. I just think didn't what? I like that's so selfish in my opinion. So anyway, cancel me if you want. It's fine. But let me dive more into it specifically into what it is that you can do because in the episode that I put out, I wasn't like very, very specific and detailed about how you can actually lose weight and run faster. Because I've become so interested in this because I've just noticed how many people are also interested in it and that want to do it, that I am going to get a qualification in nutrition so that I'm not completely educated and I'm going to start helping people do this because I just think it's a very in demand idea. And one thing I've really noticed from all the inbounder questions and from different comments and stuff is there's so many different, like I guess you can sort of almost draw parallels to running training in that if you want, you can get really, really mega smart about it in running. Like I'm just drawing a parallel, but in running you can do what Victor Sramkin does, which great coach, great runner, and he goes into every single aspect of like last day heart rate, I mean, I'm not sure if he does anymore, but like you can look at every single number and crunch all the numbers and do that. Then you can just look at like the East Africans who don't measure anything and they're producing arguably the same outcomes or better in many cases. We're dealing with so many dynamics there that it's impossible to say better because they have the genetics that are different, they have the altitude, all that stuff. But I know without a doubt that you can reach the Olympics and you can actually make achieve an Olympic medal by being incredibly basic with your training because I've seen lots of people do it without measuring heart rate, without measuring lactate, there are many examples of that. And so with my approach, I've really noticed because I get I mean my message to your question is 300 plus people full of and I skim through them sometimes. And I see people saying, you know, how do you think about the fat and the fiber and this and that? And let me tell you, I don't think about any of that yet. The strategy that I'm talking about has worked for me four times because I did it sort of without even really thinking about it at the time that I in retrospect, I did do this, but I really honed in on it over the last couple of years. And it's worked for 50 plus people that I coach personally and seemingly another few hundred people that have commented on the things that I put out. And so this is how I approach it, right? And I'm going to sort of dive into every aspect of it because all the questions sort of all evolve around the same things. But at the end of the day, this is what I think about. I think about in order to lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit. So what does that mean? It means that you need to be burning more calories than you are consuming. So you have to work out how many calories am I burning through the day? Now it's pretty easy. There's a lot of resources out there that will help you calculate this pretty, pretty like accurately. I mean, Garmin has a functionality, which I don't think it's like very, very accurate. But in my opinion, it's pretty accurate because I look at it quite a bit and often I guess how many calories I've burned in a day. And it's always within a couple of, like, maybe three or four percent. So like, for example, right now mine says, at the moment, I've had 36 K long run this morning. So it's higher. 3738 calories burned. And the projected, because it obviously knows the time of day, is 4,400 and something. If you don't want to go on crunch numbers and you don't want to go on the calculators, you can think about it like this. If you are a male that's sort of 20 to 50, you're going to be burning around 2000 calories per day if you do nothing. If you just go to work, you walk about 5,000 steps, you just sort of walk around the house, you don't do too much. It's going to be about 2000. For a woman, it's about 6,800. These are very rough numbers, but that's about where they sit. And then you have to add on your exercise. And I shared this in the previous podcast. Low intensity exercise sits at around, so walking is around 250 to 300 calories per hour. Jogging is about 750 to 750. High intensity is about 1200 to 1200. So you can then work out, you know, if you just get a pen and pat out or you phone, how many calories you're burning in a day. For most people listening to this, it'll sit, if you're training pretty hard, it'll sit around 3,000 to 3,500 per day. And then you just have to eat under that. And ideally you eat around 300 calories to 500 calories under that. I have days where I do quite a bit more than that. And the easiest way to do that is to focus on foods that are satiating and filling. Because if you have foods that are not very satiating, right, and their foods that don't really feed you up, so those foods tend to be high carb foods or candy chocolate. These foods are very high in calories, but they just don't fill you up. The opposite of those are meat, especially chicken and turkey, pretty low calories, very filling, vegetables. These foods are very filling and they also relatively low in calories compared to how much they weigh. Now the easiest way to do this if you want to get really detailed with it is to just ask an AI app or ask Google, just say, hey Google, I want to get foods that are very high satiating foods that are going to fill me up. So satiating means filling, that makes you feel full. And when you're not close to a very hard, high intensity workout, you just want to remain in a slight deficit over time. That's all. It just simple as that. Because when you're operating at a low intensity, when you're basically doing anything under about 70% of your max heart rate, 75% of your max heart rate, your body can easily use fat for fuel. So if I told you to go out and do a three hour jog, you would probably be able to do that with that carbs. Most people, like depends a bit on your adaption to carbs and your fitness level and all that stuff. So if you did a three hour run with pretty much all of it at like steady state, you would start to really struggle after about 90 minutes and after two hours, especially hours, 2015, you would really, really start to struggle. So in the phases where you're only doing easy running, you do not need high amounts of carbohydrates. In fact, it's probably better if you do not because your body will draw on the fats that you have stored and they will burn over time. Now here's the most important part that I've noticed that a lot of nutritionists and physios can't ignore because a lot of people that have a go at me go, you should really be careful about calorie deficits and red S and I looked into red S and I really tried to understand that I've spent probably two days studying how it works. And I swear if you do this next part, your risk of developing red S from my understanding based on how red S is described everywhere online, it's very low. But when you're close to a hard workout, most people train very hard twice a week or three days a week, but when you're within 12 hours of that, I would say maybe 18 hours of that if you're doing a very, very long run. So for example, me this morning, I had 36K, at least half of it, pretty steady. 18 hours for those very long workouts, but for the regular workouts that are sort of like 20 to 40 minutes worth of high intensity work. When you're within 12 hours of them, this is what I personally do. Now I know this is a bit of a unique way to do it because the comments really made me realize that it's a bit of a unique way, but this is what I do. I completely forget about how many calories I'm consuming and how many calories I'm burning. I completely don't even worry about fats or fibers or anything. I just go very high carb and I mix it up. I have pasta. I have, I mean, I've got a thing of cook, I had four or five. I had a packet of cookies yesterday, like a packet of five. Just oats basically, chopped chip. I have potatoes. I have rice. Rice is one of the best ones you can have, mostly because it just sits really well in your stomach. But I also have candy. I have all sorts of stuff as long as it's high carb. And I am big. I think I said in the last episode that I don't really worry too much about the exact carb amount, but I've come to realize that that actually might be an important thing because if you're constantly leaning on numbers and you're going, okay, my calorie deficit is 300 or 500 today, if you need to shoot for some number in order to make sure you're doing it right, I would say that women, it's hard to give this exact device because it depends a lot on body weight and stuff. But like men that are anywhere near me, so around 75 kilos, 75 kilos, 16 foot, I would say aim for 350 to 400 grams of carbs. If you're heavy on that, aim for more, if you're lighter than that, aim for 300 and women I would aim for at least 250 and all the way up to 350 grams of carbs. If you hit that amount, I am certain that your workout will probably go pretty well, despite the fact that you've been in a deficit for the last, and this is because I've done this hundreds of times and I've spoken to hundreds of people that have also done it hundreds of times. You will train very well if you use that 12 hours very, you know, in a very smart way if you really aggressively eat carbohydrates and then you also consume a good solid at least 100 grams of carbs in the hour to after the workout. You are like carbohydrates are a short term thing, like if you they're fuel, like if you put them in your body, your body uses them very quickly for energy. And so it's very basic, that's it. I don't think about anything else, like there's so many questions that come through and I've come to realize it's one of the situations where it's almost like the smarter you are and the more you think about different dynamics, the more it's almost like going to do your disservice. Like just that. And a lot of people ask about macros, how are you hitting the fats and the proteins and the carbs and all this stuff. I don't even think about that. I don't think about it at all. All I know is that if you have a relatively balanced diet with eggs, I mean some people listening might be vegetarian, that's a bit more creative with different alternatives. But if you're having chicken, beef, turkey, eggs, vegetables, fruit, just basically avoiding all process stuff for the most part, although during the carb phases, I sometimes do have some process stuff. But if you eat a well balanced diet where you're having a feel like it just takes care of itself, I don't think some nutritionists listen to this might disagree. I don't know if you really need so I might revisit this podcast in six months and realize I was wrong here, but like I don't think you really need to worry about that stuff that much. And again, this is based off talking to so many pro athletes and my own experiments. But that alone that I just shared there, calorie deficit for five days a week, basically six days a week because I'm going to be careful not six days a week. I'm doing basically two 12 hour windows of high carb and the rest of it is six days, but it's not six days in a row. It's two 12 hour windows. And that's all you have to think about. You can think about all these other different questions around macros and proteins and fats and fiber. Just don't worry about it. If you follow what I just said there, it does work. Is there a risk of getting injured? Yep. It's definitely still there. But I don't think it's any more of a risk of getting injured than doing high volume. Like there's so many people out there, I don't know, there's many people even listening to this, that do more than a hundred miles a week in training or more than 160 K. I think the risk is the same. It's also just as risky as doing sprints. And when any coach tells you to do sprints once a week, are you ever thinking about the risk involved in pulling your hamstring? Probably not. I think it's the same. And I've really realized from talking at length to a lot of physios and nutritionists that the thing that people really struggle with because this is where it gets really fascinating in my opinion. This is really where personality traits and obsessiveness comes into things. The reason why people go wrong with it is they get. This view that I'm about to share was really held by listening to Jake Smith, a lot who's come out a lot in the last month. in an awesome format of podcasts that I've listened to most of them, where he's talked a lot about his e-gisorders. He got so delusional about it all that he just, like he got to a point, this is a Jax Miss pro runner from the UK, rose to fame in 2020 from running extremely fast and a half marathon and marathon. But he basically got so obsessed with the weight loss that he wasn't even drinking like more than a liter of water a day, because he was so obsessed with what the scale number said. Now that's crazy and he even says that's crazy. So I have to be a little bit careful and ready to sort of combat those sorts of thoughts. Now I'm fairly sure I've got a pretty balanced view on all this. I know where you start to cross the line of being very irrational. That's very irrational. Trying to limit your amount. I mean, when I actually do this, I tend to drink like more water than normal because it makes me feel full. So like, I never actually imagined that someone would reduce their water intake because they're worried about what the scale will say. So what I was getting out there is it's very clear to me that the people that criticise the idea of losing weight and training hard to get faster, are the people that do not do or do not fully understand the carb cycles. And they're very basic. And I think what I'm starting to really realise is when people get really obsessed with losing weight and they really start tying their results to their weight, they kind of start skimping out on the carb cycles and going, "Oh, maybe I don't need that many carbs today. It's only like a 30 minute workout. Maybe I can get away with having just like 100 grams." No. Go very hard. And like, don't crunch the numbers on the calorie surplus. Don't do it. You don't need to. The other tip I mentioned at the start, don't weigh yourself every day. weigh yourself once a week on Mondays or any day. I do it on Mondays, long run someday. weigh yourself on Monday. Don't just. You don't want to get obsessed about this stuff. I feel like in so many aspects of life, especially this, you want to take, you want to do this, you want to be serious about it, but you also want to avoid becoming obsessed with numbers. I take that same approach to training. I'm a very big numbers person and I know that if I start to obsess over heart rate, and lactate, and paces, and all that stuff, I tend to just overanalyze everything and it causes what's called analysis paralysis. And it's the same thing with this. Focus on just what I said. Calorie deficit through the week. And by the way, I haven't even got to the point of saying, I'll finish it by the way, let's say. Calorie deficit through most of the week. Huge carb cycles for the workouts. Okay, any questions about that? Put them in the comments. I'll address them in a future episode. Now, I think it goes without saying that you don't need to follow this advice. In fact, I would say that most people do not need to follow this advice. I'm not saying everyone should do this and I never have. And I've also always said that you should only do this in periods of time. You shouldn't do it all the time. Because if I've really noticed anything about red airs and eating disorders, the people that run into trouble, the people that do it for prolonged periods of time, almost every single time, the people that try and lose weight over like a one year period. No, you want to do these in like six to, I would say maximum 20 weeks. Six to 12 weeks, ideally. Aggressive loss. And then take a break. Completely forget about it for a while. I think this part's really important. But the only people that should be listening to this and actually wanted to follow it, are people in this category. If you're sitting there going, I really would like to lose some weight. And I would like to run a bit faster. And if you honestly look at yourself in the mirror and you think to yourself, I really have quite a lot of weight to lose. I think BMI is not a bad thing to look at. And if you're BMI, I'm not going to get, look at numbers. Because I'm not, I still haven't fully wrapped my head around BMI. But I'm not, not convinced it's the greatest tool. But if you plug in your height and weight into the BMI calculator, just Google it, BMI, body mass index. And if you're still sitting well and truly in the green zone, the answer is you can do this. And you probably will get faster. And you probably will feel better. But if you're already extremely lean, like Charles Hicks and Connor Mans, and Clayton Young, this is not a good idea. So if you're already really well in that BMI spectrum, don't do this. It's not a good idea. And this is where I also think it's a bit weird when nutritionists and physios come out and have a go. Because I'm like, I'm not telling everyone to do this. I'm telling the people that think that they want to do this, how to do it. That's it. So I think it's really important to understand that. That I've never said that everyone to do this. And I've always ever said that if you feel like you want to lose weight and you feel like you can, you, like, I would even probably say it's not a bad idea to get like several people's opinion close to you about that. I know it can be a bit sensitive, a bit of touchy topic. But if you've got a wife, girlfriend, a bunch of friends, and you say, hey, look, like because I understand, especially when it comes to eating disorders, like you might not be able to make that judgment call on your own very well. So maybe that's an idea for you too, to just get five people's opinions and take it from there. Because I actually did that. I've never had any disorder. I've never had red S. I'm starting down the sand and the best that I can because I'm coaching quite a few people that want to do this, including some women, so I have to be a little bit careful. And I only say that because it's definitely clear to me that women are much more susceptible to the eating disorder part from what I understand. And I've been searched, AI statistics about that. So that's it. I'm just going to keep talking about this a lot. I'm going to put out a bunch of YouTube videos about this. And yeah, I'll have to chat about it. I think it's, I mean, some of the comments that were put on the last podcast were really insightful because people were like, yeah, this is a big stigma around this. And a lot of people don't want to talk about it because they're just getting canceled. So I think I just want to be that resource in running to be like, yeah, like if you feel like you want to lose weight, you don't know how, like I'm more than happy to show you exactly how. And you have to be, yeah, it does take a bit of work. It does take calorie counting, but I don't get the negativity around calorie counting. Like there's definitely negative mindset around it. I don't get it. Why not? It's interesting. I find it really interesting to do it. I don't have a problem with it. So yeah, stay tuned for the nutrition education that I'm looking into at the moment. And hopefully have something set up soon because starting in a couple of months or in the next, hopefully in the next two or three months, I want to actually start helping people with both at the same time from a coaching standpoint. It'll be an additional coaching service altogether. But people that want to actually lose five to 15 kilos while training quite hard for a running event. I want to be a leader in that space to help people do that. And why? Because I think it's really important to a lot of people. A lot of people have that goal. And if you're listening to this and you think this is a terrible idea, there are a lot of other great podcasts out there. And I do have to question if you are thinking that way. If you've personally struggled with something before, just that's very difficult, like eating disorder red-s. But do remember that most people are not susceptible to that. So keep that in mind. Okay. What else? So this week, I had quite a lot of questions actually through Instagram about the Chinese shoe YouTube video that I've been working on for a while. So yeah, I went to China in March April May. And yeah, bought every single Chinese running shoe in the world, basically, raising shoe especially. And I've been putting together a test to see which one is the most efficient for me personally. That two different speeds. My 5K, 10K speed, then my math on speed. And we actually tried to record the whole thing about two months ago. And the laboratory that we went to in Simon had a bunch of problems with their treadmill unfortunately. So I'm actually filming a whole new set of videos tomorrow. And so Monday, she's at Wednesday, so Sunday now. So that will be out very soon. But yeah, I'm testing all the onto super shoes, winnings, dyna fish, Kiyodan, 365 degrees, all the top brands in China. And producing a full analysis with VHU max and everything included. So it's very sort of thorough efficiency, all that stuff. And that'll be released in the next week or two. So if it's a Laundat that was hoping to come out a while ago, but we just had a bunch of technical issues with filming and treadmills. The treadmills are I'm in that we use kept breaking down, it's pretty good this perk, some reason. We didn't know they couldn't work out why. So bit of disruption. Yeah, that's coming soon, so that's fun. And yeah, off the back of that, through those travels, I met Dyna Fish at their headquarters, who I mean, probably most of you listen to this sort of release, heard of them by now, but they are a Chinese shoe brand that basically came out with one shoe in 2024, I think, or start of 2025, which kind of was like an iPhone. That's probably not the best comparison, because iPhone was a clear level above everything else. But yeah, it's just exploited in popular areas, especially within China. And over a bunch of conversations, I decided that I would like to be a distributor within Australia. I've done a fish, so I partnered up with a couple of people, long-term friend of mine, Ryan and Alex Harvey, who's a two-fifteen marathon off of the Sunshine Coast, I've become friends with, who is the investor in the business. And yeah, we were hoping to launch, actually, to launch actually. with distributing dyno issues in August. Actually, the end of July was our original plan. But we had a bunch of problems with the contract. Originally, I have to be careful in my to say here, because I think one of the founders is at least listen to some of the podcasts. So it's a bit of a confidential stuff that I probably can't share. But I mean, I can share this part. Originally, we had the rights to sell in Australia and New Zealand and the UK. And then sort of there was a period of time where they tried to give the UK to someone else. And Alex joined as an investor with the information that we had the UK. So it took us a little while to rewind that and get them to change their mind. And then the price went up on their shoes, their wholesale price. And that was a bit of a spanner in the works for us, because we don't have a huge investment at this point. I mean, it's a significant size, but it's not enough to buy 5,000 shoes. And then there was always a little additional fees that came up that we weren't ready for, that put in the box labels in English, a whole lot of other things. So we sort of had to negotiate a bunch of things. And then they basically ran out of stock as we were going through all that. Because a whole lot of Chinese retailers apparently bought up all their stock. From our understanding and from what we've gathered in China, they have just completely exploded in popularity. Like they can't produce the shoes fast enough. So this is DynafHD, white NA, FISH. I know it's a bit of an unusual name, but their shoe, I mean, anyone that's sort of tried it, that's listening would know, it is unreal. Like it kind of kills the idea of having a shoe rotation somehow. It's kind of like a super blast that's lighter and faster. And more like flexible somehow. It's probably the best way to describe it. I mean, the DynafHD guys themselves sort of model the whole idea of the super blast in the EVO SL and sort of like try to combine both of them in a way. And that's really what it's like. It's like I've run reps at 230 per K, like 30 second 200s. And I've joked in them at six minutes per K and it feels really good with both. It's like the perfect shoe to take with you on a trip where you just want to take one shoe. And you could probably still race pretty fast. They're reckon it's three seconds per kilometer, slower than like a top super shoe. So, you know, still pretty fast. Not quite as fast as a fast R or something like that, but it's still pretty good. Like, you could definitely still race pretty quick in it. So, that is coming. At the moment, it's looking more like November launch, which has been a bit disappointing because we really wanted to get it out before this sort of series of racing October November. But yeah, we have to wait unfortunately two months to get the stock even made. But the cool thing is we are going to be selling the new colorways. I've done a vision, not just the plain white. So, that's fun. And that's coming in the next few months. So, yeah, if you're in Australia, UK, or New Zealand, stay tuned. I'll be talking about the podcast, plenty. On one of those losers, that thinks Ness Cafe and Instant Coffee is basically just as good as like the premium coffee roasters down the road. And no one will agree with me on that. But I have this gift, which could be reviewed as a negative thing where like, I can just like cook a bit of pasta and sauce and cheese. And I think it's great, which is like nine out of 10. So, I don't know. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. I haven't my afternoon Ness Cafe with a bit of milk. What else? What else? Oh yeah, so I have nine weeks until my little marathon. And I have Sydney marathon in three weeks. And my thinking at the moment is to do something fun and entertaining, 'cause I've done a lot of math on's now and race a lot. And I just feel like the last three or four years of my marathon career on it is do some random things that are just kind of fun and entertaining. But my favorite YouTuber, Truett Haines, has the world record for the marathon in jeans. 236.58. And I think at this stage, can't promise yet that I'm gonna try and beat that at Sydney. Healy course has been extremely warm in previous years, although last year it was pretty close to perfect. But I think that would be funny, because he's gone on his Instagram, he's a Guinness World Record holder, and I kind of like the idea of like, you know, taking that away and CFE, you can then come back and try and beat it. I like a bit of a challenge, you know? Like, Jake Barrack-Flaff said it really well on a previous video actually. He was like, the one thing that running really blacks is like these little rivalries among people. And I don't know, that's something that I think would be fun. And I actually went to order his jeans. So he sells jeans. He doesn't sell jeans, sorry. He works for the company that makes jeans. What are the cordiages? Like, this thing up here. The perfect jeans. The perfect jeans. And unfortunately my size is, I was gonna order his ones and run in the ones that he recommends, but they're sold out on my size, I'm a 31. And they don't have any, they've got 32, but I think that's gonna be a little bit too big for me, especially at that point, and probably be like 72 kilos. That's typically a 30 or a 31, and they're both sold out. So, need some ideas for jeans, fast jeans. They need to be pretty lightweight, pretty stretchy, but I wanna have legit jeans, not like any of these stockings that look like jeans. Now, they need to be actual jeans. Because I think it's a proper world record, but I'm not a proper one, a Guinness one. So that would be fun. And yeah, otherwise trainings going pretty well. I mean, I haven't raced since that 5K. That I did in maybe end of June, I think it was, when I ran 16.06, but I've lost 5K since then. I was 80 then, now I'm 70, no, lost more, sorry. I lost 6K, now I'm 74. Yeah, I mean, I was 86K in April. I really took some time away from, you know, I got depressed for sure, and I just put on weight. I mean, at one point, I kind of knew in April, may I was about to get back into running, so I just really didn't care anymore, I was sitting while I was traveling and not really carrying whatsoever around my health, which is not good, but I've been through phases like that. I think we all have. Be 86 now, I'm 74, and I hope to be around 70 for Melbourne, which is what I raced my best at, 69, 70. And then I'm gonna try and experiment next year in April, 'cause I wanna have a little bit of, I'm gonna race Melbourne, I'm gonna race another marathon in about six weeks later, at the moment that looks like Alacante, at the end of November, got a few British mates that are racing that one, shout out to Michael and Nick, and some of their colleagues, so they'll be fun. And, 'cause there's not many open anymore in that time of the year. And I wanna have at least four weeks after Melbourne to the next one, so six weeks later. And then I'll have a little bit of time away from the weight loss thing, in fact, I think I might try and do some, yes, have some different goals for a while, two or three months. I think especially as you get older, I think it's really important to get, like, spend some periods of the year, where you're not training really hard, and just getting bit fat, no, not getting fat. Like just, getting a bit of weight, doing something else, like aiming for like a high-octaw event, or aiming for something different, I think just getting, I think it's really important, in my opinion, at least personally for me it is. So I'll spend a couple months, and then I'll race another marathon in April, 'cause that's sort of marathon season, and I wanna experiment getting down to like 66, which I've never been in my adult life. Why? I mean, I'll be 40, then I'm 40 in February, and I just wanna see, like, how fast I've been run, like the lightest weight I think is gonna work for me. And I think that's probably about 65, 66. And ironically, that's still in the green zone, be it mine, I've plugged it in, that's at the very end of the healthy weight. So you have an experiment with that, and then I hadn't really planned past that at this point, but I definitely want to experiment with racing, with really finding the line of like how light can I get? And I fully anticipate to find a period, find the line where I'm like, oh, I think I've crossed it, and this is actually where performance will deteriorate. But one thing I'm really trying to continue doing through that time is gym, and really trying to make sure I do everything in my power to keep up my power and strength. Because if I'm noticing anything about people that sort of really go down that path of losing a lot of weight, they tend to lose their speed and strength, so I think continuously working on that in the gym, in the Hill Springs, which I do every week. I'm hoping that that will maintain that aspect. Because the end of the day, if you strip out all the emotions and the thinking and the logic from the whole idea, the body is a case whereby, you know, if you keep aerobic capacity and power the same and the weight drops, simple physics says that you get faster. That's before all the mental health stuff and the emotional side comes into it, which is everything, that's huge. But yeah, so I just want to see what that line is. Because if my math serves me correctly and assuming that I have not found that line, I think 65 or 66 kilos, if that's not over the line, will be at least six minutes faster than my current PV. But that's, I'm determined as to whether that's crossing the line of going too far. Because I know quite a few people have gotten there. to wait. It's too light for them and they've just felt, you know, weak and not powerful anymore and not strong. It's affected them in a negative way. So I've heard many examples of that and I'm aware of those cases. So try and make sure I avoid, well sorry, not trying to avoid that. I'm going to actually try to find that in between February and sorry, between January and April next year. So yeah, we'll see. I'm not sure which marathon yet. I think I have to decide pretty soon because nowadays you have to pick marathons like quite a long way to advance because they sell out really quickly and I'm not at the moment. I'm not really quite fast enough to get into the Elite fields of most big races. I'm sort of you need like two 14 to 15 against the really good races and I'm still on the 218 from November 2024. So we'll see. But that's the idea now. But I've definitely become more more interested in the hierarchy stuff over the last six to 12 months. A 50-hiddle that I coach, who dived into that and I went to watch one in Bangkok via an athlete that I've been coaching for a while. Israeli athlete, Mia, who lives in Hong Kong, legend of a guy. And yeah, I saw him do it live and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was really, you know, there's a bit of a stigma around it. You can say a lot of people sort of take the piece out of hierarchy. But at the end of the day, like if you're doing hierarchy properly and you're really competing in it, it sort of aims to do two things at once. Like get very strong and get very fast and fit. It's kind of like the ultimate human performance, right? Like get strong and get fast and get fit. Like how I don't know why anyone would kick that's a bad idea. I think it's awesome. And if there's some sort of competition where you have to compete and you know, there's team events, I think it's great. So I might even dabble in a bit of that in between marathons I'm thinking just just something different to focus on, you know, focus on strength. Because the cool thing about hierarchy is you kind of train for 5K at the same time. You know, the running is sort of 5K specific because it's 8K, 8 points something K worth of running. So yeah, that's the idea of the next couple years, I think. And then originally I wanted to do an Ironman, but I don't know, sort of maybe thinking more, learning more to hierarchy at the moment. The problem with Ironman is I'm such, oh actually this leads me to share something I was meaning to share. Actually, I didn't even talk about this in the last, in my opinion, but over the last month, I'm glad I've thought of this because I'll round around the podcast off with this. But in the last month, I've been doing a lot of saunas. I'd heard so much good research about saunas and the benefits of saunas both from the standpoint of longevity and also just general VAG and max improvements and blood plasma and so forth. So I sort of really dove into them over the last four or five weeks. I started with two for the week and I went to three, then I went to four and then I watched one of Izzy Bat Dolls videos and went to six after she said she does some six sounds a week. And I noticed my training through that time, like progressively get worse and worse and worse. Now, yes, I was losing weight at the same time so that might have played a role because when you do go pretty aggressive with the weight loss and I have, you do have some days where you miscalculate the calories a little bit. I'm really making sure I don't do that the next sort of nine weeks leading in Melbourne. But I had a few of those days, so it might be that. But then I stopped saunas altogether a week, about a week ago now, six days ago and now my training has bounced back to being like normal and feeling good again. And so I came to this realization that because I'm a heat stroke sufferer, as in like, sorry, it's, I suffered heat stroke in Singapore in 2015 in a triathlon relay leg. Completely last three K, but relay leg passed out basically like what? My weight of the finish and was in a medical tent for a couple of hours and permanent damage there with like trauma. So if I try and do a workout in anything more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit or 20 degrees Celsius with high humidity, I like, my body like freaks out, I basically can't do it. I can jog and run sort of easy setty. But high intensity stuff, it's like this really weird trauma thing. But anyway, I've decided to stop them. Even though I was very bullish on them and they'd work for so many athletes, I've decided to stop doing them altogether because I just noticed this continuous like fatigue feeling whenever I do a sauner and push it pretty hard 20 minutes in like 95 degrees, which is what's recommended for like 12, 18 hours afterwards. I was just so tired, I was so fatigued and in workouts, I even got to a point where like I was pushing near, you know, threshold, vo2 max and I just felt exhausted whenever I get to any intensity. And so I spoke romantically and calmly and softly into my chat GPT and he told me, I've still a little male voice on there, to maybe have a break from them because I think if you're a heat stroke sufferer, what's the better word for that? Whatever. If you had a stroke, I think the sauners might not be the best idea at least doing them regularly. So, but I do want to say, I probably should have put this in earlier, but I do want to say a huge shout out to saunerware who sent me, this is not paid, I don't really do paid stuff anymore, but I'll talk about that in a future episode. I think that's something that people ask me about a bit, which I've never really spoken to, the whole like don't really work and we brands anymore. I'll sort of already briefly explain that, but saunerware do a basically a pair of sports undies or like swimmers. There where there's a little satch it in the front where you can put an ice pack that protects your balls because heat is not great for the testicles and future endeavours to have kids. So, they have this really convenient little ice pack that you can put in the freezer and it sort of slips right in your balls and keeps your balls cold and the sauner. I use it twice and thought it with brilliant. I just want to do a bit of shout to them for sending me that product and I really liked it. Saunerware, you can find online, it's a believe it's an Australian company, at least they shipped from Australia to me. And yeah, if you are doing sauner and you want to do that and you want to have a convenient way to ice your balls, I would highly recommend them and they just send me the products. Yeah, of course, haven't paid me to do this, but I did agree to do an Instagram thing for them, but I'm not doing that anymore because I'm not doing the sauners anymore. So, yeah, I mean I might revisit sauner down the road maybe once or twice a week, but honestly probably unlikely. I mean I did pump it up to like, I mean the trouble did start when I did more than two a week, so maybe I can experiment with that again at some point, but probably quite unlikely. But yeah, I highly recommend that brand if you happen to have a solution to that already, the simple one because they actually give you an ice pack as well and you just put them in the freezer and take it out and slip it straight in your crotch and you're set to go. And they even have a little like a little sleeve for the ice pack, ice pack, ice pack at things so you can take it to the gym with you and put it in whenever you're ready. So, yeah, I think I got through everything I wanted to talk about today. Nutrition, plenty more coming on that front on YouTube and on podcast. If you have any questions, I'm actually going to do another in my opinion in the next week or two and answer a lot of like very specific questions that are very common about this because my inbox is full of them and there's so many good ones on the YouTube channel which I haven't gotten to yet around weight loss and running faster. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to diving deep into that. That's yeah, I kind of already said it, but it's like it's something that is so interesting to so many people and so many people like I can just think about like I've got at least like 15 friends or like people that I know that could just easily lose five kilos, they'd look better, they'd feel better, they'd run faster, but they kind of just don't really know how to go about it. And it's almost like if they just had the information, the strategy and someone holding them accountable, they would be able to do it. And that's sort of who I want to, that's what I want to lean into moving forward. Actually, Ben and Mary from this messy happy, they put out a really good post the other day about coaching and education and do you have any formal like degree or certificate and it is an interesting line. It doesn't make you wonder if I really should go and get the real nutrition sort of certificate or education because a lot of the best coaches in the world are running like never did any certification. Arthur Lillard, yeah, bunch of them, Ronaldo Canaver, I didn't do any formal education and they just figure that by themselves. And it's almost like I think in many contexts, this is a bit of a controversial take, but in many aspects it's almost like maybe better to learn yourself rather than read textbooks. I know that's definitely the case with trading because I've definitely learned that. So yeah, stay tuned for all that. Thanks for listening. And looking forward to sharing more about weight loss, Chinese shoes and running fast in the marathon version.