Kelsey Marksteiner: Yeah, that’s a big problem, I think, for a lot of athletes, especially if they’re working out in the morning like you’re mentioning here. They will feel like they don’t want to eat whole foods because, at least from what I hear from people, it sits in their stomach or they feel nauseous. It just doesn’t sit well overall. The carbohydrate supplements, you mentioned one here, Vitargo H2. I tried looking that up, and I couldn’t really find it, so if you’re on the call today, send in a link if you can because for some reason I couldn’t really find that one.
Those could potentially be useful, in general, carbohydrate supplements, things like that, though I would see if your client could maybe tolerate something like an organic baby food that’s high in carbs. I know that sounds kind of weird, but I’ve had people who did that before, where they just eat those. There are little baby food packets that they make now, and you can just squirt them right in your mouth. It’s basically a big bolus of carbs, and that works well for people because it’s very easily digested and doesn’t sit in your stomach. If they can do that, that would probably be a better option, but if they can’t, again, it comes down to what is going to be the lesser of two evils, I guess. If they are going to eat nothing or they’re going to eat a carbohydrate supplement, I’d probably say doing the carbohydrate supplement is better. But again, you kind of have to weigh those pros and cons for each individual client, too, because for some people, maybe fasting is going to be OK. I’d say for most, it makes sense for them to have a preworkout meal like we’ve been talking about this week in the exposome section. If they can’t do any sort of food, even something like baby food, then, yeah, maybe the carbohydrate supplement isn’t that bad, but if they can do something a little bit more whole-food based, that would be fantastic.
Someone was saying, too, that they’ve used UCAN, which is a slow-release, non-GMO corn carb instead of Vitargo, which is high glycemic, and had great results. Good. Yeah, that could be a great option for someone who’s looking for something before their workout in the morning if they can’t tolerate a lot of food. Here’s the link to that corn option. Again, like I was saying at the beginning of this call, this is going to be if your client tolerates corn. And this is more processed corn. Sometimes that actually is a little bit easier for people if it’s just like a digestive complaint that they’re getting with it. Sometimes when it’s processed like this, it actually can be a little bit easier on the digestive system. This will be something, of course, that you have to just try with people and see how they do with it, and if they’re dealing with other major health conditions when they come to you, you may want to focus on those things first. You may want to not do things like this right off the bat.
In general, when you’re dealing with athletes who are also sick, you’re going to run into a little bit of trouble usually just with them wanting to continue their athletic pursuits as heavily as ever but they’re very sick, and you do have to do some education on exercise as a stressor so they realize that they are putting their body under some stress when it’s already under stress from being ill. There has to be this ongoing dialogue about stuff like that and just education about how right now might not be the best time to be very focused on athletic pursuits. They may need to cut back. They possibly were overtraining, which maybe even put them into an ill state to begin with, so that needs to be a big, big part of the counseling that you go through with your clients if that’s a potential issue. You probably want to use some of that motivational interviewing that we’ve talked about before to get them to come to the conclusion that cutting back on exercise is a good idea at this point. It doesn’t mean that they can never go back to it, but it means that right now the health impact it’s having is not a good one and it’s not acting as a good stressor, necessarily, in the amounts that they’re currently doing it, so they may need to cut back in order to improve their health so that eventually they can go up to higher levels of exercise.