E03 | Ellen Landes Unpacks Nutrition Strategies for Runners

Unlock the secrets to peak performance with Ellen Landes, the Runner's Dietitian.  Ellen joins our show with her wealth of knowledge on nutrition for runners, and the credentials to back it up —Master of Science in Nutrition, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, and Certified Personal Trainer.

It's a balancing act—nourishing your body for the long run (pun intended) and avoiding the common traps that can trip up even the most seasoned athletes. Ellen strips away the complexity of dietary do's and don'ts, favoring a patient, trial-and-error approach to find that nutritional sweet spot. And when it comes to supplements, she's slicing through the marketing fog with a no-nonsense guide on what will actually give you that edge in your stride.

Join us on a transformative journey from restrictive eating to embracing food freedom while maintaining your athletic discipline. Lace up, tune in, and let's get moving with guidance from the Runners Dietitian.

website:  The Runner's Dietitian
Instagram:  @therunnersdietitian

Transcript

Casey Koza: 0:32

Today, on episode three, we have Ellen Landis. She has a host of acronyms behind her name which we will get into. She can be found at the Runners Dietitian on Instagram and Twitter, and today we're gonna learn a whole lot about nutrition, something that I need help with a lot a lot, a lot of help with, and Ellen is gonna guide us to the right way to improve our performance. So stay tuned and hopefully we can all learn something and get a little bit better today.

Nathan Reyes: 1:00

Well, that's our hope, and I think that we asked her enough of the tough questions. We will learn something, casey.

Casey Koza: 1:07

All right, Ellen, so thank you so much for joining us tonight. I appreciate it.

Ellen Landes: 1:11

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you guys.

Casey Koza: 1:14

Yeah. So I'm actually excited to hopefully learn of all the things I'm doing wrong and hopefully maybe reinforce a couple of things that I'm doing right, because I doubt there is very much that I'm doing right. Yeah, but tonight we have Ellen Landis on the show and she is a nutritionist, a dietitian. I'm gonna read off some acronyms here. I don't know exactly what they mean MS, RDN and CPT. Do you mind going through those and explaining a little bit of what those are to the layman out there like myself?

Ellen Landes: 1:50

Sure, so MS is just I have my master's in science and nutrition and RDN is registered dietitian, nutritionist. It's interchanged with RD. So you've probably seen RD and you've seen RDN. They're the same thing. We can call ourselves either so RD or RDN, registered dietitian. And then CPT is just certified personal trainer.

Casey Koza: 2:16

So you got a lot of good information to hopefully do this out to us here, and we certainly appreciate that.

Ellen Landes: 2:21

Yeah, I hope so. Hopefully I can live up to that.

Casey Koza: 2:24

And you're also a runner, because your handle is the runner's dietitian on Instagram.

Ellen Landes: 2:30

That's right, yeah.

Casey Koza: 2:31

What's your favorite distance?

Ellen Landes: 2:33

Oh, you know what I actually really like? An 8K. I know that most people would probably go for like a half or like a 5K like one of the more standards, but I just feel like 8K for me. I do road races, I haven't done any trail races, but 8K is kind of like just long enough that I can push really, really hard and be done, and it's not that long, you know what I mean. But I do like like a longer half marathon type distance and I hate 5K, so we'll go 8K is my favorite 8K is a pretty tough because you put yourself through the ringer and you definitely put yourself.

Casey Koza: 3:10

They're pretty intense.

Ellen Landes: 3:12

They are, but they're not like that long. You know, I don't know. I feel like it's a good middle of the road, Like the 5K for me. I'm just don't think that I'm that fast. So running that fast, that hard right away in the 5K, I just don't do well in it. So maybe that means I need to work on my 5K next year.

Casey Koza: 3:33

That's right, vish. I don't get warmed up till mile six, so 5K is not for me.

Ellen Landes: 3:38

Yeah, no me either.

Casey Koza: 3:41

Now I did scroll through your Instagram a little bit here to try and make myself better at eating, you know, and I certainly appreciate that. One big thing I had to take away, it seems and I think a lot of people make this mistake is the fueling before the run and the night before the run. It's something I often hear runners talk about and it kind of gets dissected a lot by runners who probably we don't know as much as we should because we're not educated, we don't read the studies that you read and know pretty well. Can you just go through just a real basic program of what the night before your 8K.

Casey Koza: 4:21

You're set to go. You wanna set your PR. You wanna do your best. What does your program the night before look like? In the morning of look like?

Ellen Landes: 4:29

Yeah. So I think distance is an important thing to take into account there. So, like before an 8K, you know that's five miles, basically you're not gonna be carb loading or anything like that. So what you would do before a 5K, 8K, 10K, any of those you're not gonna do a full carb load. If you're doing like a half marathon or if you are, you know, an hour and a half plus 10K runner, something like that, you're probably gonna do a carb load for half marathon, marathon, any like ultras, obviously you're gonna do carb loading.

Ellen Landes: 5:04

But if it's just like an 8K race, I would just try to emphasize carbohydrates the day before, certainly not taking out protein or fat or anything like that, but just trying to make more of your plate filled with carbs. That could look like a lot of different things for different people, and what I use with my athletes is the performance plate method, which is just where you sort of picture a dinner plate and you're splitting it up into carbohydrates color, which is your fruits and veggies, and then your protein, and you're just dialing up certain aspects of that depending on what you need. So the night before a race you would be dialing up the carbohydrates. Before a race day I would focus on you know, if it's an 8K distance, making half of your plate at least carbohydrates at all of your meals the day before. And then the biggest thing really is to just eat things that you're used to eating, which you guys probably know, that We've probably all learned about the hard way I know I have but eat foods that you're used to eating, focus on carbohydrates, but don't add in new carbohydrates that you're not used to.

Ellen Landes: 6:13

And then in the morning, before the race, it kind of depends on what time you're gonna get up, how much time you have before your race begins, but I typically like to see a good chunk of carbohydrates coming in two, three hours before the race, if possible, if you're able to get up before then, and that would look like a full meal. So something like oatmeal or a bagel with peanut butter, something like that, or like toast with peanut butter banana is good a little bit of fat, a little bit of protein with that meal. And then, when you get closer to that race, start like 15 minutes, 20 minutes beforehand that's a good time to top off your glycogen a little bit. Maybe have some sort of simple carbohydrate that you're used to eating and that could be a sports nutrition product like a gel or a chew, something like that, or a sports drink that has carbohydrates and electrolytes in it, just right before the race for like one more hit of carbohydrates and then you're on the road.

Nathan Reyes: 7:11

If you don't mind, I wanna step back just a little bit. Yeah, For almost every race, I can see a large majority of runners going onto Google and getting some information, including what should I eat? How do we get to the point where there's a specialized dietitian for runners? How do you get to that point to? I'm gonna take this serious and I feel like there's enough there that I wanna make a difference by pursuing that.

Ellen Landes: 7:43

Yeah, I think and that's a really good question. I think that there are a lot of people out there who are pretty independent and they do really well with troubleshooting and gathering the information that they find on Google or other websites or free resources that dietitians are putting out on Instagram. For some people, that's enough for them to sort of troubleshoot and figure out what they need. For other people, they do need a little bit more handholding, and there's a lot of different scenarios in which that might happen. It might be that a runner is experiencing with a lot of GI distress on the run I see that a lot and they can't quite figure out what it is.

Ellen Landes: 8:21

We have these basic guidelines and recommendations that people can follow, but at the end of the day, there's so much nuance when it comes to nutrition that what works for me may feel completely different for you and your gut, and if I were to just tell you to do what I do, you might end up with horrible stomach problems when you're on the run. And then there's things like just personal preferences. Maybe they need help figuring out how to incorporate foods that they prefer to include or they prefer to avoid. Maybe they eat a plant-based diet or something like that. So I think what it comes down to is when someone's in a situation where they have their own individual nuanced factors to consider and they might need a little bit of additional help, where a dietitian can kind of take a look at what they're currently eating and help give them guidelines for experimenting to see okay, this doesn't work for you, let's try this instead.

Nathan Reyes: 9:21

Are people coming to you with aches and pains and hurts, or are they coming to you with just a normal way that they're doing things and they're like I wanna get out of my norm? For me, I could say like there's been three or four times when I haven't eaten enough or ate the wrong thing. We've all had those of you done enough races. I think I would find myself wanting to talk to an expert when it comes to like plateauing. I've done these three or four things the same on each of these races. It might be the nutrition that I need to address next, it's not the other things.

Ellen Landes: 9:54

Yeah, and that's a really good point too. So I would say there's a few different things. There's something like that where someone's reached a level and they're like I haven't really tried to leverage my nutrition in a way that I've seen other people doing and I'm ready to see what I can do there to make my performance even better. That's definitely one really big part. Then there's people who are not doing well. They're having horrible races, they're feeling terrible and they think maybe it's my nutrition, I'm doing something wrong, and they need help there. Or sometimes it is people who are coming with that GI distress. A lot of people will come and say I can't eat anything before my run because it makes me sick and it upsets my stomach, and so I don't eat anything. There's so many different reasons why people need help with their nutrition when it comes to performance.

Nathan Reyes: 11:05

I make a statement to you and I'd like to hear your reaction.

Ellen Landes: 11:09

Okay.

Nathan Reyes: 11:11

I know my body and I know how to feel it. So is that true or false?

Ellen Landes: 11:17

most the time, I think that's tough. I think that it can be true, but I think sometimes we have blinders on when it comes to that. And that's another position where, another situation I used to say where a dietitian could be helpful, where you do think you know, I know my body, I know how to feel my body and I'm doing just fine. Some people don't realize that they could be doing better. You know, some people don't realize how good they can feel running really long distances. Some people don't realize you can run 10 miles and then go spend the rest of the day with your family and still feel pretty good. So I think it can be true and I think you know I don't want to discredit anyone who really, truly has done that work and found a really good fueling plan for themselves Certainly that can be true, but I would say a lot of the time people could probably make some changes to do better with their nutrition.

Nathan Reyes: 12:16

I could see myself saying that, but truly delving into what we go through as runners or competitors and then switch into that diet conversation, I would say there would be a lot of holes in my argument. I feel like the more I'd learn, the more I figure out that I didn't really know. If anyone finds themselves there, is it a long process? Are you still like coming across things that you're learning about someone's body? You're asking them. Tell me what that was like if you tried this.

Ellen Landes: 12:49

It typically depends. We never really nail it on our first try when I'm working with a new runner. Sometimes we do, but pretty much we end up doing a lot of trial and error because I can't magically know what food combination is going to be perfect for you before a run, what gels are going to feel the best for you during a run. We have to just try it and see and find out. I would say, most of the time it does take a little bit of time, a little bit of going back and forth, and it does take some patience before you nail it down.

Casey Koza: 13:20

That was pretty much how I learned. It was just trial and error of what worked with the stomach and what doesn't. I don't think there's any other way to do it other than trial and error, because you just have to learn from experience and go with that. I have a very regimented system now, except for when I'm hanging out with my friends in big foot 50Ks.

Ellen Landes: 13:41

Perfect. That's the thing. Once you do figure it out, it just becomes a habit. You're so used to it. These few foods are a great option for me before a run. This is what makes me feel good on the run, you just know. And then it becomes super easy to keep doing that.

Casey Koza: 13:59

I think maybe you have people have done this, but there's people that try, maybe a little bit too hard, to overthink it and over-optimize it to where they're trying to make changes to something. They're trying to fix something that's not broke.

Ellen Landes: 14:15

Oh, yeah, totally.

Casey Koza: 14:17

Does that happen with a lot of your runners? They're like well, if I add a second banana in an orange, maybe I can do better. This was working pretty good for you Set your PR. Maybe we just stick with that and focus somewhere else. Does that happen a lot? A lot of people have yours overthink it.

Ellen Landes: 14:31

You know where I see people starting to do that is mostly with supplements. If we're in a good spot and they want to start adding in more stuff, I'm like, but why, you don't need it? You're in a good spot, you're doing great, we don't need to add in whatever this other supplement is. I do think it's really easy to get in a spot where you are overthinking it, because if you look at sports nutrition recommendations, it is a lot of number crunching. There's so many different ways that you can put those pieces together. If you want to hit 60 grams of carbs per hour on your three hour run, you can do all this math and figure it out. Or you could get there by doing these gels, or you could use this much sports drink and this gel.

Ellen Landes: 15:15

I think there is definitely a lot of potential for spiraling and overthinking it. I don't think I see it too often. I think because there are people who are working with me so I'm there to sort of guide them on. I think it's more so when they come to me. They're in a position where they have been trying to figure it out themselves and they've been totally overthinking it and spiraling and just like I don't even know anymore. Just help me and tell me what to eat.

Casey Koza: 15:44

You touched a hot button word there. Supplement there is a lot of junk science, a lot of pseudo science, a lot of anecdotal things that you can get down a very long rabbit hole on the internet.

Ellen Landes: 15:58

Well, yeah.

Casey Koza: 15:59

Do you have any? We'll say, because there's a million of them, two or three that you recommend and two or three that you absolute. Snake oil useless. Don't even bother.

Ellen Landes: 16:13

Okay, recommend probably protein powder. It's super convenient and great way to help you hit your overall protein for the day, but also get in protein right after a run, which is super important and something that I see a lot of runners missing Protein powder, I would say. A lot of my clients use one protein shake a day, usually right after their run. For any supplement, it should be a high quality, third party tested product. I'd go protein powder Gosh. I'm not a big supplement fan, to be honest. Maybe collagen if there is a lot of joint pain, collagen can be a good one to include before running with a vitamin C source Maybe, like a creatine. Creatine is super beneficial, mostly for strength and power athletes who are looking to build muscle, but it can be beneficial for runners as well. So, yeah, I'd say protein, collagen, creatine.

Casey Koza: 17:19

I'd take two of the three, so I'm good.

Ellen Landes: 17:21

All right, okay. What do I not recommend? Literally everything else.

Casey Koza: 17:28

Yeah, I mean basically everything else. Like I said, there's a lot of junk science, but I have one of the stick I want to ask you about, because it's kind of become a hot topic in our world ultra running.

Ellen Landes: 17:40

Okay.

Casey Koza: 17:41

And that's key tones. It can kind of make sense to me. I've not read any good studies on it that I felt were independently done third party. It can kind of make sense to me if you say well, I have an electric car that also runs on gas and hydrogen, a third fuel source. I can maybe see it, I could maybe understand, but I haven't seen any good data on it. What are your feelings on it?

Ellen Landes: 18:06

Yeah, I like that analogy too, because that's basically what it is. So our bodies use carbs and fat as a fuel source all the time, and carbs are preferred fuel source. Okay, so the idea is that if we can take key tones, which are another fuel source, ketones are a fuel source. If we can add in a third fuel source. Essentially the idea is that, well, now we have three fuel sources, so maybe we're going to perform better, feel better, so on and so forth. Now the body doesn't produce ketones normally, unless you're in a state of ketosis, which we only achieve by not eating any carbohydrates. So someone who's on the keto diet would be eventually reaching a state of ketosis, which means that they are now using ketones for a fuel source instead of carbohydrates, because they don't have any carbs. So it is something that the body can do. The body can use ketones, but the idea is that if we are taking a ketone supplement, you don't have to do the keto diet in order to produce or to have those ketones available. If that makes sense, you don't have to kind of bypass cutting carbs out of your diet while also taking in the ketones. So, hey, you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? And then you have these three different fuel sources.

Ellen Landes: 19:27

But you're absolutely right that there's really just not any research to support it. The idea makes perfect sense, right? Because if we can take in any sort of extra fuel, that's going to help us spare our glycogen stores. That's going to help us because once our glycogen stores are out, that's when we hit the wall, and anytime we can spare, that that's preferred. But we just don't have any good research that shows that taking a ketone supplement is helping us do that exactly. I think in the research that I have looked at, in one study there was like a very small percentage of our fuel was coming from the ketones anyway, so we were still using carbs and fat like we normally would. I think there was some research that showed that it actually impaired performance as well. So I would just say, overall, the research is just not there. Just like you said, it's not there. It's a really expensive supplement. I think that is it like ketone IQ, something like that.

Casey Koza: 20:27

Yeah, so I actually won the free trail fantasy, free trail podcast as a fantasy event. I won the UTMB event, so I got a case of ketone IQ.

Ellen Landes: 20:40

Okay, does it taste really bad? I heard it tastes bad.

Casey Koza: 20:43

I haven't tried it yet. Okay, I was waiting for someone like you to tell me if it's going to work or not, because if you tell me it's going to work, Ellen, in my mind it's going to work and that's what really matters.

Ellen Landes: 20:53

Well, so now let's consider that, because the placebo effect is a real thing and it's probably not going to hurt you ultimately. So if you believe that it works, then hey, it might.

Casey Koza: 21:06

I've been a big proponent of that for a long time. Like if you feel that carbon shoes make you faster, they probably do, because you believe it in your mind.

Ellen Landes: 21:15

Probably, but you got it for free. I would say for anyone listening to this probably don't spend your money on it. I'm not going out and buying a ketone supplement if that helps.

Casey Koza: 21:27

Let me see here Try it at mile 20 of my next race. Got it? Yep, no, right there.

Nathan Reyes: 21:37

Ellen, as we talk, I have this fear. That is in my mind.

Ellen Landes: 21:41

Oh God.

Nathan Reyes: 21:42

What if I went to my kitchen, but it wasn't my own, it was Ellen the dietitian's kitchen. What would I find there?

Ellen Landes: 21:50

Oh my gosh. You know I think you would actually be really surprised by what you would find in my kitchen, because I have two small children. I have a three year old and an almost one year old. So we have very typical three year old snacks in our house. My husband love him dearly, but he is a very picky eater. So we've got all the stuff in the house. We definitely have plenty of veggies, but we also have literally in our cabinet right now. We have Reese's Pup cereal, we have some Trader Joe's chocolate chip cookies. You know we've got lots of good snacks in there too. So I think that if you came over to my kitchen you would be set with some good snacks and good food Nothing scary.

Casey Koza: 22:37

You seem very passionate about this. It seems very organic to me. Where did this come from? I know for me a little bit I do eat fairly healthy and that came from my mom. She's always sending me stuff of non GMO foods and whatnot, so I kind of got a little bit of it from her, minus the Christmas sale and the fried foods. But where did you get this from? Where did this start? How did you get here?

Ellen Landes: 23:02

You know, I actually think unless my surprise you so I did not grow up very sporty. I was not athletic. If my husband listens to that he's going to laugh because he thinks I'm like the least athletic person and I probably. I just was not into sports. I was not into fitness or nutrition or anything like that. And I actually was in college for art. I went to school for art and French. I had to take a science class in like my sophomore year of college, so I chose nutrition because I thought it would be easy.

Ellen Landes: 23:36

I didn't really know anything about it, didn't really care about it, but I took the class and I actually really loved it. I found myself like wanting to go to this lecture and enjoying the material, and I was shocked by that. But I enjoyed it and so I started looking into, well, what other classes are like this that I, that I might like? And then I discovered the dietetics major and ended up switching majors, which ended up making me take five and a half years to finish college, because there is no overlap between nutrition and dietetics and art.

Casey Koza: 24:11

So you were. Van Wilder is what you were.

Ellen Landes: 24:13

Yeah, pretty much I just wanted to stay there as long as I possibly could. I went to UW Madison. It was a really good time. So, yeah, I totally switched gears and found myself studying nutrition and through that process I got very into the health aspect of it and more so like the dieting and aesthetics type of thing. And it wasn't until I went to grad school that I really found myself fascinated by nutrition for performance and sort of shifted gears there. So I've been more interested in performance ever since then. Got to work with like the women's crew team and women's cross country team when I was at Boston University for for grad school and it was such a cool experience, yeah, and it's just kind of been an interest in performance nutrition ever since then.

Nathan Reyes: 25:05

So, and I just love food you know we don't like food- I've heard it said that freedom is making those choices that are going to get you where you want to go, and I feel like a dietitian. The first thing that comes to my mind is less freedom. Where do you stand on that? We look at runners looking for that freedom that they crave. Can that be found through healthy and disciplined eating?

Ellen Landes: 25:34

Yeah, and I'm actually really glad that you brought that up, because I do think that a lot of people think of a dietitian as, like the food police or something like that, and I think there are dietitians who are more on that spectrum. And then there's dietitians who are maybe more aligned with my approach to food and if you looked through my Instagram, you probably picked up on this. But I am very big on food freedom and intuitive eating, and I really don't believe in eliminating any sort of food unless you don't like it or if you're allergic to it, of course, I don't think you should eat it. But for me, food has to be part of our life and your diet should just be part of your life. It shouldn't be dictating how you're living your life. So if you're not allowed to eat certain things, or you can only have this amount of this food, only if you run three miles can you then have this? Those types of rules are just not healthy, in my opinion. Ultimately, I think that the more food rules that we have for ourselves, the more of a disservice we're doing.

Ellen Landes: 26:43

I hope that I can at least start to help you feel less like dietitian means no freedom, and it can mean the opposite, because I actually do quite a bit of that work with some of my clients as they come to me. Dietitians tend to be kind of like type A and dietitians do too and so a lot of them do come to me from a very dieting type of mindset and a fear of eating more food, and we do a lot of work on the relationship with food side of things, so not even just performance, nutrition or nutrient timing and all that stuff, but really working on the mindset that's going to allow them to eat more food and eat the food that they love, without feeling like this immense fear of being unhealthy or gaining weight or anything like that. So I hope that you'll at least reconsider. Some dietitians are definitely on the strict side of things, but a lot of us do align more with that food freedom and intuitive eating, and I do a ton of work in that area as well.

Nathan Reyes: 27:50

Now, do you have a success story that I can hear of?

Ellen Landes: 27:54

In terms of food freedom.

Nathan Reyes: 27:56

In terms of that and success with performance.

Ellen Landes: 28:00

I mean, yeah, tons of that Performance is a little bit easier, right? Because you have like a PR that you can share. So someone who can come to me and we work together on you know, dialing in what you think of when you think of sports nutrition. So we work on overall eating habits and making sure they're eating enough, and then you know their nutrient timing, which is essentially the nutrients that you're consuming before, during and after those runs. That stuff, I think, is more straightforward.

Ellen Landes: 28:31

My most recent client came to me and was eating like severely under eating for the level of work that he was doing in his runs and we actually worked really hard to increase his overall intake first. So we use the performance plate method which I mentioned a little bit earlier, which is just dialing up different parts of your plate more carbohydrates on those harder training days, a little bit less on lower days, as needed. So we worked there and then we worked on trying out a bunch of different gels. So he used the feed you guys are probably familiar with, where you can order. You know a bunch of different types of gels and he was really diligent in taking notes and trying a different gel every weekend. You would try a different type until you really nailed down the one that he liked, and I ended up really liking the Morton 160, which is I don't know if you guys are familiar with it, but it's the one that has 40 grams of carbs in it instead of just like the 20 or 25, I think the other one has.

Casey Koza: 29:32

Is that the drink mix or the gel?

Ellen Landes: 29:34

It's a gel, it's basically like double of their original gel. He found that he really liked that because he was able to take fewer gels overall, which that better in his stomach, and so he found that he was able to hold a faster race pace for longer periods of time because he wasn't experiencing GI distress. In terms of I'm losing my train of thought. Oh, food freedom. You know what my favorite food freedom story is?

Ellen Landes: 30:01

An old client of mine who used to she I like telling her story because it's about cereal and I love cereal too, so I just totally relate to her on this. But she came to me and she knew that she needed to eat better for running and performance. But she also really struggled with cereal specifically because she felt like she couldn't keep it in her house and she would have like she would buy a box every once in a while and she would try to have a single bowl of it. But then next thing she knew she was having like another bowl, another bowl, so on and so forth, and we worked together to make sure she had cereal in her house all the time, every single day, no matter what, because what that does is it sort of desensitizes you to it. It's not that big of a deal. If it's there and it's available to you all the time, it really isn't such a big deal and you stop being so obsessive with it, whereas before she was kind of putting it on a pedestal and she was, you know, thinking, oh, I got this box of cereal, this is exciting, I'm going to have it at the end of my night, it's a special treat. And she was making it such a big deal and then she would feel out of control around it and want to get it out of the house. So now it's out of the house, so now it's a rare special treat Again.

Ellen Landes: 31:20

We actually worked on having her have cereal all the time and then adding things to her cereal. So, in addition to performance plates, I like to use the philosophy of take what you want and add what you need. That allows you to eat the foods that you want, but you're also adding something to make sure that it's balanced. Cereal in and of itself isn't always the most balanced meal. It doesn't keep you that full. So we worked on adding things like a drizzle of peanut butter or like a handful of nuts, or she would mix her milk with protein powder and then have that with her cereal. So it became a more filling snack. It also became a snack that she was allowed to have at any time. So that's my favorite food freedom story, I think.

Casey Koza: 32:07

Nice. I've heard a lot of food freedom success stories. I had one tonight actually.

Ellen Landes: 32:14

We want to hear it.

Casey Koza: 32:17

We had fried chicken that I hadn't had in a while. You know, just decided let's have fried chicken.

Ellen Landes: 32:22

Excellent, it's delicious.

Casey Koza: 32:26

Yeah, I did like the one thing when I was looking through Instagram that don't make food. What did you say? A reward? Oh, I went out and ran six miles a day so I could eat the Snickers bar. That's a very healthy way to look at it, because I think you know there's kind of a stigma around running when it comes to weight and you mentioned that a little bit of weight and we've seen it with coaches and you know, like the Nike Bowerman Track Club, all the pressure they were putting on their athletes, because if you lose two pounds you're going to be a little bit better.

Casey Koza: 32:58

And I think it never made sense to me that why coach? It's an old school mentality, so I get that. But if you have any advice and I know specifically, you know they were a little bit tougher on the women runners when it came to that Is there any like a little bit, if someone can hear this message that you could give, as someone who follows the science and understands, you know, the body chemistry of what you could tell those athletes and help them out a little bit maybe.

Ellen Landes: 33:28

Do you mean like the athletes who feel like they need to lose weight to be faster?

Casey Koza: 33:32

Yeah, like well, if I, you know, go out of 500 calorie deficit. You know, for the next couple of weeks before this meet, you know I'll lose, you know, a half a pound of. My coach says that'll take four seconds off my 5k time, or something like that.

Ellen Landes: 33:48

Yeah, yeah, and it makes me sad, but it is still very present, that type of mindset and coaching obviously, this idea that like lighter is faster and ultimately, if being lighter means that you have to under fuel, you are only hurting yourself in the long run. Maybe for one race you might be faster, but you also might increase your risk of injury. You might increase your risk of red S, which is relative energy deficiency in sports, which has tons of problems that come along with it. Ultimately, if you are going on a caloric deficit, you are not in a position to perform at your best. We can say that with like 100% confidence.

Ellen Landes: 34:34

If anyone ever comes to me and they tell me hey, alan, I really want to lose 10 pounds and I want to PR my marathon this fall, then I say, okay, which one are we gonna do? We can't do both, because if you want to PR, you have to be eating enough to support the work that your body wants to do. If you want to get stronger faster and PR your marathon, you cannot be in a caloric deficit. If you want to lose weight, that's fine, that can be your goal, if you want to healthily lose weight, but you cannot expect to PR a race at the same time.

Casey Koza: 35:08

Yeah, I'm glad you said that because I know when I'm at a race or something I hear a lot of people say things and I'm not one to chime in. But now that I have a little bit of a space to kind of project a message to hopefully help people, one, be healthier. Two, maybe, to get a little bit more performance out of themselves, because they're going to eat that extra 500 calories a day to fuel themselves, like I learned when I got to run the ShakeOut with the Elites when they laughed at me of hey, you're not fueling your body.

Ellen Landes: 35:38

What are you?

Casey Koza: 35:39

doing Like that's like mad lad stuff. So I'm just really glad to hear that from someone other than me. Yeah, so I appreciate that, Ellen, because that is something and I get it. Like you said, if someone wants to lose weight, that is fine. If that is your goal to lose weight and you need, because there are people that need to lose weight like we're not going to sugarcoat it and say that there's not, but you cannot do both at the same time. You're not going to drop 10 pounds and train yourself up for your PR and the half marathon, or AK in your case.

Ellen Landes: 36:13

I do like an AK, but I was actually rethinking that distance. Now I'm thinking maybe I like the half better, I don't know. But one thing I wanted to say on that with weight and racing is that I also like to have people who come with that goal of doing both. I like to ask them which one is going to feel like the bigger win, because when you do reach that goal weight you have now lost fitness. You're going to kind of have to start back over to building that back up. Or are you going to feel really good when you cross that finish line and you absolutely killed it? Like which goal is going to be more important?

Ellen Landes: 36:52

I don't want to go too far on a tangent, but I do think that people think that they have more control over weight than they do, but ultimately we don't have that much control over our body weight. Absolutely, we can lose weight, gain weight, all of that stuff, and we have the ability to manipulate that. But there are such things as set points and your body, to an extent, is going to do what it's going to do. So I just encourage people to work with their bodies and choose the performance goal whenever they can and you never know. Sometimes weight loss is a side effect of working on that performance goal. I see that all the time. I never promise it because I don't know what's going to happen. But if you focus on PR-ing a race and you're doing all this running and you're eating really well, sometimes weight loss does happen as a side effect.

Casey Koza: 37:44

Yeah, and actually I am a case study in that when I retired from playing, I'm a former rugby player, so I was drinking way more beer and eating way more food and running way less and I just kind of naturally lost it over the last two years. Now this is a two year period. It wasn't it's not a six week, it's not an eight week, it was a two year period of losing this weight and yeah, the performance maybe did go up just from being healthier, not from necessarily losing the weight, but just from being healthier. And that wasn't really even my goal was to lose the weight. But yeah, it's definitely.

Casey Koza: 38:17

I think you get there slowly, very incrementally, not trying to really do it, but just I cleaned up the eating a little bit and it kind of just naturally happened rather than trying to force it, cause I think if you force it and you go into these diets, especially some of these fad diets, it's not sustainable for a lot of people that I see failing those. There's people at work that ask me the time like how do you do it? It's like I don't know, I just kind of did it.

Ellen Landes: 38:43

You just kept living your life and working on the goals that were important to you, and you weren't focusing on what the skill was doing. So you did it perfectly. I mean, that's the ideal situation.

Casey Koza: 38:56

Yeah, not really even trying and not like to brag about it, but just people are listening like that's just how I did it. People always ask well, how do you lose weight? Well, here's how I did it. I just kind of picked up the activity and ate a little bit smarter. I still go out and drink beer and eat pizza.

Ellen Landes: 39:12

Yeah, but that's important because it fits into your lifestyle and that's why you were able to do it and that's why you have maintained it, because it's easy for you. This is just your lifestyle, now you know. But the thing is that's not what people wanna hear. They see that someone loses weight and they wanna know like what crazy thing that they did, but ultimately it literally comes down to the most boring slow approach in the world. Right, like this is it. It was two years.

Casey Koza: 39:39

It took two years Like it wasn't a six months. There wasn't a crash at all, it wasn't a fad, it was just two years of steadily increasing activity and kind of sometimes eating better.

Ellen Landes: 39:51

That's all you need. But that also is like a case study in that it doesn't need to be perfect. You can kind of go out and have beers every once in a while and have your fried chicken night, and run your races and still be in a position where you've lost this weight two years later and you're maintaining it.

Casey Koza: 40:10

You mentioned beer. Do you have a limit of beer that you would recommend people drink?

Ellen Landes: 40:15

You know everyone has their own limit. If you're gonna drive, probably just have like one or two, you know. You know alcohol is fine. I think that alcohol affects people differently and if you wanna drink it and it works fine with your goals, then you should continue to drink it. I think it's fine. You know, I think binge drinking is probably not ever a good idea, but yeah, I wouldn't say that I have a specific limit, but I would discourage binge drinking. We'll say that. But I enjoy having a glass of wine or a drink from now and then too, so I see nothing wrong with enjoying alcohol. I probably wouldn't do it the night before like you guys did a night before at 50K, but that's fine.

Casey Koza: 41:00

I'm glad to hear you say that. Ellen and I will send all the registration info for my annual beer mile that I host.

Ellen Landes: 41:07

Excellent yeah.

Casey Koza: 41:09

There's gonna be a long list to get in this year.

Ellen Landes: 41:11

I've never done one of those. Yeah, I just I don't think I would do very well, but I should. At least at some point in my life I should probably try.

Casey Koza: 41:19

I'll be quite honest with you. You're 100% correct. You will not do it very well. I did not do very well. Someone may have had a reversal of fortune at the end, so yeah but, we had a great time. We had a blast.

Ellen Landes: 41:31

Yeah, I'm scared that would be me. I'm worried that that's what would happen. It's fine you drink a beer and then you run a mile and that's what that would be.

Casey Koza: 41:39

Yeah, so I actually. Yeah, you drink a beer, run a mile.

Ellen Landes: 41:47

So four beers in a mile? Oh no, Can I walk the mile? Walk the mile, get a bike.

Casey Koza: 41:54

I mean we're not too picky.

Nathan Reyes: 41:58

Well, tell us how we get in touch with you or how our Weeby's audience has the ability to get to know you a little bit better.

Ellen Landes: 42:05

Yeah, so my website is just therunnersdieticiancom, or I am on Instagram, which is also the runner's dietician. You can feel free to message me over on Instagram anytime. Sign up for my email newsletter. I send out monthly newsletters and then, if anything else kind of comes up between the months, I'll send out other little blasts to my email list. So make sure you're on the email list and, yeah, follow along on Instagram. Reach out If you're looking for a little bit of additional help with your running goals or your food freedom attempts, anything like that.

Casey Koza: 42:41

Well, alam, we certainly appreciate your time. It's very refreshing to talk to you. You have a lot of very down to earth takes on things that people sometimes either get up in arms about or are kind of I guess, still kind of stigma to even talk about when it comes to weight loss and whatnot. So I appreciate you giving us a very real take on those and down to earth science oriented view, which I always appreciate because I do not trust the jump science. Alam.

Ellen Landes: 43:07

Thank you guys so much. This was so much fun.