what is a good example of a, you know, a pre-training meal, if you will? What is the timing of that meal relative to training that works best? Yeah. I mean, like I'm the kind of person gets up and is out the door within a half an hour to go do whatever I'm going to do.

So it's not like I'm going to have a full meal. I've heard of people like you. Yeah. Meaning I tend to move slowly in the morning. I wish I could, but the way my life is, it doesn't work that way. So, but I'm also one of the people that never really has an appetite till 11 o'clock.

Okay. So we're similar in that way. Yeah. So how do you, how do you square that? So I make a double espresso at night and I put some almond milk and a scoop of protein powder in there. So the almond milk is sweetened and usually it's unsweetened, but sweetened for the carb and then the protein powder for the protein.

Because if I'm going to go do an ocean swim, then I need some carbohydrate and protein on board. If I'm going to just go to the gym, then I'll probably just have the protein powder in the coffee. Yes, I'm caffeinating, but I'm also getting the calories for the hypothalamus and getting some more circulating amino acids.

Abby Smith-Ryan out of UNC did some specific work looking at carbohydrate, protein before and strength or cardio and found that if you're going to do a true strength training session, you only need around 15 grams of protein before you go to really help you get into the idea that yes, you have some fuel on board and also increases your post-exercise oxygen consumption or your EPOC.

So your resting metabolism stays elevated, giving you a better chance for recovery post-exercise as well. If you're going to do any kind of cardiovascular type work up to an hour, then you're adding 30 grams of carb to that. So it's not a lot of food and it's not a full meal.

Other people are like, I'm starving right before I go training. Then yes, you can have your meal, giving yourself about a half an hour before. But it doesn't have to be major food that we're talking about. But that's just enough to bring blood sugar up and stimulate the hypothalamus to say, yeah, there's some nutrition coming in.

And then you have your real food afterwards. You have your breakfast afterwards within 45 minutes. As a neuroscientist, I find it so interesting that at least some of what you're talking about with this pre-workout meal, and perhaps most of it relates to how ingesting those calories impacts the brain, protects those kispeptin neurons.

And we'll talk more about kispeptin, very interesting peptide. As opposed to saying, okay, you need X number of calories because you're going to burn X number of calories. I hate that conversation. Right. Which is a very different conversation. Here, what we're talking about is the neural aspects of being able to generate intensity, also blunt cortisol, and get the most out of training without putting the body into kind of an emergency state.

Yeah. And the longer someone withholds food after exercise, and the greater they stay in that catabolic or breakdown state, the more the brain perceives it as being in a low energy state. So the first thing to go is lean mass. When you start telling a woman that, you know, if you're going to do fasted training and or you're going to delay food intake afterwards, why are you training?

Because the first thing that goes is lean mass. And it's really, really hard for women to put on lean mass. So once you start really nailing that and then saying, look, you just need 15 grams of protein to really help and be able to conserve that lean mass. It's a small, simple fix.

People try it and they're like, oh my gosh, I feel amazing. So small little things when you're working with the whole system, because I get tired, especially around Christmas time when you're reading all the magazines, it's like two cookies means you have to walk for 30 minutes on the treadmill.

It's like, it doesn't, it doesn't correlate like that at all. So that's why I was like, I hate the calorie conversation because it's just not applicable. Right. And it has its own kind of, um, elements of being laced with neuroticism about calorie counting. And then that can drift easily into the realm of eating disorders.

I did an episode about eating disorders some years ago. And as I was researching that episode, um, I learned that people with eating disorders, women and men, um, especially anorexia become like calorie calculators, their eyes and their brain just are constantly evaluating the caloric load of food. And it can be, um, obviously very intrusive.

It's also the most deadly of all the psychiatric conditions. So it's, um, that's a long way from hopefully what we're talking about here, but, but there's the opportunity for drift whenever talking about calorie counting in and out. We of course believe in the laws of thermodynamics and calories in calories out, but I love what you're describing here as getting the brain in a mode that the brain and body are protected so that one can invest in that high intensity exercise and get the adaptations that one wants, but not send everything down this pathway of, um, you know, just becoming a computer of, you know, how much am I exercising?

What did I burn? What did I earn? It's, it's, it's, it's crazy. It's crazy. Um, as long as we're talking about food and food intake relative to training, what is the suggested post-training, um, window, um, in which one should either avoid or make sure they get nutrition? Um, meaning how long does one have after, let's say a resistance training session of about an hour?

It seems to me that's what most people are doing. If they're investing in resistance training, maybe a plus or minus, uh, what, 20 minutes. Um, and they're hitting those, um, high intensity sets where they have maybe just one or two repetitions in reserve, maybe going to failure on a few of those sets.

What do you recommend women eat after they train? So we know that women who are in their reproductive years need around 35 grams of good protein, high quality leucine oriented protein within 45 minutes. And we see that women who are perimenopausal onwards are 40 to 60 grams because we become more anabolically resistant to food and exercise as we get older.

Um, when we look at like the recovery window for food, there are definitely sex differences because we hear all the conversation of there's no recovery window. It's, you know, it's old science, but we look at the research of when women's metabolisms come back down to baseline, meaning that they have constant straight blood sugar levels versus men, women it's within, uh, 60 minutes.

And for men, it's up to three hours. So when we're looking at the data that says there's no mental window per se for getting food in, it's based on male data. So when we're looking at women, women, we have this tighter window to stop that breakdown effect and start the reparation.

Um, so yeah, it's like when we're talking about the protein intake, it's really important not only to get that leucine content up in the muscle to start the reparation and repair, but also again, to signal that, yeah, we're in a building state. We're not holding that catabolic state and increasing all the repercussions that come with it.

So women should try and get 30 or as much as 40, maybe 50 grams of protein depending on their age, post-training within an hour of training. Yep. Men seem to have a longer window. They could wait an hour, two hours, maybe even three hours before ingesting protein. What about carbohydrate?

We look at mixed, but for men, it's more important because they go through their liver and muscle glycogen so much faster than women. So when we look at women, we want to get around 0.3 grams per kilo, um, of carbohydrate within two hours of finishing. So we look at protein and people like, well, that's a big dose of protein.

How do I get it all in? It's like, yeah, well, you can look at how we mix all of these things. You're also getting carbohydrate in with that. So that's why I say you could have your next meal after your training session. Um, yeah, there's a time and a place for protein supplementation, but if you're getting that real food and then you're also getting, you know, your magnesium and your potassium and your sodium and all the things that people supposedly lose and you're able to also repair a lot better.

At some point, there was a lot of discussion about training fasted burns more body fat. Um, I think now most people accept that that's not the case, that perhaps the percentage of fat as fuel is increased when one trains fasted, but that overall in terms of loss of body fat, it doesn't matter if you train fasted or you train fed.

Correct. Okay. I think, um, that can't be stated enough by experts like you. Um, that doesn't mean that if one prefers to train fasted or with a minimum of food in their gut, that they can't do that. Like I like to train fasted, but I, what I'm hearing is that women should probably ingest at least some protein, high quality protein, and maybe drink the protein in a protein shake form if they don't want to ingest solid food.

Yeah. I think the easiest way for people to understand the basic idea of what low energy is and how this affects men and women is when we are looking at, um, a tipping point for endocrine dysfunction for men, we're seeing that tipping point at 15 calories per kilogram of fat-free mass for women, it's 30.

So when we're looking at baseline calorie needs before you really get into that endocrine dysfunction, when you're looking at those parameters, you can see why men do better in a fasted state or a low calorie state. But for women, our intake and especially our carbohydrate needs are so much higher because we have so many other functions that are reliant on that kispeptin upregulation or downregulation, preferably upregulation.

Um, so when we're just talking the basic calorie needs and what we're seeing, it's that dichotomy right there of 15 to 30. And when you start telling people that, they're like, Oh, okay, I get it. Is that a biological aspect? It's like, well, you could trace it all the way back where, you know, men went out to get the calories and most tribes and the women were home and it wasn't advantageous to be pregnant under low calorie intake.

That's why you have dysfunction when the calories are too low. But, you know, you can also feed forward to modern day now. And you're seeing that all this perturbance of hormone and the way we regulate hormone across the circadian rhythm requires more calories for women than it does for men.

I know some men that basically don't eat all day and then eat one meal in the evening and they'll train in the morning. That's inconceivable to me because within an hour or so of training, I'm hungry. I know some men that don't eat all day and they'll eat all day and eat all day and eat all day.