TriDot Podcast Episode 283
Mark Allen's 6 Rules for Day-to-Day Nutrition
Announcer: This is the TriDot Podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate, inspire and entertain. We'll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests. Join the conversation and let's improve together.
Andrew Harley: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the TriDot podcast. We have me and one coach today, so hopefully that's enough for you, our listening audience. But boy, oh boy, is that coach somebody that I'm excited to talk to. We've got Mark Allen, the six time IRONMAN world champion and legendary triathlon coach. And Mark is here with me and he and I are going to discuss Mark's six rules, his six guidelines when it comes to nutrition. Mark, thanks so much for joining the TriDot Podcast to talk eating and healthy and nutrition and vegetables today.
Mark Allen: I know I had to gobble down my lunch really quick before I came under. I hope I don't have any pomegranate seeds still stuck in my teeth, you know what I'm saying?
Andrew Harley: Not that I can see. Not that I can see. I had broccoli, so hopefully I don't have any broccoli in my teeth. And now with that visual in people's minds, let's get rolling. I am Andrew, the average triathlete, voice of the people, captain of the middle of the pack. And as always, we're going to have a warm up question that Mark and I will answer. Then we'll get into our main set conversation where Mark will present to us his six rules for day to day nutrition. And then we'll cool down with Mark sharing our coach cool down tip of the week, lots of good stuff. Let's get to it.
Warm Up Question
Announcer: Time to warm up. Let's get moving.
Andrew Harley: All right, Mark, for our warm up question today, I think this is the perfect question to ask somebody like yourself who has been in the sport for a hot minute. Now, what I want to know from you and our audience is what is one thing from your triathlon career that you would go back and change if you could? Mark Allen, what is this answer for you?
Mark Allen: Well, it's that. That's kind of a hard one because—
Andrew Harley: It's a loaded question, Mark.
Mark Allen: You don't ask easy questions. You ask the ones that can get me in trouble. So anyway, you know, I, looking back on my career, I kind of optimized everything with what was available at the time. You know, I tried to analyze training techniques and equipment and all that kind of stuff. We just didn't have as much available. So if I was to go back and change anything, I would go back and bring some of the things that I have now back with me. I would go in the time machine. You know, I would bring an AI tool with me so that I could optimize my training. Because, you know, looking at that, in retrospect, I can see a lot of the volume and training that I did had nothing to do with getting physiologically more fit. It had to do with just sort of pumping up my self confidence kind of a thing. Like, oh, if I can do all of that, I can do Iron man and I can maybe win it. You know, it's like, no, just cut back and you'll do just as well and probably better because you'd be fresher. The other thing I'd bring back with me would be a power meter. Yeah, we didn't have those. We didn't have those. And they're a big help. Well, yeah, the first time I ever rode a bike with one, it was about two years after I quit. And I'm like, oh, geez. Just by shifting, I can see just shifting my position on my seat a little bit. I just gained 6 watts and my heart rate's the same, you know, stuff like that. So I, you know, if anything I would change it would be to go back in that time machine with some of the technology that's available now.
Andrew Harley: Yeah, no, it makes sense. I know you said that about nutrition as well. While we're talking about food and calories and what you're putting in your body today, you guys didn't have all the nutrition products that we can tap into. Right. We go to thefeed.com, we go to our local sporting goods store and man, the options of products you can use to fuel yourself and the ways they're packing the calories in and the grams of carbohydrate in. That's something else you didn't have. Is that correct?
Mark Allen: Yeah, I think nowadays you're able to get 150, even 200 calories an hour more in without getting nauseous and sick. And that's huge. If you look back at, let's say, IRONMAN, where, you know, our times are slower, and one of the reasons they were slower is that we were going as fast as we could go based on, not on our fitness, but on our ability to get fuel into the tank to keep going at the level that our fitness could have taken us to. And so you never actually really saw the speed that we could have gone had we had some of the race nutrition that you have today, gotten in more calories per hour, we could have sustained those higher output levels, those higher running paces. So yeah, you know, and the nutrition part of the sport has really been the last piece to fall in place in terms of innovation. You know, it's always pretty much started with cycling. You know, way back when aero bars were first invented and cyclists were looking at us like we were a bunch of kooks, you know. And then Greg LeMond goes and wins the Tour de France because he beats Laurent Fignon in the final time trial in Paris final stage by, you know, just enough to win by literally seconds with aero bars. All of a sudden we're cool, right? And then, you know, then we had innovations in swim technology with wetsuits and swim skins and all that kind of stuff. And then the super shoes came out and then last piece kind of along the same timeline as the shoe technology has been the evolution of in race nutrition, which I think is a huge piece. But in race nutrition is a little bit different than your day to day what you put in your mouth kind of nutrition or it should be anyway. So.
Andrew Harley: Yeah, so basically the long story short here is Mark's answer is he wished he could take all the tech and all the advancements in fueling and technology that we have now. And Mark, frankly it's remarkable that the times you guys were posting, right with all the advantages that the modern day professionals have versus what you had and you guys still hit some pretty ridiculous times, if I might say so myself. This answer for me is a very simple and obvious one. My PR at the 70.3 distance to date is a 5 hour, 2 minute and 32 second time. And so you can guess where I'm going here. Had I known on the day that I was going to finish at 5:02:30, surely Mark, surely I could have done something to eke out two more minutes and 30 seconds to go under the five hour threshold. And Mark, you know, you don't know which direction life's going to take you, right? So at that time I was like, man, yeah, I'll just sign up for a 70.3 or two next year and I'll knock that time down a couple more minutes and I'll be able to say I'm a sub 5 hour IRONMAN half IRONMAN finisher. And then you have a kid and your life kind of goes askew and you don't train quite as much and your fitness slides a little bit and all of a sudden that 5:02 would be a miracle if you could pull it off again. But if I go back, Mark, I would head into that race and just pick up, you know, the intensity on the bike for five to ten minutes. Right. Just maybe stop at an aid station or two less on the run. I took a porta potty stop that I did need, but maybe I would have rushed it a little bit more if I knew how close I was going to come to that five hour mark. Right. There's a lot of things I could have done maybe to gain 30 seconds here, 30 seconds there. So that is this answer for me.
Mark Allen: Yeah, it might have been that three and a half minute foot massage you had in T2 before you went out on the run. You should not have done that. You know, I'm just—
Andrew Harley: Yeah, you know, I like being pampered, Mark. I like being pampered. I like people to know that I'm a famous podcast host. So, you know, gotta roll into a transition with my entourage. We're gonna throw this question out to you, our audience cause we wanna hear from you, from everything in your triathlon journey so far. If you could go back in time and change one thing about it, what would that be? Can't wait to see what you, our athletes have to say.
Main Set:
Announcer: Onto the main set, going in 3, 2, 1.
Andrew Harley: All right, all right, all right. Onto our main set where Mark Allen is going to present to us his six day to day nutrition rules for us to live by. Very excited to see what he has lined up here because Mark, I know just in our time together how near and dear nutrition and good fueling and good food is to your heart. People don't know this about Mark Allen. Mark Allen is quite the chef. He knows his way around a kitchen, that's for sure. He's got some Mark Allen famous recipes that his friends and family know him to be the master of and maybe we'll get into that a little bit here. But Mark, where I want to start today, just to kind of lay the groundwork for this conversation, is how much does proper day to day eating make in our actual triathlon performance, whether it's training or racing. And then how much is this kind of a talking point between you and the athletes you coach?
Mark Allen: You know, what you eat day to day, from day to day, it's not going to make much difference. So, like, you know, you had all the stuff through the holidays, and then January 1st, you ate a nice clean day of diet food and everything. Nothing's going to change by January 2nd. But, you know, it's what you eat 90% of the time that really can have a dramatic impact on just first and foremost, it's most important to look at, I think, your diet and what you're eating from a health standpoint. And if you're healthy, then the performance is gonna follow. If you're eating a diet that's not promoting overall body health, you're not gonna get the muscle repair, replenishment, recovery that you need. You know, things are going to start to break down. Mental clarity is going to fall off. You know, you might develop some serious health issues. Depending, you know, there's been more than one triathlete out there who exercises day and night, but they have heart issues. And so we want to look at this as, you know, first and foremost, food is your friend and it should be your friend. Food should be medicine for your body that keeps it healthy and it's preventative. And so it's going to be something that if you adopt eating habits that are healthy, over time, you will see a dramatic difference day to day, from one day to the next, you're not going to notice anything. And you might be missing that chocolate chip cookie that you gave up last night or whatever, but in the end, you know, and I've got a few stories about that, but we'll save those for later.
Andrew Harley: Yeah, and not unlike what we tell athletes with our workouts, right, Mark? I mean, some people stress about, oh, I gotta nail every single session, I gotta do every single session. It's the cumulative consistency over time, the 90% as you're calling it here, that really makes the impact. That one day that you had to miss your workout or that one day you had a bad workout or had to cut it short for something in your life that popped up that's not going to throw everything in your training and your performance and your fitness off track. Right. It's the consistency over time that pays off. So glad to hear that's the case for our nutrition as well. And Mark, full disclosure to our audience, just kind of a fun podcast story here. You very recently were in Dallas. You're in Dallas frequently these days with a lot of our team being based in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. But you were in Dallas just a few weeks ago. Not for a TriDot purpose. You were in Dallas for another reason. And while you were in town, a couple of us from the team that live locally got together and had dinner with you and enjoyed that time. And we asked you naturally, hey, you're not in town for us, so why are you in town? And your answer was surprising and very fun. So can you share with our listeners why you were in town just a few weeks ago?
Mark Allen: Yeah, last year at USA Triathlon Nationals, excuse me, they had an auction and one of the prizes I donated, and it was called a kitchen makeover. And so anybody who bid on it and won it, I would fly out to their house, rifle through their cabinets, through their drawers, through the refrigerator, and pull everything out and kind of give my thumbs up on this and thumbs down on that and how things could be improved and the reasons behind it. And so a gentleman who lives about 30 minutes outside of Dallas won it. And so, you know, this prize was actually on behalf of USA Triathlon foundation that I went there. And so, you know, I've done this before, and I start with the refrigerator because usually that's where most of the good stuff is, right? You're not gonna put some highly processed food that could last on the shelf for 12—you're not going to put your Twinkies in the refrigerator, right? They're gonna go in the back of your cupboard where, you know, you can sneak them when nobody else is looking. So I start with the refrigerator, and usually that's pretty healthy, but there's always something in there that I kind of have a recommendation on. And then we move on to the pantry and move on to the drawers where all of the stuff that maybe some of the stuff you shouldn't be having is living secretly waiting for you, those delicious things. And so it's a fun process. And of all of the ones that I've done, they have one thing in common, and that's that everything that I pull out and I put in the ban pile, the athletes know it. They already know it. They just do it anyway. So, you know what you'll hear today is not going to be anything groundbreaking. But it just might be, you know, a reinforcement that, okay, you know, I've heard this a number of times. Mark Allen's saying this again. And so maybe I'll start to change some of these patterns, these things that probably aren't serving me in the bigger picture.
Andrew Harley: Yeah, that's exactly right. And we were at that dinner and you were telling us what you were doing, and it sparked this idea of, like, oh, it'd be so cool to have you come on the podcast, because I know nutrition matters so much to you, not just for performance, but just for everyday health. And it sparked the idea for this podcast. I want to get Mark on a microphone and hear what his nutrition rules are that he gives to his athletes. And Mark, I wonder if I'm an athlete and I know Mark Allen is coming to my house and he's going to rifle through my pantry. I feel like I would do a little pre cleaning. Right. So that you don't judge everything you see in there. Right. Maybe keep a couple things in there for you to throw away so it feels legit. But there's probably a few things that I would not want you to see were even in there in the first place. I wonder if any of your athletes that you've done this for have kind of pre-done that to not be judged by Mark Allen.
Mark Allen: Yeah. Yeah. The gentleman that I did this for, he sent me an email and he said, show up at my house at 4 o'clock. We'll do the kitchen makeover, and we'll also do a burial ceremony for my Pop Tarts.
Andrew Harley: So he knew? Yeah. He automatically knew. Yeah. Okay, well, Mark, without further ado, you've got six tips lined up, and I didn't give you the number six. You had to come up on your own with, okay, what are the things that matter enough that I want to say them on this podcast? And there's six of them. So what is Mark Allen's nutrition rule number one?
Mark Allen: Okay. Yeah. So to go back to the number six, there's no magic to number six. Except for me. Six is kind of a magic number.
Andrew Harley: Yeah.
Mark Allen: Six championships. And the first year that I—or the last year that I was racing Iron Man, I thought, if I win, this will be number six. And so the whole year I did sets of six by six, six quarters on the track, everything was sort of like patterning in that six. So, and it worked out. So, yeah, I'm giving you my IRONMAN 6. So the first rule and if you can follow this one, the other ones are going to fall in place very easily for you. And that's no added sugar. No sugar. No sugar. No sugar. No sugar, no sugar. And I'm only talking specifically about the food that you eat at meals. I'm not talking about what you take in during your workouts.
Andrew Harley: When you're training, that's helpful.
Mark Allen: When you're training, you need calories to go in really quickly. So a slow burning carbohydrate that if you're sitting around the house won't raise your blood sugar is not the one that's going to work in your training or in your racing. And they have found that actually if you eat pretty healthy in your meals, having sport drinks or sport developed products that have pretty highly refined stuff in it doesn't actually have the same negative impact as it does on just the average population. So, okay, so why no sugar? Okay. You know, sugar is very inflammatory. So it makes your joints hurt. It makes blood vessels, makes blood harder to move through. It sets up patterns. If you eat a lot of sugar, as you know where you eat the sugar, your blood sugar goes up, your brain is not happy. Your brain survives on glucose. And if you get too much of it going all at once, your brain goes, there's too much. And so your pancreas releases insulin, which is a storage hormone and it stores that sugar away in the form of—the first 2000 calories get stored as glycogen in your liver. The first 2000 calories get turned into fat and get stored probably where you don't want it.
Andrew Harley: Sure.
Mark Allen: And so, you know, if you eat a big meal or a lot of sugar all at once, then insulin goes up, blood sugar drops down to healthy levels. But then insulin doesn't just shut off right then, it keeps working. And a lot of times it'll lower your blood sugar too low so that now your brain's not happy because it's not getting enough fuel. And so you'd think, well, just release some of that stuff that you just stored. But when insulin is present, you can't release blood sugar to get it back up to normal levels. And so what do you do? You eat some more sugar. And so it's a constant—it puts you on this yo-yo. So if you can cut out sugar and to do that, that means anything that's in a box, look at it and see if sugar is added. Anything that's pre-made even like a loaf of bread. Look at it and see is there sugar added to this? Like when you cut out sugar, you realize even a lot of like whole grain breads taste sweet because they put so much sugar in it. My story with sugar. I've got two of them. One of them was in 1989, I hadn't won Kona yet. Dave Scott had won six times. And I was the kind of athlete, like I was pretty healthy. But I wasn't a monk either, you know. And there was a Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookie store two blocks from my house in Boulder where I was training.
Andrew Harley: Very nice.
Mark Allen: I love those delicious, chewy, warm chocolate chip cookies. Who doesn't, right?
Andrew Harley: Sure.
Mark Allen: Like that T shirt. I've never met a carbohydrate that I don't like.
Andrew Harley: You know that.
Mark Allen: And so I would do my long bike rides and I thought, when that long bike ride is done every Saturday, I deserve a treat. So I would go down to Mrs. Fields, I would get six or seven chocolate chip cookies, thinking, one a day, it'll last me till next Saturday, right? By the time I got home, there was only like two or three left. And I thought, I can't leave those poor little cookies all by themselves. I may as well just eat them all. And one day the light bulb went on. You know, Dave Scott was famous for rinsing his cottage cheese. And so I'm thinking, I'm eating half a dozen chocolate chip cookies, Dave Scott is rinsing his cottage cheese, and he's won six and I've won zero. And so I thought, okay, cold turkey, no more of those. And so I stopped eating them. And I craved them for about five or six weeks. But then finally that craving went away for those chocolate chip cookies. And I realized that the craving for that sugar was so intense that it masked all of these other subtle cravings that my body was telling me. Like, you need a little more protein today. You need a little more good oils today. You're dehydrated, you just need some more water. And when the sugar craving, that big craving, disappeared all of a sudden, I realized my body is so intuitive. And everybody's body is. We're here because our bodies know what to eat. And when you listen to those, you take away the big noise. You can hear all of the fine tuning messages your body's telling you. And then you can start to craft your diet based on what your body needs each and every day, each and every meal. The second piece of this is that, you know, my whole life I've had blood tests periodically when I was a swimmer, you know, in college, a couple times as a triathlete, sometimes since I retired. And all along this journey, my cholesterol has been high, my triglycerides have been high. LDL has been high. HDL has not been as—has been relatively low, not in a dangerous range, but right at the border. And the doctors who have administered the test always say the same thing. They go, gee, you exercise so much. It's strange that your blood profile would be healthy, but at the just on the border of maybe we should do something about it. And my dad had, he was on cholesterol lowering medication and you know, he was thin, but, you know, he had really high cholesterol. And I thought, well, it's genetic. Around the time I turned 60—now I'm 67. No, I don't look or feel over 85.
Andrew Harley: Don't sound it. Young at heart for sure. Yeah.
Mark Allen: So anyway, around 60, I just sort of by accident just stopped buying anything that had sugar in it. So when I got home, there was no sugar. I didn't have to resist it because it wasn't sitting in a cupboard, it wasn't tucked away in my freezer, it wasn't in the refrigerator. And so when I was hungry, I actually ate real food. And about two years after this process where other than like a birthday party or something like that, I wasn't eating sugar. And I had a blood test done and my cholesterol was low. HDL, LDL was in perfect balance. Triglycerides were well within the normal range. And so here I am, I'm getting older and all of a sudden my blood profile is the best it's been my entire life. My entire life. And that doesn't normally happen. And the only thing that I changed in that two year period was that I stopped eating sugar.
Andrew Harley: No. It's amazing.
Mark Allen: So that's why I put this one as number one. Because, you know, as a triathlete you want stable blood sugar. You want that to be really stable as best as you can. You do not want to have added inflammation. It inflames your brain, it inflames your muscles, your joints, your everything. You want to be able to hear those signals of what your body is telling you. Your body really needs to repair, replenish, rebuild. Sugar doesn't do any of that. Sugar does not repair anything. It doesn't rebuild anything, you know. Yeah, it might help replenish glycogen. But there's plenty of other ways you can do that where you don't raise your blood sugar and have that going on. So that's number one. Try it. If you get the stuff out of your house, it's going to be so much easier. And anytime you need willpower to resist something, there's going to be a point where the willpower wears out. And all of a sudden the floodgates open. If it's not in the house, you don't need willpower because it's not there. You'll find something else to eat.
Andrew Harley: Yep, that's so true, Mark. This is something that really, when we had our baby, and once the baby became a big baby young toddler who was starting to eat real food, you know, you start reading as a parent, okay, the baby shouldn't have more than a couple grams of sugar in their snacks, their meals or whatever. And, um, you know, so you start looking at, okay, what are we feeding the baby? And oh my gosh, the pasta sauce we're gonna use for dinner tonight. Look at how much sugar's in it. The bread that we made toast with, look how much sugar is in it. The NutriGrain bar that I've eaten as a snack during bike rides cause I think it's so healthy. Look how much added sugar is in this NutriGrain, you know, fig bar. And we start examining everything and it's like, oh, my gosh, like, it was so illuminating to have to look at that for the first time on behalf of our child. And at first it's almost overwhelming to like, how do I get all of this out of my house? Surely there isn't something at the grocery store that's equivalent for all these products. But you start finding, oh, there's the pasta sauce that has no added sugar. There's the bread that has no added sugar. There's the fig bar equivalent that has no added sugar. And those products exist, right? You just have to be mindful. You have to learn what they are, and you have to start putting those in the cart once you learn what they are. And we've definitely curbed—not to pat on the back for me, my wife, it literally is for our kid. But it's forced us to kind of really wean down the amount of sugar that's in our own house. So really love this tip. Mark, as rule number one, Mark Allen, what is Mark's nutrition rule number two?
Mark Allen: Okay. So one of the goals, and I sort of talked about this with the first one, is to try to use your body's natural intuitive sense about what you need. And so sugar masks that. Another thing that masks that ability is when you eat foods that have high flavor taste added. So, you know, if, and I'm not talking about spices, I'm talking about flavorings. So even if it says natural flavorings added, that's a high concentrated taste that hits the same part of your brain that morphine does, that everything—it becomes addictive. And so it makes food something that you become addicted to as opposed to something you're using as medicine to rehabilitate your body.
Andrew Harley: Wow.
Mark Allen: And so this adding high concentrated flavorings to foods started around 1972, 1973, and this was exactly the time when America went from pretty healthy to having a lot of obesity issues coming in. And everybody in the beginning, up until just recently actually was saying, oh, well, you know, in the early 70s or whatever, everybody all of a sudden stopped exercising and we need to exercise more. Maybe that was part of the issue. But the thing is, every age group across the entire spectrum of ages, all of a sudden started having obesity problems. There's no chance in hell that the entire nation stopped exercising at the same time. What happened? Food products came on the market where they were engineered to have high taste in them. They became addictive. And those foods were very highly processed, especially in the beginning. And so there they were also low nutrient density. I'm gonna talk about that later. So eliminate stuff that has high flavoring added to it. Even if it says natural flavorings added, it's going to do the same thing. It's made to become addictive for you. That doesn't mean your food has to taste like cardboard. You know, if you use natural spices, you can have the most incredible tasting food and it won't be addictive. Also, almost all of the foods where food flavorings are added, they're also generally highly processed foods. And so a lot of the natural nutrients are taken out of it, and we don't—and when you don't have the natural nutrients, you're feeding your body calories, but you're not getting what you need. And when that happens, you can also have increased hunger because your body is still searching for the magnesium it needs and the micronutrients and the phytonutrients and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, no Dorito ranch flavored Doritos, you know, you name it. And sugar is also one of those high flavor additives. And so even if you're drinking—well, I'll get to that, too. But anyway, so eliminate all foods that have flavors added to them. They can have spices, but if it says natural, even natural flavors, naturally derived, organic food flavoring, that's meant to be addictive for you, and it will make you keep eating way beyond when your body would probably just be saying, that's enough of that.
Andrew Harley: In my understanding, Mark, I could be a little wrong on this because I am not a nutritionist or a dietitian or anything like that, but I've heard chatter amongst athletes, amongst peers that are from other countries around the world, that when they travel to America or if they move to America for university or for a season or a time period, that even trying to eat healthy and exercising, they'll find themselves slowly gaining weight. Because often in other countries outside of America, the rules is the wrong word, guidelines is the wrong word, the policies that are in place for what can be in food is very different in a place like New Zealand or Australia or in Europe. And they can't put as many processed things, fake things, as we can in America. And so all of a sudden, you're eating the same bag of chips or crisps off the shelf, and there's, you know, the ingredient list in America is very different from the ingredient list in that same bag of crisps in New Zealand or Australia or somewhere else. And, yeah, it makes a difference in the end. And for rule number one and rule number two, we're already seeing, Mark, kind of like what you said at the beginning. I mean, if you do these two things we've already talked about, what are you left with? You're left with real food. Real food that is colorful, that has good nutrients, that is packed with good things for you, and you're already just pretty much eliminating the fake food. And, yeah, that will probably go a long way. So I'm excited to hear what rules 3, 4, 5, and 6 are, because I think we've already covered a lot of ground just in rule one and two. So, Mark, nutrition rule number three. What do you got?
Mark Allen: Rule number three. Don't drink your calories.
Andrew Harley: Yeah, that's good.
Mark Allen: Obviously, you know, you have a Coke. There's—people know that's not good for you, but people might look at other drinks where it's natural flavorings flavored with fruit juice or even fruit juice itself. You're drinking calories and it's very easy to overdo the calories. So if you're concerned about your weight, your body fat and you're drinking calories. One, it's going to be a lot of sugar, you know, and OJ has just as much sugar as a Coke. Yeah. So they're basically doing the same thing when they hit bottom in your stomach and they have the same effect on your body. Even like, you know, smoothies, you know, you put like, and I hate to sort of single out smoothies, but that's kind of like a healthy thing for a lot of people. It's easy to overdo the calories. And there's also a lot of research now that's showing that there's something about having to chew your food that helps shut off your appetite so you don't overeat.
Andrew Harley: Interesting. Yeah.
Mark Allen: And so when you take away the chewing part, and that chewing part can be taken away a lot of ways. One by blending it all up so you just swallow it as opposed to chewing it. Another way is when, you know, foods are processed and we take away the outer husks or the fiber of stuff. Yeah, things almost melt in your mouth. You don't have to chew them much. And so your body doesn't shut off the appetite thing as quickly. And I'm sure there's a reason why that happens. They do know that that happens. So when we're chewing stuff like you chew an apple takes a lot of effort. Right. And you have an apple, you're probably full. You throw an apple in a blender, you can swallow that along with a banana, a bunch of boysenberries and some yogurt and God knows what else you put in there, you know, and so you've got this stuff that comes from a healthy source, but the way that you're taking it in is not necessarily healthy for—it's not helping you stay balanced with your appetite control. So as best as you can, try not to drink your calories, try to eat them.
Andrew Harley: This was really illuminating for me when I was a young 20 something, graduated college, started working in Dallas, Fort Worth. And my brother and I actually worked at the same company straight out of college. And so we take our lunch breaks together and live nearby each other in apartments here in the Metroplex. And my brother at one point got interested in Weight Watchers. He wasn't an athlete. He wasn't running every day like I was. And he just was trying to stay on top of his health in some way. And so just out of curiosity, I was like, well, let me try this and just kind of see what it's about and do Weight Watchers alongside my brother. And so I saw for the first time at my weight, you know, 140 pounds, roughly, this is how many calories I should be taking in or in Weight Watchers program, this is how many points I can have per day. And you look at what's in a cup of orange juice, to your point, or one soda or one smoothie from the local smoothie place where they are kind of spicing it up with some extra sugar to make it taste even better. It's like, wow, there goes one fourth of my calories and points for the day. And it didn't fill me up all that much. It was really fascinating, and it really highlighted for me how much is in a small can of Coke or a small glass of orange juice or a small glass of whole milk. It's like, man, would I rather have that? Or I'd rather have, you know, the same thing in a serving of cashews or a serving of grilled chicken where it's actually filling me up a little bit and lasting longer in my stomach. And anyway, yes, totally tracking with you, Mark. I really love this. For the Harley household, for example, what we do, because we like the occasional Sprite, we like the occasional drink, we like the occasional glass of sweet tea as Texans, and I have some pear juice in my fridge that I love, this pear juice. And so our rule, loosely, in the Harley household is the weekends we can have a Sprite with dinner on Saturday night. All week long we're not going to touch it, but we'll do a little bit of that. Not go crazy, but we'll do a little bit of that on the weekend. And that's our way of kind of staying balanced and still enjoying those drinks that we like, whether it's pear juice with breakfast or a Sprite at dinner without it really impacting our health all through the week. So really like that one, Mark. Mark Allen's nutrition rule number four.
Mark Allen: Yeah, well, that's the 90% rule right there. You outlined it perfectly. It's what you eat most of the time that helps you to be healthy or erodes your health. Okay, so rule number four. This goes to the fats and the oils. When I was first competing, everybody was fat phobic. Everybody thought, oh, my God, fat is going to—if you have toast with butter on it, you're gonna die of a heart attack. You know, that kind of a thing. Or if I eat an egg, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna croak on my ride next week. So that's obviously shifted. You know, we've gone even completely the opposite, like with the keto diet, where you can go crazy with fat and protein, but you're cutting out the carbohydrates. And so when you're thinking about sort of what are some of the fats or oils that I can have that will promote health as opposed to erode health, my sort of go to rule on this is the one type of oil that I try to avoid are omega-6 oils.
Andrew Harley: Okay.
Mark Allen: Okay. So what are omega-6 oils? Omega-6 oils are like canola oil, safflower oil, soy oil, you know, all of the oils that generally you see in products that are packaged. So for example, maybe you buy your salad dressing almost always it's going to have an omega-6 oil in it. It's going to have some canola oil, it's going to have some safflower oil, some soy oil. Now, what's the big deal with those oils? I mean, they're unsaturated. Unsaturated oils reduce inflammation, which is a good thing. So they're vasodilators also, which means they open up your blood vessels, which means that it helps blood flow smoother and quicker, which means that you get better oxygen delivery to the muscles. So it can actually improve your aerobic pace or all of your metabolism because you're getting more oxygen easier. Your body's not having to fight these little constricted blood vessels. They're vasodilating. Saturated fats are vasoconstrictors, so they do the opposite. They kind of shut things down and make it harder for blood to move through your system, makes it harder to deliver oxygen. There's a balance and a need for both of these. And I'll get to the oil part first. But, you know, when we exercise, there's tissue damage that happens. Your body only knows where that tissue damage happens because of saturated fats, which cause inflammation in that area. So at night when you're sleeping, all the little repair guys are cruising around and they're going, oh, where's the inflammation? Oh, it's in the quads. There they are. Let's repair the quads. And then when all of that is repaired and your muscles getting stronger, then you need the unsaturated oils to reduce the inflammation and get it back to normal. Okay. So you would think, well, what's wrong with canola oil? It's unsaturated. It should be doing all the good stuff for me. Omega-6 oils are not stable in the body. If your body is under any kind of stress, those unsaturated oils can be turned into saturated fat in your body. So you could eat nothing that has saturated fat in it, but you could be having cardiovascular issues because everything's getting constricted because you're eating a ton of omega-6 oils and you're under stress, and that's turning into saturated fat, and it's causing all the problems that happen when you have too much saturated fat. Cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, a bunch of stuff like that. So next time you go to the store and you're reaching for that bottle of delicious salad dressing that most of us try to have on our salad, I mean, who eats salad without dressing? I don't. Anybody like lettuce? Yum. No. You need the salad dressing, right? Check out where the oils are in there. If there's Omega-6, think of another alternative. Some products only have olive oil in them, which is very stable in the body. It's an omega-9 oil. It's so easy to just make your own. You just have olive oil. You have some balsamic vinegar. You have garlic powder, salt, pepper, maybe some dijon mustard. You mix it all together, throw it on the salad. Super delicious, super healthy. You can also get really good oils. So olive oil is a go-to to always have in the house. So good. Nuts, almonds, walnuts, some of the best. Avocado. Avocado is the oil, and avocado is actually better for helping prevent cardiovascular disease than omega-3 oils, which come from cold water fish. So that's kind of my wrap on the oils. My ban list are omega-6 oils again—canola, safflower, soy. You know, there's a bunch of them like that. Olive oil's a yes. Nuts are a yes. Avocados are a definite yes.
Andrew Harley: What I appreciate about this one, Mark, is I think all of us have a notion that there's a difference nutritionally, right, between the different oils. And you'll see supplements, and you'll see different foods advertising, we have this, we have this fat versus that fat. And so just hearing that breakdown, I've never heard something like that. And what it's leading me to want to do is the next time you're in Dallas, we need to film you in Jeff Booher's kitchen giving a demonstration on how to cook Mark Allen's famous salad dressing. Because that sounds very delicious to me. I actually am, Mark, I am maybe the one person you've ever met that I will eat a salad with no dressing. It's a specific—I really enjoy arugula or rocket in some parts of the world. And if it's just straight arugula with some blue cheese crumbles or feta cheese or goat cheese, and it's got like some diced apple or some diced cranberry, and so if there's a couple things on that salad that are packed with flavor already, I'm good. I'm okay with the leaves being dry. But if it is a romaine salad or a spinach salad or something that maybe doesn't have as much flavor packed into the toppings, like a Caesar salad, for example, like, yeah, okay, I need the dressing. I can't have that dry. And my wife, she judges me every single time. She's looking at me like, you're nuts for eating that dry salad over there, you weirdo. She kind of moves over a chair at the dinner table when I'm eating a dry salad, but I will do it anyway. But that dressing sounds delicious. Mark Allen's nutrition rule number five.
Mark Allen: When I was first competing, the scientific research said, no endurance athletes don't need any more protein than somebody who's just sitting on the couch. And my personal experience was completely not that at all. So all my friends were eating tons of rice cakes and lots of carbs, but not really focused at all on protein. And I was just going, where's my protein after every workout? And so I was eating very counter to what the conventional wisdom was at the time, because I was really trying to tune into what my body was saying. And then literally, almost 20 years later, there was a research study, and they came out and they go, oops, we were wrong. You guys actually need as much protein, if not more than even bodybuilders because of the tissue damage that happens when you're doing long running and long bike rides and everything. And so if you're going to work out hard, you know, and when you're also adding in strength training, which also breaks down muscle, it's super important to give your body the essential amino acids you need to rebuild that muscle that gets broken down so you actually get stronger from the training that you're doing. Protein doesn't store in your body. So it's something that you kind of have to make sure you're getting in all of your meals so that your body's continually doing that repair process. And you know, we all know kind of where protein comes from. It comes from animal products, from dairy products, if you're a vegetarian, from combining a grain and legume together. You know, one of the caveats to that that is misleading is that some vegetable things say that it has all eight essential amino acids in it. Like, technically, soy is a complete protein. However, some of the amino acid levels are so minimal that it effectively doesn't have enough for your body to actually utilize that in and of itself. And so, you know, if you are vegetarian, it's really important to combine that grain and the legume together and not just rely on a single vegetable source to provide you with that protein. But, you know, if you really look at how much protein an endurance athlete needs, it's also very hard to get that much protein without a massive volume of food from vegetable sources. But anyway, that's a whole philosophical discussion, but the takeaway here is just to attune to that. So when you're having your breakfast, if you're having oatmeal with almond milk, where's your protein? There is none. Protein stabilizes blood sugar. That's something that is really good to have as much as possible. You know, when you have your A1C test done with your blood test every now and then, your yearly thing, that's seeing how stable your blood sugar is over a several month period. And if it's been going up and down, that's not gonna be a good thing. If it's stable, that's a good thing. Protein stabilizes blood sugar. As you get older to stimulate your body to go into that repair process from your, with the protein that you're eating, you need to eat a higher percent of your calories as protein for your body to go, aha, I've got the stuff I need to repair. So when you're a younger person, the percentage of your diet that needs to be protein to get the repair process going on your muscles is lower than the percent of protein you need to get that process going as an older person. That's not saying that you need to eat more calories overall. You just need to eat a higher percentage of your diet from protein. So if you're 50, 60, 70, if you are a post-menopausal woman, you need more protein to keep your body stabilized and to get it to do that repair process.
Andrew Harley: Yeah, very good. This, I realized how much I was underdoing protein when I started tracking my nutrition with an app called Chronometer. And there are several apps like this and we actually have—I looked it up while you were talking to make sure I got this right—Episode 51 of the TriDot podcast. It came out on September 14th of 2020. So it's been a hot minute now, but the information, I promise you in there is still good. We talked, I believe it was me, Elizabeth James, professional triathlete and TriDot coach, and Dr. Krista Austin, a nutritionist. And we were talking about how to use and when to use a nutrition tracking app. And one of Dr. Austin's favorites is Cronometer. And I've been using it ever since just to keep an eye on what I'm actually eating throughout the day. And sometimes I'm really on top of it and sometimes I just kind of loosely track it. But when I started using Chronometer Mark, it was wild how it pointed out how many things I eat in my day that are carbohydrates. I was massively overdoing the carbohydrates, even for a triathlete who was training. And I was massively underdoing the protein and the healthy fats. And so I had to start looking, I had to start looking for how can I get protein in me earlier in the day at breakfast because I wasn't getting that much, whereas I would have thought that I was. I had to look at how can I get some protein and some healthy fats into my snacking as opposed to just lunch and dinner. And it helped me really get that right. And for me, that's been the biggest use of that app is making sure I'm keeping all three of those things in my diet pretty regularly. But until that, I've been a triathlete for years. I had been a fairly healthy, so I thought, adult for years, not realizing I was massively underdoing my protein intake as somebody who's training for these kind of sports. So I really like that being on the list and just the way you've gone from starting off with the big picture items of, hey, let's cut out the crap, right? Let's cut out the actual crap and then dialing it into not drinking calories, talking about how to get fats right, talking about how to get protein right. Mark, overall, 10 out of 10. This is a very, very good list so far. And we've got one more. Mark Allen, nutrition rule, let's see what it is. What's rule number six?
Mark Allen: Eat nutrient dense foods. And if you follow this one rule, you'll probably cut out all the other stuff that I highlighted that's not good to do. So when you're looking at something and you go, I want some of that, ask yourself, is this a nutrient dense food? You know, is a barbecued tortilla chip or potato chip nutrient dense? Yes, it's going to be calorie dense and it's going to be flavor dense, but there's no nutrients in it, you know, so anytime a food starts to get processed, a lot of the nutrients get taken out of it. Even like if you're eating, let's say you're having a salad with chicken for lunch, which is kind of like everybody's classic I'm eating healthy lunch type thing. Yeah, chicken salad, but it's on iceberg lettuce—that's not nutrient dense. There's like no nutrients in that lettuce, so.
Andrew Harley: And it's drowned in Caesar dressing from—
Mark Allen: Yeah, omega-6 oils in that dressing. And so how do I improve that nutrient density? Well, you can start with green leafy stuff that has more nutrients in it. Phytonutrients. You know, all of the colored vegetables have great phytonutrients. Those are things that our body needs to sort of carry on a lot of the basic processes. Is it nutrient dense itself? So, you know, the more processed something is, the less nutrient value is going to be in there. And as I alluded to in one of the earlier tips here, if a food is low in nutrient density, even if it has enough calories to sort of satiate you, your body's still going to be searching for those nutrients to round out the whole ball of wax of what you put in. And so your appetite can still be there even though you've eaten enough. And so when you're eating food, if you notice that you feel like, God, I ate a ton, but I still don't feel like something's missing, there's probably some nutrients your body still needs to carry on the basic functions and keep it balanced. And so really analyze in a bigger picture what's possibly missing here? What am I not getting that I need? And if you're eating high nutrient density foods, even if they're high calorie foods, that's okay if they come from natural sources. I mean, nuts are high calories, but they're also high nutrient density. They give you those really good oils. It's kind of basic stuff. But if you have this in the back of your mind and so ask yourself, am I eating high nutrient dense foods or are these empty calories? If there's a lot of sugar that's pure empty calorie, if there's no sugar and a bunch of stuff that's healthy, that's probably higher nutrient density.
Andrew Harley: Yeah, everybody's gonna be different here, Mark. But where I get in trouble with this personally is at like snack times, right? You know, my wife and I, we've always enjoyed pretty healthy food. We love our fruits and veggies. We love whole grains and good proteins and you know, so we just kind of naturally, by what we like to eat, have pretty good lunches and dinners when we sit down and we're cooking it and in control of what's in the meal. But where I get in trouble with empty calories is the snack attacks, right? The snack times where I'm reaching for those pretzels off the shelf in the cupboard or I'm reaching for those Cheez-Its that are artificially flavored and processed like Mark Allen told me not to do, that I shouldn't buy because if I don't buy them, I can't eat them. You know, those are the things where I personally am taking in empty calories, right? It's not so much the meals. For some people, this is mealtime.
Mark Allen: If you want the ultimate food crack, go get Barbara's Jalapeno Cheese Puffs. You cannot eat one. There's no nutrient value. Super high intense flavor that just hits that addicted part of your brain and you can't stop. So let me just sort of, I'll go back over each one of these. So you just have—the first one was cut out sugar. That's going to be the biggest thing you can do to help yourself because then your body will start to tell you what it actually really needs. Cut out foods that have high taste added to it. Even if it says natural flavorings, it's all the same. And again, your food doesn't have to taste like cardboard. Use peppers, use cinnamon, use those things that don't hit the addictive part of your brain. They're natural products that your body goes, yeah, this makes the food taste really good, but when I'm full, I've had enough. Don't drink your calories—rule number three. The fourth one, cut out the omega-6 oils. Eat the good oils, olive oil, nuts, avocado. Rule 5, tend to your protein. Make sure that you have a complete protein and that you're getting enough. And that as you age, you actually increase the amount of protein in relation to the other calories you have in your diet so that your body keeps responding with repair and replenish. And then ultimately always search for nutrient dense foods. If you do that, you're going to get the nutrients you need, your body's going to stay balanced, your hunger will turn off as it should, because you have enough of all that stuff it needs when you go to sleep to actually repair and keep everything balanced. And then the last piece, it doesn't have anything to do with eating, but it has everything to do with your eating—get enough sleep.
Andrew Harley: Wow.
Mark Allen: What does this have to do with it? If you are short on sleep, your body stops producing the hormone that turns off your appetite. So even if you're eating super healthy and you're not getting enough sleep, chances are you're going to be overeating, you're going to be snacking more in between meals, you're going to eat more meals than your body actually needs. And if you start tracking your sleep and you match that against how your appetite is going, you're going to see how impactful this is. Like, I know that when I'm traveling and I'm not getting enough sleep, it doesn't matter how healthy I eat. I finish a meal and I'm still hungry. I get hungry between meals when I haven't done any exercise, all that kind of stuff. And that's because, as I said, not enough sleep, your body stops producing the hormone that turns off your appetite and so you tend to overeat.
Andrew Harley: Oh, fascinating. I've never heard that before. Yeah, never that. Now, Mark, you can't physically fly to all of our houses and go through our pantries and refrigerators, but like you said, toward the beginning of the show. I mean, as you're saying these rules, and if we knew you were going to come look through our pantry, I think most of us know the things in there that shouldn't be in there. A lot of times, Mark, for us, it's just the motivation to not have it in there or to throw it out once it is in there, or to take the extra measures at the grocery store to look at the ingredient labels and make sure we're getting these things right. For a lot of athletes, Mark, I think it just comes down to how bad do we want it? Where is the motivation coming from to take the time and the effort to put some things to the side and put some better things in our eating rotation? And for the athlete listening today that all they're lacking here is the motivation, what would you say to kind of spur them on, spark them on to taking these measures for their own health?
Mark Allen: Yeah, it's a great question, Andrew. You know, eating healthy is the same thing as exercising. You know, when you first start exercising, it feels uncomfortable and you don't like it and it kind of hurts. And, you know, everybody's talking about how they get the exercise high. And all I think about is this is like painful. But then all of a sudden, you reach a critical mass where you start to experience, oh, actually, I do feel better. My stress levels are going down. I'm sleeping better. You're starting to feel all the positives of exercise, and then it becomes part of your life and you want to exercise. And it's the same way when you make shifts in your diet. At first you're like, oh, I'm missing out on, you know, my Barbara's jalapeno cheese puffs, you know, or whatever it is. And then all of a sudden, after a period, like I said with those chocolate chip cookies, it took about six weeks. All of a sudden, you stop missing those things and you start feeling better with the things that you've changed and you're eating more healthy, and all of a sudden you don't want those things. You feel like, why would I shove that into my body? I'm doing all this other stuff to keep myself healthy, get fit, you know, live a long life. Why would I shove that in there? You know, and you do really reach a critical mass where it attracts you to the good foods as opposed to the unhealthy ones. And so, you know, try to stick with some changes in your eating habits until you do feel that shift. And once you do, you'll be really thankful that you did. And that doesn't mean that, you know, from time to time, like you said, or maybe even on the weekends, you go bonkers. But then most of the time, you're living the life that's actually meant to be your best life through this.
Announcer: Great set, everyone. Let's cool down.
Andrew Harley: We always like to end our show with what we call our Coach Cooldown tip of the week, where one of the coaches on the show gives us one final triathlon training tip. And Mark, we've covered a lot about nutrition today, and so I'm kind of curious to hear from you one thing in triathlon that is not nutrition. What is a training or racing tip you want to leave our audience with today?
Mark Allen: I guess the one tip is one that you actually threw out there in the very beginning, and that's to be consistent. You know, that consistency is so much more important than the actual weekly volume that you train, the amount of intensity that you train at. It's just getting out there and doing stuff on a consistent basis. Because if you are training consistently, that means that one, that means that you're not over training because you're not getting exhausted and burned out and getting sick or injured or ill. So you're actually not over training. And with consistency, you start to build this momentum that becomes part of your life and who you are. And like I said, you feel this commitment and a pull to keep it going, you know, and so consistency is the number one thing will help make you a better athlete. With your diet, it'll make you healthier through the choices that you make and, you know, in your relationships, like anything, you don't wait till Valentine's Day to tell your loved one that you love them. You do it over and over and over and over. That's just one of the highlight days.
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