What The Fat? Sports Performance: Leaner, Fitter, Faster on Low-Carb Healthy Fat. by Schofield Grant & Zinn Caryn & Rodger Craig

Author:Schofield, Grant & Zinn, Caryn & Rodger, Craig [Schofield, Grant]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: The Real Food Publishing Company
Published: 2015-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

Athlete profile: Emilie Rennell

Age: 34

Height: 170 cm

Weight: 71 kg

Occupation: Personal trainer

Sport: Boxing

Sport history: Equestrian; trail running; boxing

Sporting career highlights: Won all boxing fights

Emilie began her sporting career representing New Zealand as an equestrian, moving on to trail running for several years, and then finally discovering her sporting passion, boxing. At the time she was studying to be a personal trainer and she describes her defining moment for her boxing passion as when she learned how to pad-hold for clients. She was hooked and decided to join a boxing gym and started working with one of New Zealand’s female boxing greats, Daniella Smith.

‘I’ve only had four competitive fights, two at 64kg and two at 62kg,’ Emilie says, humbly, ‘but I’m proud to say I’m as yet undefeated!’

Like any sport, boxing comes with its own set of challenges, and for Emilie it was trying to ‘make weight’ to fight in a 62–64kg weight class.

‘The advice that I got to lose the 3 kilograms I needed to lose was from Caryn, the dietitian – at that stage she had her mainstream hat on – however, it worked at the time and I lost the weight I needed to, and won my fights. But, looking back, I was always hungry; eating 6–7 meals every day – my life was ruled by food. I had to get food every couple of hours to eat due to constant hunger.’

It was only several years later when she switched to LCHF eating that her world really changed. It went something like this:

‘I reconnected with Caryn after seeing her Low Carb Down Under talk on YouTube. I thought, if Caryn’s into LCHF, then that’s good enough to give me the confidence to get started. By the time I went to see her I’d already been diligently tracking my food and my carbs were really low (around 25 grams per day), but my protein was quite high (around 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight). So we thought we’d just test my ketones even though Caryn was convinced I wasn’t in ketosis because my protein was higher than what’s recommended. And what do you know? I was well in ketosis, a reading of 2.6 mmol/l, in fact.’

‘Running fat-adapted was blissful! The instant energy that I had totally blew my mind. I had absolutely no muscle soreness from running or from boxing training. I’d go out training on empty or on a coffee with a bit of cream and felt like I could go on forever.’

Some fine-tuning to Emilie’s diet saw her body fat drop further and her strength improve. It was several weeks later when she started feeling like she couldn’t quite reach her top end intensity during some of her harder training sessions. ‘My legs were a bit dead during a hard workout (especially during my 100-metre sprints or sparring sessions) and I felt that I was just not able to get to that top gear.’

What Emilie found out next was that this was all part of the plan.

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