The Power of Carbohydrates with Maja Berry RD, BSc, MSc

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Carbohydrates have gotten a bad rap over the past few years, so I asked Maja Berry to do a dive into all things carbs for us. 

Join us as we delve deep into the world of carbohydrates and their impact on athletic prowess. 

Discover the role of carbohydrates in both energy and recovery. Maja Berry demystifies common myths, and providing evidence-based insights along with practical strategies for optimizing carbohydrate intake and timing. Your peak performance awaits!

Thoughts about this episode? Let me know over on IG!

About Maja Berry:

Maja Berry is a qualified dietitian with a Master’s degree in sports nutrition, specializing primarily in addressing issues related to under-fuelling and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) or Hypothalamic Amenorrhea (HA). Her dedication to this field stems from a deep understanding of the critical link between energy consumption and expenditure. Maja has observed that numerous athletes grapple with under-fuelling; however, she believes that achieving optimal fuelling can effectively address this issue

Her professional experience includes working at the English Ballet School, where efforts are continuously made to ensure that students are robust and well-conditioned athletes. In her private practice, Maja assists a diverse group of athletes who have encountered difficulties in maintaining a healthy balance of energy intake and output. Additionally, her experience in treating eating disorders has further reinforced her understanding of the often-present connection between sports, under-fuelling, and mental health.

Featured on the show:

Where to find Maja:

Website: www.thebluebirdcentre.com

LinkedIn: Maja Berry

Instagram: @maja.berryrd

Facebook: majaberryrd

Tiktok: @majaberryrd

Important Links:

• • Stay up to date on the Total Performance podcast where you can join Siobhan Milner and guests as we explore the many aspects that come together to build our total performance.

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Transcript for The Power of Carbohydrates for Athletes with Maja Berry, RD, BSc, MSc

Siobhan Milner: [00:00:00] Hi everyone, I’m Siobhan Milner and this is Total Performance, a podcast dedicated to all things athletic performance and injury prevention. Join me and my guests as we explore the many aspects that come together to build our Total Performance picture. Let’s get into it. Welcome, Maya. How are you?

Maja Berry: Good, thanks.

How are you?

Siobhan Milner: Yeah, I’m good, thank you. I’m excited. I’ve been, uh, Well, we’re going to talk about carbohydrates and I was just thinking about it myself because I’ve just been for a run and as you know I’ve had a few thoughts around carbs with the athletes I’m working with so I’m excited to get into the topic.

So maybe we can start with and I know it sounds like a really silly Simple question, but, especially with, as we talked about social media these days, I think it is worth clarifying. What are carbohydrates?

Maja Berry: Carbohydrates are one of the main macronutrients that we have. And I think it’s, it’s a good way to start going back to basics because I think a lot of the time people forget why we have carbs.

So people think about it often in terms of weight gain or weight loss, but [00:01:00] they don’t think about the fact that it gives us energy. So it is the main macronutrient that gives us energy. It is our first point of call. If we are doing any form of exercise with a sitting here, us talking or going for run, both require energy.

And so that is primarily what it is. And then it’s. kind of got different groups, whether it’s a complex carb, so it’s like a starch, or a more basic one like a sugar, and then foods that contain fiber, that’s again, those are all different types of carbohydrates, so it’s a big range of foods.

Siobhan Milner: So we’ve talked about the fact that we need them for energy, it’s our preferred energy source, would there be a reason why, they might be specifically important for athletes versus general population, or is it like it’s important for everyone?

Maja Berry: It’s important for everyone, where it comes to athletes in comparison to the everyday person who maybe doesn’t do as much sports is how much of it we have and, and where and how we incorporate it. So for the general person, making sure that they have some carbs in their day is important [00:02:00] because then they will be less likely having a slump or looking for sugar as an energy source.

But for athletes, we need it to fuel whatever exercise we’re doing. And if we don’t have it, it costs our body. Um, so it becomes incredibly important for an athlete.

Siobhan Milner: And when you say it costs our body, what sort of effect does it have on the body if we’re not getting enough carbs?

Maja Berry: So it is the, it can be a primary reason for relative energy deficiency in sports.

So there’s new consensus guidelines that have come out from the IOC now in October, 2023. So just recently, and what was really amazing about these guidelines is that they Basically stipulate that without carbohydrates, we are at much greater risk of developing reds because we don’t have our fuel to keep us going.

And we don’t have, especially if you’re talking about people who are, aesthetically slimmer. So they don’t have necessarily any reserves or any resources, because basically if we think about how we need energy, if [00:03:00] we’re going for a cycle, we’re going for a run, or we’re doing any kind of. Sport. Our body uses what it has available to it.

If it doesn’t have something instantly available, it breaks it down to use it. So carbs will be the first source. Then it might break down fat. So if we have fat stores that can use that, if it doesn’t have that, it breaks down protein. So we need to make sure that we have the energy from carbs, because if we don’t have energy from fat, for example, because we are of a lean physique, then we’re breaking down muscle to create energy, and that comes at a cost.

So it’s about making sure that we are, having enough throughout the day to not have our body struggle because it doesn’t have enough energy.

Siobhan Milner: The aesthetic thing is an interesting point that I’ve, I’ve mentioned too, I’ve thought about as well, because some of the individual athletes I work with are in aesthetically focused sports, but then I’m also just working with some sports where the uniform means that.

There is kind of a secondary aesthetic focus. So I think again, social media and [00:04:00] a lot of documentaries in the last few years have made people a little bit afraid of carbs, particularly for weight gain. So I wondered, are there any myths around that, that you feel need dispelling?

Maja Berry: I think there are a few things here.

So, so one is the idea of If we are thinking about a generic form of informing people to lose weight, it’s very difficult to say to them, okay, so take your whole day, take a little bit out here, add a little bit more there, remove this. It’s much easier to say, take an entire food group out, because that just makes it an immediate win because everybody pretty much eats carbs.

So you ask everyone to remove carbs entirely, and you’ve got a deficit of three to 500 calories, and you’re most likely going to cause weight loss. Additional to that, we store cover hybrids. So we store them in our liver and our muscle. So if we have a day or two where we have no carbs, the scales will show that we’re lighter, but all we need is a carb meal and that weight will go up again because it’s transitory.

It [00:05:00] moves around. It’s, it’s an energy source that’s there available to us. So there are two quick wins that people who are trying to help. other people lose weight can demonstrate. So one is you’re creating a deficit. The other one is that you are emptying your storage system. So it’s showing a loss. So, you know, you win win you’re showing people that they can lose weight by cutting carbs.

So it isn’t carbs that make us gain or lose weight. It is the fact that there is a deficit. So whether that deficit is from carbs or fats or protein. It doesn’t matter so much as the deficit that makes the difference. But then as well, it’s also about how our food gets used. So if you think that carbohydrates are our first energy source, If we are, we digest it and process it relatively quickly in comparison to protein, protein takes a little bit longer.

So we’re going to feel full for longer by including a protein versus a carb. So again, if you’re trying to get people to have a deficit and you’re asking them to not feel too hungry. focusing on [00:06:00] the protein makes a difference. So, so to me, it’s not that one thing causes us to lose weight and the other one doesn’t.

It’s actually really just cleverly using the different macronutrients to our advantage. But then again, if we’re thinking about, aesthetic sports, when we’re already lean, we’re not looking at foods to cause us to be leaner. We’re looking at foods to fuel our sport so that we’re really good at it. And we’re looking at it to make sure that we stay strong and we’re top of our game.

By focusing on protein, we’re not on top of our game because our body is, is working at cost. So it’s, it’s about thinking about when we talk about healthy eating, we talk about what is good for us. It’s about thinking about the individual that each single person rather than the generic everybody. And for somebody who is an athlete thinking about how they’re going to fuel their training, how they’re going to stay strong.

If they’re wanting to be leaner, yes, you can do that. by an overall reduction or an overall deficit [00:07:00] rather than carbohydrate deficit, which will have a knock on effect to sports and will probably mean that they are not working at their

Siobhan Milner: best. And so this, yeah, this deficit, like this is why we see, for example, people who do the total opposite and they go for the low fat diet.

Again, they’ve cut out like a a big chunk of food groups available to them. And that’s why they end up in a caloric deficit and they’re losing weight as well.

Maja Berry: Yeah. So it’s, it’s not the macronutrient. That’s, that’s the annoying thing. It’s not one particular food. You know, it’s not that if we, I, when I, I worked for a while in, inpatients and I had a girl who was on a chocolate diet, she loved chocolate and she.

had like Nutella, everything, but she was extremely underweight. So underweight that she was an inpatient. So it wasn’t a particular food. You know, everyone sees chocolate as being so unhealthy because it’s going to cause us to gain weight. It’s if you’re having it at a deficit, it’s not going to. So it’s about the overall day and the overall week rather than the individual foods.

Siobhan Milner: You talked about the [00:08:00] costs of not getting enough carbohydrates. So What sort of symptoms or indicators might athletes notice if they are not getting enough carbohydrates?

Maja Berry: For females, a really quick and easy one,, so there are a few, so one will be losing their period. Um, so I work specifically in underfueling and the number of people who come to me because they’ve lost their period, that’s the, the Often the quickest way that we see it and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with a drop in weight.

So I’ve had People where they are within a healthy BMI, but they’ve lost their period because they’re under fueling and over exercising And they haven’t got that balance right and their weight doesn’t necessarily drop as a result But also within that if they go for a high protein high fat diet and a low carb diet Even though their calories are okay They could lose their period because their carb intake doesn’t match their energy expenditure.

So loss of period is one [00:09:00] indicator. Another one can be stress fractures or injuries or being more prone to illness. Um, so I will often get somebody who’s had a stress fracture and, , there might be a little bit of overtraining, but very much under fueling. Um, so that would be a typical one. Or if they’re feeling just really tired, if they feel like they, they are rested, but they’re still just not quite getting on top of their training and it just all feels a bit exhausting.

Those are kind of the main ones that, um, would be referred to me where we wouldn’t, something very specific that we’ve noticed.

Siobhan Milner: One of the things that sticks out to me is, yeah, you can be under fueling without being underweight, because I know for myself as an athlete, there was a point where I realized this, that actually, I performed better.

At, what to me felt like a higher weight actually. And that was, and that was partially to do with how I was fueling.

Maja Berry: Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is the body doesn’t like to lose weight. It’s not very happy to do that. So you’re, it’ll do everything to try and avoid that. So [00:10:00] it is a weird one that we can sometimes lose our period before dropping to a low weight.

It’s just the body trying to cope. Exercise, it has to expend energy and exercise. It does, it’s not given a choice. It isn’t able to say to you, hey, stop a second. I don’t have enough here. It has to expend that, so then it’s how it then has what’s left available, what it does with that. And if there isn’t enough energy available after exercise, then hormones suffer, your body struggles, because it doesn’t have that energy to do the repairing and everything else that it needs to do.

Siobhan Milner: And as you said, if it resorts to breaking down protein instead, especially as athletes, we’re wanting to maintain lean muscle, so it’s a pretty big thing if we don’t have the carbs to spare our protein.

Maja Berry: Yeah, I think one of the most frustrating things I find is that people say they want to build muscle and get leaner, and therefore they need to go high protein, low carb.

But if you aren’t giving your body enough carb to convert the protein into muscle, then it’s [00:11:00] completely wasted. Then it’s actually just, yeah, completely wasted effort.

Siobhan Milner: When it comes to different types of sport, so we’ve got, you know, we’ve got our endurance, we’ve got our team sport, things like that, are there different carbohydrate requirements for these sorts of sports?

Maja Berry: A lot of it depends on, how long the duration of the sport is. So, Louise Burke is like the guru of, anything to do with Sports and nutrition. And she has a lovely little table that tells us kind of how much carbohydrate we should have per day based on our exercise that we’re doing per day or per week.

So, for example, if you are doing an hour per day, and that’s quite consistent, you should be aiming for five to seven grams per kilogram body weight per day. If you’re doing one to three hours, that requirement goes up. If you’re doing endurance where it’s over three hours, that requirement goes up again.

So, the kind of overall day or the overall week will depend on how much sports you’re doing in a day. But again, I think it [00:12:00] is often incredibly hard for us to meet those requirements. So if I take my ballet students, for example, they’re doing four, five, six hours a day. Um, that would mean that they are having something like they should be having something like 10 grams per kilogram body weight per day.

Now I can’t ask them to have 500 grams of carbohydrates per day. So I start with making sure that. is having five grams per kilogram body weight. So that then means that we are covering as much as possible and we have a look at how they manage with that and what the energy levels are, whether they get their period, everything else that goes with it.

So I think her, her requirements are optimistic. Um, and I generally. don’t tend to be able to get as high as the requirements that she suggests.

Siobhan Milner: Do athletes then need to be tracking their carbohydrate intake, do you think?

Maja Berry: So, I get mine too. Um, so, and I prefer it to, a lot of people, athletes and [00:13:00] general population will count calories.

I way prefer counting carbs. because if we have sufficient carbohydrates in the day to match our exercise, we will most likely have sufficient, um, calories overall. So for example, understanding that a slice of bread is 15 grams or a banana is 20 grams, or just having a sense of which foods have what amount of carbohydrate in them can help just having kind of a mental counter in your head, just as an initial, but.

For me, it’s basically that you can appreciate how hard it is to get kind of over 200 grams a day. So, if, if you think that, say, breakfast is 30, lunch is, if it’s a sandwich, it’s only going to be 30. If it’s rice or pasta, it might be 50 to 60. But it’s kind of hard just with three meals to get to, say, for example, 300 grams of carbs.

And if you’re a 60 kilogram female and you’re needing 5 gram per kilogram body weight, it’s, You’re needing 300 grams a day and you [00:14:00] cannot get that from three meals. So then you’re needing to think, okay, so, you know, where are the bananas or the dates or the trek bars or the slice of toaster between or the crumpet or however else to have an understanding of snacks being equally as important to get our carbohydrates as our meals are.

Siobhan Milner: When you said dates, I thought of, I think you shared like a date flapjack or something on Instagram.

Maja Berry: Oh my goodness. That is absolutely, I take that on my cycle. It is like the best.

Siobhan Milner: That looks so good. No, that’s interesting because, again, just for myself, the only thing I ever tracked so much was protein.

Cause I found it so hard to get the minimum amounts of protein. So. It’s interesting to think, you know, actually maybe I should give tracking my carb a go for a week just to see like, am I far off? Because

Maja Berry: I’d be surprised if anyone doesn’t manage to meet their protein requirements. So, so generally we say we need kind of one gram per kilogram body weight, for athletes.

If you are trying to gain muscle and you’re wanting it to be higher. So say for example, you are wanting [00:15:00] it to be two grams per kilogram body weight. We tend to do that already anyway. So if I am analyzing anyone’s intake for the day, I tend to find that they are having double the amount of protein that they need, as in 2 grams per kilogram body weight rather than 1 gram per kilogram body weight.

Trying to get 5 grams per kilogram body weight for the carbohydrate requirements is a lot harder to achieve.

Siobhan Milner: And you mentioned as well, you know, there’s different kinds of carbs we talked about, like simple versus complex. Do athletes need to take any consideration there? And again, does that change depending on the requirements of their sport?

Maja Berry: No, no. So it’s, it’s kind of, okay. So it’s one of those things where if we think of complex, so if we think of oats or rice or pasta or potatoes or whatever, they take longer to be digested and absorbed. So they’re good as our kind of underlying base that we need. Our fast acting ones. So things like. Dates or jelly babies or , you know, those running sports gels or drinks or anything like that.

Those are fast acting. We can have them in 10 [00:16:00] minutes later. We can do exercise and be using those carbohydrates. So those date bars, for example, are perfect because they have the date, which is a fast release, so that’s going to be immediately available to us. And then they have the oats, which are underlying, which will then last over the duration of the time.

So both are really important. Um, I kind of see it as before sport, having something slow and fast release. So say for example, having, overnight oats with honey or this golf or something like that, that’s giving us a slow and fast, and we can use that. And then if we’re doing more than one hour of exercise, we need to top it up with gels or drinks or.

Jelly Babies or something like that, because we need the fast acting one then just to top it up and keep our levels up that we’re using them.

Siobhan Milner: You talked about the duration and how that affects the, the carb as well.

I wonder, I don’t know how it is with ballet, but I’ve worked with some dancers who will do a lot of Long duration [00:17:00] rehearsals that are quite low intensity and I’ve also worked with some sports, uh, that, the same thing, skillsport, where they have a really long duration training or a long duration game, but it’s low intensity.

Do they still need to think about their carbohydrate requirements in the same way other athletes do? So

Maja Berry: I suppose the thought process would be that if you’re doing something really quick and fast, so say, for example, rowing, where it’s, great intensity from the beginning, then keeping them topped up with fast release.

is a really good idea. If it is a slower, longer day, then as long as they are having sufficient carbohydrates, and so long as they are having some that are going to keep them going throughout the day, then whether it’s fast or slow, it doesn’t make as much of a difference because their body will be using it throughout that day.

Period of time. Um, the other thing that I just remembered that I forgot to talk about is one aspect of carbohydrates is also the fiber. So fiber is harder for us to break down. So if [00:18:00] we have a lunch that is with like lentils and lots of vegetables and so on, and we go straight into training afterwards, our body is going to struggle because we’re digesting it with all the fiber that it’s got at the same time as trying to do sports.

So I would leave high fiber foods for periods of time where you’re not immediately going into training because otherwise it could affect your guts. So it’s those three things. So it’s the immediate sugar that’s available. It’s a complex carb that’s available for a longer period of time. And then thinking about when you have the fiber, because that could affect your guts.

Like if you’re going on a run and you’ve got lots of fiber that your body’s busy trying to sort out. It’s not going to be fun.

Siobhan Milner: I know there’s a bit of research around training the gut. And the reason I know this is my, my background was in, uh, adventure racing. So endurance sports. So I had to learn how to eat, uh, and a lot.

But what I’m curious about is, you know, there are some athletes that say, Oh, I just can’t eat beforehand. You know, they have a morning session or something. They’re like, Oh, I just can’t eat [00:19:00] breakfast. Do you have any tips for athletes that struggle with this?

Maja Berry: So I would always say you can train your gut, but I would usually go liquid over food and high glucose over high fiber.

So a lot of athletes might be trying to have like porridge with, um, with berries or fruit or banana or things that are kind of high fiber. I would take as much of the fiber out as possible, um, and go for. like a flapjack equivalent, something that’s giving the sugar release, or a lot of the time I would recommend doing a smoothie.

So having a smoothie where it has milk, oats, banana, berries, honey, somehow the body, firstly, if you don’t have an appetite, a lot of people talk about you, especially if they’re going out training at six o’clock in the morning, they’re not hungry before it to eat anything. So it’s about. trying to work out what kind of food you can eat that won’t feel like it’s sitting heavy in your stomach.

Um, so things like smoothies or just a banana before you go, that’s 20 [00:20:00] grams of carbs. That’s a good fast, quick something to have before you go, or a couple of dates. Again, they’re really easy to eat. They don’t feel too heavy on the stomach. So it’s trying different things out and working out what works best, but I tend to find low fiber, high sugar. liquid type things work better.

Siobhan Milner: I never said this to a dietician, but, uh, when I sometimes run to work in the morning and I have like a short time, I’ll often, if I have leftover potatoes or rice in the fridge, My breakfast.

Maja Berry: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s, I mean, a lot of, a lot of people talk about training their gut to have potatoes, for example, again, we’re not too fussy about what the carbohydrate is.

I’m glad you said that you didn’t say if I’m running out of time, I run out of the house with nothing that as a sports dietitian, I would be unhappy with the fact that having potato or rice.

Siobhan Milner: Perfect. But then the other thing, um, that, and again, you know, maybe this is just me coming from the endurance background because again, we need some slow release and we need some fast [00:21:00] release.

I often, on a long run, just run with candy in my pocket, actually, because we used to use the gels, but, um, I, I didn’t like them that much. And I was like, I feel I get the same thing from just having a little bit of candy.

Maja Berry: But you do, it’s exactly the same. But again, it’s that kind of marketing strategy where sports products are listed as this is going to fuel your sport.

This is really important for you. Look at this. It’s like perfectly packaged, but actually candy, jelly babies, those kinds of equivalents are exactly the same. They’re just listed differently there. They’re suggested as a snack that you don’t have when you exercise in comparison to Clef or Velofort or whatever else, which is listed as a sports.

Equivalent. Um, so, so actually we can, like, I will often prefer to have like a slice of toast with banana as a carbohydrate intake than a Clif Bar because it’s easily accessible, it tastes nice, it does the job, it doesn’t cost a fortune, it’s quick and easy to have. You don’t [00:22:00] need to have products that are specifically for sports.

They will do the job.

Siobhan Milner: You also touched a little bit on the pre versus post training carb in terms of like the kind of carbohydrate that we have pre versus post. But are there any other particular recommendations in terms of the amount of carb before and after? And again, is that affected by the sport and duration?

Maja Berry: So, I would always say to start, to start training, you should be thinking of having a snack of 20 to 30 grams of carbs, then for every hour you should be topping it up with around 30 grams. Then when you are recovering, you’re thinking as much, that’s when protein and carbohydrates as a package are really important because that’s the recovery thing.

And again, the idea is that. We can recover at any point after the sporting event. So, um, the concept is that we kind of have 24 hours to recover, but actually, we also see that the faster we refuel and it’s faster, we [00:23:00] recover from the training that we’ve done, the quicker our body then recovers and is able to do the same again the next day.

If we wait too long, it’s having to use its own stores to replace and do whatever it needs to do, but replacing quickly afterwards, the, they do have different amounts. as in what is best suited for recovery, but typically I would say if you have a meal afterwards or a snack that has like 20 grams carbs, 20 grams protein, you’re covering what you need for the immediate.

And then when you go and carry on having your meals and so on, then you’re recovering nicely. But it’s making sure that afterwards you’re having carbs and protein because that’s then the protein is needed for the muscle recovery as well. So that’s where both together are really important.

Siobhan Milner: And so we said 20 grams was like a banana and 15 grams would be a piece of toast.

Any other easy examples for acids? Yeah, so milk

Maja Berry: is a really good one. So, so we tend to say that like chocolate milk post sports is a really good one because it has a really good combination of carbs [00:24:00] and protein. So we’re recovering well with that. Um, uh, any of the, I’m using bars as an example, so any of the kind of trick or cliff or anything will often have both a slice of toast with peanut butter instead of a slice of toast with banana because then you’re getting the carb and protein.

So it’s thinking about it in terms of the protein and the carbs, so doing the two together. Peanut butter. That seems to be a popular one as well.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah. Peanut butter is really popular over here in the Netherlands, actually. So I think that’s not a, that’s not a hard one to convince athletes of.

Maja Berry: And that’s, it’s, again, it’s one of those weird things where peanut butter is fine, but the slice of toast isn’t.

Whereas to me, the slice of toast is often more important than the peanut butter because it’s needed as an energy fuel. So it’s, it’s trying to think about why these foods are so popular. What’s kind of, Given them peanut butter used to be something that everyone was told not to have. Now all of a sudden it’s the thing that we all have to have.

So it’s these kind of ideas change and [00:25:00] I think they’re just often good marketing strategies.

Siobhan Milner: Sure and and they change but they come back too. You know, like that it’s like it’s high carb, it’s low carb, it’s high fat, it’s low fat, like you see it come and go.

Maja Berry: Yeah I mean carbs once upon a time used to be popular.

You wouldn’t think that now.

Siobhan Milner: Yeah again it’s it’s the marketing and and it’s also. I think doing the simple things consistently isn’t very sexy.

Maja Berry: Yeah, it’s, it’s a lot harder to say, you know, take a little bit out, have a little bit more vegetables, watch how much you have overall in the day, much easier just to have a generic, this is what you need to do.

But it’s also, I think the thing that people forget so much is what am I trying to do with this healthy nutrition? What is healthy for me as an individual is going to be entirely different to what somebody else needs for, for good nutrition. And, and that’s the part that gets lost in the whole, this is good for me.

Because we’re not thinking about ourselves as an individual anymore. We’re just seeing, oh, they’re all telling us that we should be eating more [00:26:00] of this. We’re not thinking why, we’re not thinking what’s good about it, we’re not thinking about what the ingredients are that make that product good for us.

We’re just, oh, everyone’s talking about peanut butter therefore we all have to have peanut butter.

Siobhan Milner: We, you just mentioned vegetables actually and I’m, I’m curious because I know there’s some people that go on, you know, these low carb diets or they’re interested in them and sometimes you’ll see fruit and vegetables and things.

get cut out or or they’ll only eat fruit and vegetables and they’ll cut out bread and things like this. Are fruit and vegetables a good carb source for us to consider or do we need to really make sure we’re getting a lot of bread as well? Like how can athletes think about that?

Maja Berry: Again, we have to think about the fiber aspect of it.

So yes, fruit and vegetables have carbs, some more complex than others, but they have a lot of fiber. And there is more research coming out that actually the fiber stops a lot of the absorption of a lot of these fruits and vegetables. So although it says that it has a certain amount of carb, we can’t be sure that it has as much as is indicated.

But then the other part is if we are [00:27:00] having, for example, an apple while cycling, there’s a lot of fiber that the body is having to break down as well, which is harder for it to do. So having a slight, again, it’s thinking about when we have these. foods. Having an apple before or during training can be harder for the stomach to digest in comparison to a slice of toast.

Um, it’s again thinking about white bread versus brown bread. So your white bread is more easily digested because it doesn’t have fiber. So it could be that when you are cycling or running or doing a training, having a honey sandwich with white bread is more important than having a brown equivalent because your stomach is more sensitive to having to digest fiber.

So with fruit and vegetables, I would never count them as the key component of the carbohydrate intake of the day. So I often have to work with people where they’ve decided that lentils are a carb and I’m having to train them that actually they need to add in rice or pasta or potatoes or things like that because it [00:28:00] just, it doesn’t have enough per portion in comparison.

You know, if you think that rice has around 60 grams per portion, lentils have half of that. So yes, there might be some, but it’s also with fibers, also with proteins, just not giving us what, as much as we need.

Siobhan Milner: Is there anything else that you feel like you want people to know about carbohydrate or about nutrition in general, especially as athletes.

Maja Berry: I think, I think the really key one is the other one is timing, um, and the idea of training fasted. So I know that’s kind of with intermittent fasting and fasting in general, there’s the idea that we should train first thing in the morning without having had any nutrition. Um, on the whole, I cannot think of a good reason to do that.

Um, again, if we look at any research by Louise Burke, for example, um, she has shown that Although trading fasted can have an effect on glycogen storage and how it gets used over the longer period of [00:29:00] time, it makes no difference if you’re trading fasted or not, um, your body still ends up responding in the same way and needing carbs.

generally. Um, her, the idea was that if you trained faster, you use fat stores and then, but actually if we’re thinking of, again, if we’re thinking of the person who has a lighter frame is a leaner person, we have to be thinking that we are needing to refuel all the time. And doing kind of three meals a day and not prioritizing snacks is, is not going to be something that’s going to be helpful for that person.

So, a lot of the time when I’m working with individuals who are struggling with REDS, the main things that I’m doing is, A, making sure there’s overall enough calories in the day. B, making sure that there are enough carbohydrates in the day. And often I’m having to add additional carbohydrates cause there just isn’t enough.

And then the third really important one is the timing of it. So going for a run first thing in the morning, coming home for breakfast doesn’t help. Even if you’ve [00:30:00] had a good dinner the night before, because you need to be giving your body something for that training. So that’s why I was saying like, when you go for a short run on your way to work, for example, having the potatoes or the jelly babies or something like that, is a really, that’s more, it’s an optimal way of fueling.

Going and not giving yourself that and maybe just having a coffee, the coffee will make you feel like you’ve got the energy because you’ve got the caffeine, but it’s not giving you actual energy. So your body is going to struggle and it’s not going to recover as quickly or as easily.

Siobhan Milner: And I think that the other thing is it’s probably a little bit like dehydration, where also if you’re not appropriately fueled beforehand or not appropriately hydrated, then that quality of that session is probably going to drop.

And if you’re an athlete, you’re needing specific quality from specific sessions, then it’s really important to think.

Maja Berry: Exactly. Yeah. And that’s that’s as much for that training session and the recovery from it to then be able to go and do the same again the next day. So for a lot of athletes, they’re training twice a day or they’re training quite [00:31:00] intensely for a longer period of time.

They need to be thinking about their recovery and they need to be thinking about how they’re feeling. Um, to get the best out of their body.

Siobhan Milner: Awesome. Thank you so much, Maya. Where can people find you if they’re interested to learn a little bit more about you and your work?

Maja Berry: So I have a website called, the Bluebird Center, and then my Instagram is maya. berryrd. Um, so I kind of separate the sports from the eating disorders because I do both. So it’s mayaberry on Instagram, but the Bluebird Center on my website.

Siobhan Milner: Cool. Thank you so much.

Maja Berry: No problem. Thank you.

Siobhan Milner: Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode.

I hope you enjoyed it. Just a reminder that you can find further podcast episodes at http://www.siobhan-milner.com/podcast. And this is where you can also find different ways of working with me if you get to http://www.siobhan-milner.com Enjoy!