Society prescribes a certain approach to food and health, but this does need to be the only way. Alex McDonald proved that an unorthodox wellness approach is possible by running five consecutive marathons in just five days – all without eating anything. In this conversation with Daniel Weinberg, he shares how he pulled off this extraordinary feat through ketogenic diet combined with sheer dedication. He also dispels some common misconceptions surrounding cholesterol and heart disease, as well as the true impact of carbohydrates on blood sugar and insulin.
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5 Marathons In 5 Days While Fasting – Turning Pain Into Gratitude With Alex McDonald
For this episode, we have Alex McDonald, a phenomenal man who is able to complete five marathons in five consecutive days while fasting. He proves the ability to turn pain into gratitude.
Welcome to the show, Alex. How are you?
Great. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Awesome to have you. Are you at home now? Where are you?
I’m in Sydney, Australia.
Managing Food And Lifestyle Choices
We’re going to talk about why we manage our food and our healthy lifestyle. Society prescribes to us many different ways of living, but the traditional way is what we learn at school and how we are brought up at home, and the traditional food pyramid. You have taken what I would consider a completely unorthodox approach, very much against the grain. I’d love to dig in and talk about how you started that journey and explain to the audience the type of diet or healthy lifestyle that you’ve now been involved in for quite a number of years, and we’ll start that discussion. How did you get involved in where you’re at now?
To cut to it, what do I do? I do the complete opposite of what I grew up to learn as the appropriate nutrition, so I turned it on its head. How did I start with that? For me, I’m always fascinated by the outliers. The people who do things a bit differently. They break all the rules, but they achieve results that are extraordinary. That started years ago, which is when I got into this. It all started with a guy called Arthur De Vany. The guy was in his 60s, and he was set off by the blood work of a 30-year-old. He was fit. He was lifting things. He was playing with his grandkids, and he’d be the first picked on their team.
Where is this guy from?
He’s in the States, I believe. He wrote a book called The New Evolution Diet. I was in my late twenties. Someone had mentioned that I should look him up, and he popped up on my feed. I don’t want to read. I like to consume everything. I had to read and went, “This is awesome. This guy is getting these amazing results.” I thought, “How does he do it?” He took an evolutionary approach, which was a simple rule. If it didn’t exist 20,000 years ago, don’t eat it. That was it, and then exercise. Lift heavy things and run fast when you can as much as possible.
How would you describe your diet pre your change? What were you doing exercise-wise?
I grew up in the ‘80s. It was very much the food pyramid. I have my cereal for breakfast. I’d consider myself healthy because I have half a jug of juice, fruit, and all that stuff. I was in my late twenties. I had a banking career. I certainly drank way too much. I was an average guy, but I’d be doing gym three times a week, trying to be fit and healthy, but I look like everyone else.
In your late twenties, you’re indestructible, too. I didn’t have a medical reason to go into it. It was more through my curiosity, I would say. This guy was in his 60s and healthier than a 30-year-old. I thought, “This is cool. I have one month. I’ll do what he did and give it a go. If it works for me, then let’s find that middle ground or somewhere in between.”
What did you do?
All I did was cut out anything that was processed. No sugar. Anything in a packet, don’t eat it. If it was natural, then we’re good. Back then, it was called the Paleolithic approach. I only ate what our Paleolithic ancestors would have eaten. There were no grains and no processed anything. It was lots of meat, vegetables, and fruit, and that was about it. I only drink water. No soft drinks or any of that stuff. I did it for 30 days. I went, “30 days of all in. Let’s see what happens, and then I’ll find that middle ground.” To be honest, in those 30 days, it was like a coming-to-Jesus moment. I’ve never felt better in my life. What I used to think felt good was not even close.
When you say you feel so good, how would you describe the feeling? Is it like a clear head? Is it energy? Is it sleeping well? What are we talking about?
All of the above. You wake up in the morning, and you’re bouncing out of bed. You’re like, “I’m ready to go.” Mental clarity rocks it all day. There wasn’t that low after lunch, like, “I don’t feel pretty good. I need to have a coffee. How am I going to get through?” Staring at my watch even at 9:00 AM after eating breakfast at 7:30, going, “It’s another three hours till lunch. How am I going to get that?” None of that.
It was rock solid. I can’t concentrate on my day and stay mentally sharp right to the end. When I lay down at the end of my day, I’d be tired, but I’d go to sleep like that. I wake up feeling fresh and go again. I was like, “This is amazing.” To give you an idea, I’d wake up, and previously, it would have felt like I used to wake up every day with a hangover, so to speak, and now I wasn’t. It wasn’t that I was drinking. It was due to alcohol. The difference was that stark.
Is that what paleo is?
Paleo is probably the step before you get to low carb. If you start with your traditional mainstream food pyramid or MyPlate or whatever you want to call it, it is very much heavy on the processed grains, the cereals, the bread, and the rice. Not that it’s part of the recommendations, but the normal diet has a lot of processed foods. There are a lot of takeaways. There’s a lot of fried food and all that. It’s the normal diet. To step away from that is to cut out the obvious stuff.
The paleo is cut out of anything that’s been manufactured. If it doesn’t look like something that you would get in nature, you don’t need it. That’s it. That means it’s been processed. That’s the simple rule of thumb. By doing that, the difference was incredible. From there, I was like, “If I feel this good, there’s no way I can go back to eating what I was eating.” My curiosity got to me again. It was like, I need to understand why. I did that and I achieved it.
Did you continue with it moving forward, or after the post-experiment, did you go back to your normal eating ways? Did you already start adjusting to, “I’m going to stick to this, only water, food, vegetables, and meat?”
After a month, I can’t go back. I was stuck with it, but like everyone, you do that for a week, and then you go out with the boys on the weekend. You go for a nice dinner, and you’re like, “I’ll have a day off.” How I’d wake up, it was the old me. I feel garbage again. It was that reminder. I was like, “Let’s not do that again.” The next time, I might stretch it out for weeks, then I have another dinner or something, and go back and have a day where I have a blowout. I’d feel crap again. It was rinse and repeat.
Each time I did the rinse and repeat, the gaps got bigger. Eventually, it got to the point of, when you have tequila, you’re like, “The best night ever.” The next day, you feel like death, and it’s like, the next time around you go, “Is it worth me doing that again for fun because I know I’m going to pay the price?” For me, it became a similar thing. It was like, “Is this all going to be worth it, or is this event going to fall off the wagon? Am I happy to pay the price tomorrow?” Eventually, I got to a point where it’s not anymore.
The paleo diet cuts out all kinds of manufactured food. If it does not look like something you would get in nature, do not eat it. Share on XSocially, though, does that not impact it? I’m sure you’ve got a good and big bunch of mates who would regularly go out and have a good time. If you choose this path, does it not affect your social experience? Are you excluding yourself or isolating yourself from your crowd?
Back then, I may have had a little bit because you say what you’re doing, and people look at you like you’ve got two heads. You learn. You go, “I won’t tell anyone,” but no one knows where stuff’s being passed around. Looking to see if I’m only eating the hamburger patties and not the pizza. No one cares if I’m eating dim sum or not. It’s not that. I’m in my late twenties. I was still drinking, and I would still do that. I found that the benefits I got from getting my nutrition right weren’t being destroyed by even having some drinks when I would go out.
I’d still have a bender and have a big night. I’m not saying that’s healthy, but the benefits I got from getting the rest of my week right were huge. I was able to navigate that, but now I’m in my 40s. I have young kids. It’s not that I go out for benders. It’s pretty rare of all. It’s a very different life now and much easier. From there, it was like, “I need to understand how and why this works.” That took me down the rabbit hole of understanding the science behind it, and there’s a big piece of that. The more I understood it, and the more I followed things all the way through to the source.
When you say that you went down the rabbit hole, what did you do? Who are your resources or sources of information? Did you go and speak to the doctors? How did you do the research?
You’d start out with the recommendations and go, “This is what the American Heart Association says, or this is X, Y, and Z.” The nerd in me goes, “I’d read that. They’d say, “These are the sources that we were referring to.” I’d read the papers and I’d be like, “The recommendation says that this thing is not white. It’s black.” There’s the source that says it’s black, and I read the source says, “It’s white.” They don’t agree.
Once you see these things where things don’t agree with the source, you’re like, “What’s the actual truth here?” The thing that brought it all together for me was a book written by Gary Taubes. I think he was released in about 2011 or 2012. It’s called Good Calories, Bad Calories. I highly recommend it. It is the Bible in terms of the history of nutrition research. It tells the political story but also dives into every paper and gives the narrative of good calories and bad calories. It changed my life.
Half the book is probably 400 pages long, or 500 and 250 would be references to the pages of all about what he studied. He’s interviewed 700 of them. I think it was 700 of the top people around the world who would write all those papers and ask their opinions and all that. It was an eye-opener. From there, it’s a house of cards. Everything that I had been taught, which was reassuring because the way that I felt doing the complete opposite was consistent with what the science was telling me, once I got to where the actual source was.
Contradictions And Misconceptions About Healthy Living
Can you give some examples when you read something like Good Calories, Bad Calories? There are contradictions in what’s being presented, what is being prescribed to society, and what the reality is. Can you give an example of something you saw and went, “That doesn’t make sense?”
The perfect example is heart disease. It’s the number one killer in the world. Everyone goes, “I know what causes heart disease. High cholesterol. Don’t eat fat because it clogs your arteries.” That’s what everyone is embedded in. There’s a backstory to that. It started probably in the 1940s or 1950s, when heart disease was not a thing. It was around a little bit, but there were two competing theories. One was saturated fat, causing the issue, and the other was sugar.
There were two guys answering keys on the cholesterol side of things. I think Robert Lustig was his name. There are two stories, fat versus sugar. As it turns out, Ancel Keys was called a very charismatic guy at the time, and he carried a lot of weight. His competing theory was the one that won out. It won out because of a study that he published, which was called the Seven Countries Study.
He said, “We’ll go around the world. Let’s have a look at everyone’s fat intake or saturated fat intake. Look at their cholesterol levels and plot on a chart how many of them died.” They have this nice correlation going, “The more fat they eat, the higher the cholesterol, the more they die. I think I’ve done that the right way.” The reality was, when you look at his papers, there weren’t seven countries in there. There were 23. If you put all 23 in there, all the correlation disappears.
He cherry-picked the data to show that fat causes cholesterol. Can you explain why he had that bias? What was the motivation to be biased with the data? What was he trying to do?
It wasn’t that fat causes cholesterol. It does. It was more the tenuous length that high cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. That is the thing.
Why was he trying? Why did he want to show that? Is that something so he could sell or create something like a drug? What was the reason or the motivation for him to manipulate the data, for lack of a better word?
Essentially, everyone in that field of the academic world was about, “How do I build a name and make a name for myself in this space?” The guy who was on the cover of Time Magazine is the greatest guy ever that saved the whole world because he’s discovered this thing that’s going to save us from heart disease. There’s the ego there. It’s a big part of that, and being a very dominating character while being very charismatic. Those who opposed his view, he was very good at shutting them down and winning the political battle about it, which is, in every sense of the word, unscientific because he’s not objective. It’s not the objective truth that matters. It’s about proving who is right.
You’re saying to this day, in my mind, when you hear from people, that it is still quite an accepted piece of science or data, where people generally believe cholesterol is bad for you. It causes heart disease. I’ve had friends who are on drugs like Lipitor. My father was or may still be on anti-cholesterol medication. Are you suggesting that it’s not right, or is some of it right?
The starting point is that it’s the most studied theory in all of nutrition, the link between cholesterol and heart disease. There’s a strong callosal effect. The reality is, even with all of that, there is no evidence to support that. None whatsoever. The only evidence on papers that ever do support it is what’s called epidemiological studies. To put it pretty simply, it’s like saying let’s take a population of 10,000 people and this is how fast it is.
We’ll say, “Of those 10,000, let’s interview them all and give them a questionnaire saying, how much meat did you eat in the last week? Let’s extrapolate that over the last ten years. We’ll ask them once and see what that is.” They’ll run all our data. Put it in through their models and do some fancy modeling on it, but it’s garbage in and garbage out. It doesn’t matter how fancy your models are. If I ask you, what did you eat three weeks ago on Tuesday morning? I couldn’t tell you. Tell me what you ate, to the gram, of exactly what it was. Is it a sandwich? Is it a pizza with meat, or is it lasagna meat? What is it? All of those things get lost.
All of these papers then go, “Let’s collate all of that data, and then we’ll track these people through time, who died.” We’ll look at their data and say, “Based on these people, there’s quite an association between those who ate what we’ll define to be high fat because of what they answered in that one questionnaire over that ten-year period and their outcomes.” It’s farcical to think that one thing was the one thing that caused all of those issues because they don’t take into account any things around what their lifestyle was like, do they smoked or drank, how old they were, what their other ailments were, or what their family history was. All that stuff gets lost.
Tracking Every Single Thing You Eat
We’re told all these things, and most of us comply with what our doctors are telling us and what nutritionists are telling us. You simply said, “I’m not convinced. I need to go deeper. I need to look further.” You went on the journey, and where did you arrive? Where did you get to? Tell us that journey and where you are now diet diet-wise?
The impetus was I thought amazing after that first month in the first period. I did what anyone would do. I was like, “You’ve got to try this. It’s the best. You’ve got to do this. It’s awesome.” I expected them to go. “Yes, you’re so right.” Anyway, I got slammed. I’ve got a lot of doctor friends who would be like, “You’ve lost your mind. You’re a lunatic. I used to think you were a smart guy. Come on. Wake up.” From there, it kicked me into gear. It was like, “I’m going to track everything.” I tracked everything I ate and all my blood markers. I’ve done that for years. The data I have on it is extensive because it became, “Don’t just trust me. This is hard data on what is happening to my body.”
When you say you tracked everything, are you saying you wrote down all the food you had and you took blood on a regular basis, and you wore a glucose monitor? Talk through it.
It is not the objective truth that matters. It is about proving who is right. Share on XI started this in 2010 or 2011. Early days, it was a couple of years into that. People are like, “I don’t believe the quantity that you ate and the fact that you’re not fat like the rest of us. This doesn’t reconcile.” I was like, “I’ll keep a food diary,” and so I did for nine months. I’ve got under a thousand meals. I recorded everything that went into my mouth, and I’ve tracked all the data. I can share that with you.
It showed me on my macros and all that. Nine months is a long time. I only stopped it after nine months because I was like, “I don’t need to do this any longer. This has been ages.” It was real data. From there, I went on to experiments wearing continuous glucose monitors. I’m wearing those things on your arm that tell you what happens to your blood sugar.
What does a glucose monitor do?
A blood glucose monitor is a proxy for your blood sugar level. When you eat or consume food, any micronutrients, like food and drink, can be anything, but there are different types of foods that will impact your blood sugar. Underlying all disease, I firmly believe, it stems from controlling your blood sugar. When we have out-of-control blood sugar, the extreme version of that is type 2 diabetes, or effectively what’s called insulin resistance.
If you think of blood sugar as the fire, insulin is the hormone that brings down or puts out the fire. Your body needs to regulate its blood sugar through a very tight band, and to do so, whatever you eat, or particularly what causes your blood sugar to spike, is carbohydrates. Fat does not. Protein does such a minimal amount, but it doesn’t even move the dial compared to carbohydrates.
When you say carbohydrate, you’re saying everything from what’s considered to be a healthy carbohydrate, like a banana, to something like an ice cream, which is full of sugar. Does the banana have as much impact on your blood glucose level going up as something like a Mars bar?
Yes, and that’s part of what I track. I did the experiment wearing this, and what I did was I had a glass of water. I put four teaspoons of sugar in it, drank that, and saw what happened to my blood sugar. A massive spike. The next day, I went to drink a glass of water and have a banana, and let’s see what happens, then I tracked that. I tracked it against the glass of water with four teaspoons of sugar in it, and it was astounding. It was identical.
Tell us what happens between the banana and four teaspoons of sugar.
What was astounding was that whether it was a banana, plain rice, white rice, brown rice, or cereal. It doesn’t matter.
I remember when we talked about this. There’s a belief among people that brown rice, for example, is way healthier than white rice. I remember having this debate with you, and you said, “No, let me show you. I’ve done a paper on this. I’m going to record.” You showed that the white rice has a quicker peak than the brown rice, but the brown rice will give you the same blood glucose level. It will just go over a longer period of time. Is it something like that? Is that right?
That’s spot on.
There’s no real health benefit difference by going, “I’m going to go healthy and have brown rice.” That’s a fallacy. Is that what you’re saying?
That’s right. My analogy is like you’re driving on the road. If you skid off the road and you’re under the dirt and you’re in bad territory. White rice makes a skid off a long way, and then you come back pretty quickly, but you go off a long way, which is bad. The brown rice means you get off and you’re on the gravel. You’ll sit there for ages, and then you bring yourself back in.
Equal effects but different ways they affect.
Over a different time frame. It’s useful to know this. The reason is that high blood sugar is bad. The hormone that brings it down is what’s called insulin. Insulin brings it down and puts out the fire, so to speak. Insulin is what they call a fat accumulation of hormones. People say you get fat because you eat fat. It’s bollocks. You eat fat because your insulin is out of control, or your blood sugar is out of control, and you’re pumping your body fluid of insulin.
The easiest way to demonstrate that is when you’re a type-2 diabetic who needs to inject themselves with insulin to bring their blood glucose down because their body is not producing enough insulin to do the job. They have to do it externally. You have to do it in different spots. If I did it on my arm repeatedly in the same spot, my arm would look normal, and there would be a massive ball of fat that would accumulate precisely where the insulin was.
Anywhere there is insulin in your body, your body will accumulate fat at that spot, which is why you have to move it around your body, because you want to spray the fat out so you don’t look like a weirdo with a fat arm because you’ve done it in the same spot. Most people do it on their legs, but that’s part of the reason they move it around. Once you understand that, you say, “While my body is full of insulin, I’m accumulating fat. It’s like the fat trigger is on.”
Back to the brown rice example, the white rice gets my insulin high, so lots of fat is accumulating. Brown rice takes me off the road, but insulin is there. Not as much, but for longer. Now the machine is working longer, accumulating the fat. The whole game is, how do I make sure my insulin is as low as possible all the time? That’s it. It’s as simple as, if ever I eat something that makes my blood sugar spike, my insulin has to bring it down. More insulin, more fat, that’s the problem. Don’t eat anything that makes your blood sugar spike.
If the insulin isn’t responding, your fat is building up. Is that what you’re saying?
I’m saying it’s a glucose chain reaction. Whenever you eat a carbohydrate, specifically glucose. When you’re eating glucose, your blood sugar goes high. That is life-threatening. It needs to come down. To bring it down, you need insulin, which is the hose to put out the fire or the water to put out the fire. While insulin is acting to do its good job of bringing the blood glucose down, it does other things in your body, but quite a lot of other things. One of those things is that it instructs the cells to store some of that glucose, convert it to fat, and store it in your fat cells. That’s how we clear it. That’s how you get it out of your blood system.
That’s how you get fat.
That’s the game. If you can keep your blood sugar low, your insulin will always be low, which means you are now in fat-burning mode. That was a pivotal moment once I understood that.
Adopting A Healthier Diet
Once you understood that through the experience, you then adjusted your diet again. Is that the point where you started eliminating all carbohydrates? You started taking all the fruits?
If you think of blood sugar as the fire, insulin is the hormone that puts it out. Share on XThere was another angle to it. For me, fat loss wasn’t a problem because I’d been doing this for a long time. I was already very lean. The part that I learned was, while you are consuming, call it glucose. Glucose is an energy source. Your body uses it for energy. Everyone knows that, but while you’re doing that, the amount of glucose you can store in your body is only a small amount. It’s a maximum of about 2,000 calories. Picture a small fuel tank on our body. I’m pretty lean. I’m about 14% to 15% body fat. It sounds high, but it puts me in the top 4% of lean individuals for my age, given the world we’re in.
Even at those numbers, I’ve got more than 100,000 calories of available energy on my body, stored as fat. Coming back to insulin, whenever my insulin is high, it locks the door to that fat storage. I can’t access it. My body won’t use it, and it’s using this tiny fuel tank. It burns through that quickly, and that’s why you’re ravenously hungry two hours after you have a bowl of pasta, because you’ve consumed all this glucose, and your body is not aware or can’t access the fat that’s on your body. It has to run out of the fuel tank and give in some more, which is where your hunger signals come into it.
For me, it was not a fat story. What I learned is that you can train your body to not only use this small glucose fuel tank, and say, “Let’s look at this massive fuel tank of fat that I’ve got on my body.” Theoretically, if I’ve only got 2,000 calories of glucose and I’ve got 100,000 calories of available energy in fat. I’m going to tap into it. That means I could go 50 times longer. Imagine having 50 times more energy in your day. That was what took me to the next stage.
I want to recap. There are a lot of numbers being thrown away. Let’s say I’m going to have two big balls of pasta. What you’re saying is that the most calories and calories that equal energy. The only calories that I can have from eating this that my body will accept in the short-term period are up to 2,000 calories, and I can use them for energy.
If I eat more food that could potentially produce in excess of 2,000 calories, that goes into becoming fat straight away, because the human body can only have up to 2,000 calories. It can be used to produce calories at any one time. When people are thinking they need to eat carbs for energy, the amount that you’re eating most of the time, you are more likely to eat more than you can use at any one time. Is that what you’re suggesting?
Yes. There are two parts to that. One is, let’s be clear. The truth 2,000 calories is what’s the form of glucose, which is stored in your body in the form of glycogen. It’s what it’s called. Everyone understands glycogen in your muscles. You want to talk about your glycogen before you do a big race, etc. That’s what we’re talking about. The maximum you can hold in your body is 2,000 calories. It doesn’t matter. You cannot top that up anymore. That’s the size of the fuel tank. You tapped out.
That’s the size of our petrol tank.
Correct. One of your petrol tanks. You’ve got one petrol tank, which is glycogen, and you’ve got another form of stored energy, which is fat. Everyone understands that we’ve got those two. Now, the thing is, if you’re always topping up this one, your body goes, “I don’t need to be efficient in converting fat to energy because you’re always feeding me every two hours. I never even have to do that.”
The magic comes from when you cut out the regular intake of carbohydrates, your body produces its own glycogen and its own glucose, which is an absolute fact, and no one can deny this. The required amount of carbohydrate essential for life that you need to eat is 0 grams. That is not an essential nutrient.
Dealing With The Outdated Food Pyramid
In the food pyramid that we all learn, and what nutritionists in general prescribe to us around carbohydrates, how many carbohydrates are they saying that we should have in our day? When they tell us, you could have some fruit. We should be on a balanced diet. What are we being told today that you’re effectively dispelling?
If you use the food pyramid, it’s a bit outdated now. You have the MyPlate with the section of it, but the vast majority of it, I would say half to two-thirds, would be the base of that should be complex carbohydrates. That’s the bread and pasta, and that sort of thing. I couldn’t tell you the exact number of servings, but it’s a crazy amount, given that the required amount for any glucose is zero.
It’s probably a useful thing to understand. People go, “I’ll cut out the sugar, but I’ll eat the complex carbohydrates because they’re good,” like the pasta and the rice. A quick lesson, complex carbohydrates are nothing more than sugar. Sugar molecules are glucose and fructose. Two things, two molecules bound together, that’s sugar. Fructose is the sweet one. Glucose is the bit that spikes your blood sugar, like insulin.
That’s what you get from fruits. Is that correct?
You’ll have both, but fructose tastes sweet, and glucose doesn’t taste sweet, which is why rice doesn’t taste sweet. It’s full of glucose, but it doesn’t taste sweet. Banana does because they’re high in fructose, which is sweet. The other thing to remember, it’s the glucose part of the sugar that causes your blood sugar to spike. A complex carbohydrate, by definition of complex, is a glucose molecule and a glucose molecule, a whole chain of those.
Glucose plus fructose, you mean?
Only glucose. Complex carbohydrates are all of those. As Dr. David neatly put it, he says, “All it is, is glucose molecules holding hands.” That’s what a complex carbohydrate is. All of them. As soon as you ingest it, the hands let go, and it’s glucose. Whether it came from sugar or from pasta, it all ends up being exactly the same thing, which is glucose.
Having a banana or having a teaspoon of sugar is going to have the exact same effect?
Likely. It all goes down to the core components of being glucose and fructose. They get metabolized differently, but effectively, the glucose portion, which we’re focusing on here, is exactly the same thing.
You’re suggesting that when people say you should cut sugar out of your diet, that includes what you would typically or normally consider to be healthy things as well. If you’re going to take sugar in your diet, that also means you can’t eat bananas and apples. Is that what you say?
Let’s be picky with our words. The purpose of it is not so much the sugar. I want to reduce my blood sugar spikes.
Which is driven by glucose.
Correct. If I eliminate any form of glucose, I will not have spikes in my blood sugar. Ordinarily, like some spikes in your day, if some people go, “I can’t eat fruit.” You can buy fruit that is traditionally seasonal. You’d eat it during certain periods of the year, and when you do have it, you might indulge in it, but you’re not eating ten apples a day or twelve bananas every single day of your life. That would never happen. Except for today’s world and it gets worse. Let’s not focus on fruit. Let’s look at all the processed and other stuff as well that we’re throwing in.
Adapting A Diet Of Meat And Eggs
Once you went through this whole experiment, you then decided to change the date again. Is that correct?
The key was to train our body not to use this more fuel tank of carbohydrates. Use our big fat stores. How do I do that? Don’t eat carbohydrates, and your body goes, “We have to use this.” You unlock the door to it. I did that again, and when I spoke about the energy levels increasing when I first started this on the paleo leg of things, it went to a whole new level.
Tell us the diet you switched to then.
Prior to that, I’d have lots of leafy greens. I’d still have lots of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, beans, and peas, and all that stuff. From then on, I went, “I’ll limit that and I’ll give myself a quarter per day,” which is about 30 grams of carbohydrates per day, which is very low.
Can you give us an example of the grams of carbohydrates?
To give you an idea, one teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams. Eight teaspoons of sugar would be about it. Eight teaspoons of sugar equivalent would be about two slices of bread. That would be the max, and that’d be me tapping out on the day. I’d probably say one would be enough, but again, I would need bread at all, but that’s an idea of a quota. I cut out my glucose intake low and my energy went through the roof.
What that meant for me, I was like, “I feel better than ever.” I got more energy, and that led me into, as you alluded to, my final experiment. With my most recent one, how can I test out that I have 50 times more energy than what anyone else believes? Because they don’t believe what I say, I need to do something that can prove that I’m not lying and that I genuinely have this amount of energy, and that led me to what I did in 2023.
We’ll get there in a second. Tell them clearly, so that the audience understands. Your diet then becomes, from my understanding, meat/eggs pretty much only. Am I missing anything?
The progression was paleo. Lots of leafy greens. I’m still having sweet potato and carrots, then we cut out any of the heavy carbohydrates. We have leafy greens, meat, and eggs. That’s more of the keto end of the spectrum, then I dialed down the veg even more. We get to the point at the end of it, carnivore, where I’m cutting out anything that’s plant-based, and I’m now only focused on the fat. Crank that as far as I can, fat and protein, because both eggs.
What Alex Eats In A Single Day
I want to hone this so the audience can understand. When you say you are a carnivore, I want you to tell us from the moment you wake up to the moment you go a sleep, I want you to talk to us through a day of what you eat. Tell us the volume and what exactly.
When I say I’m a carnivore and I only eat that, believe me, I’m 99% carnivore. The first thing I start my day with is coffee. I’ll have a black coffee, which seems bizarre, but I’ll put 30 grams of butter in it. I’ll blend that up. It’s tasty and I’ll put some salt in it. That’s me. I’ll have that in the morning.
Salt in your coffee with butter. The butter understood. It’s called a Bullet, isn’t it?
They put MCT oil in the Bullet, so the medium chain triglycerides. Butter is effectively the same thing. It cranks up the fat and gives me a creamy taste without the impact of having sugar, which is lactose in the milk in my coffee.
Why the salt?
For two reasons. One, it’s a diuretic in the coffee, so it does make you excrete salt. You’re winning that, but the real reason is that it tastes better. It goes from being muddy water to a salted caramel flavor. It’s nice.
I will experiment with that. You go over the coffee, then what do you do?
To be honest, I don’t need to eat until that evening. Some days, I might have lunch, which might be a couple of hamburger patties. I might have 3 or 4 of those with some cheese and maybe some eggs, but that might be once or twice a week. Otherwise, I’d wait until dinner. I’ll wait because I don’t have the hunger signals anymore. It’s not like I’m looking at my clock going, “I’m starving. How long do I have to wait?”
What are you eating for dinner?
For dinner, generally, I’ll have somewhere between 800 grams to a kilo of steak, and I’ll top that with a bit of butter, and I might have a side of eggs or besides salads of pork chops or something like that as well.
Can you control the amount you eat, or do you eat until you’ve had enough?
I eat until I’m full. To be very clear, I eat until it stops tasting good, which is a very natural way of doing it. If the last bite on my plate still tastes good, I’ll go eat some more, but I guarantee the first bite of a steak is phenomenal, and the last one, you’re like, “I couldn’t eat another thing.” That’s why you can’t overeat on it. The simple game that I play is that I rely on my satiety. If I’m hungry, I eat. If I’m not, I don’t eat.
Do you eat around the same time every evening? Is it pretty programmatic?
I’m not religious about it, but it’s more when I get home. Generally, I sit with that. About 7:00 is when I eat. There are other days when I might not even eat during the day because I’m not hungry. If I have a big meal, then I might be like, “The idea of eating here is a bit much.” I don’t need to do it. I’ll hold out and wait till the next day.
You’re eating different types of meat at that satiety. You’ll have maybe a T-bone, tomahawk, or a ribeye, and you’re cycling through different meat. When you’re saying meat, you’re saying red meat. You’re not saying chicken.
When your body is producing ketones, they are an energy source that you can use as a fuel source. Share on XI probably have 90% red meat. I will have a chicken because when you’re out and about, and say someone is going to get lunch. I’ll be like, “You’re going to the chicken shop, I’ll have the chicken for lunch.” They’re like, “What cut do you want?” I go, “No, a chicken. I wouldn’t eat the whole thing.” I’m not joking. When I eat a lot, I eat until I literally cannot eat another thing. After eating chicken for lunch, I probably wouldn’t eat dinner. I might need to have dinner the next day. It’s so simple. It’s eating until I can’t eat anymore.
Understanding The Ketogenic Diet
It’s coffee in the morning. It’s water when you want to drink or when you are thirsty, and it’s meat. In general, the majority of the time, it’s one meal a day. It’s maybe lunch. You might have burger patties or eggs. Whatever. It’s one meal a day, on average, a couple of days a week. You might throw in a second meal. I have some questions. Is this what is referred to as a ketogenic diet? Is that what that is?
Yes.
What is a ketogenic diet, so everyone understands?
A keto diet is any diet where your body is producing what’s called ketones. When your body is producing ketones, they’re an energy source that your body uses as a fuel source. They’re fantastic for your brain and your whole body. It’s like a superpower.
You’ve gone into ketosis.
Correct. Ketosis means your body is producing ketones, which are measurable. Those are the three types. You can measure them in three different ways. One through a urine test, one through your breath, and one through your blood. Blood is the most accurate of those, but there are different types of ketones. The blood ones, which I’ve tracked over time as well, are the beta-hydroxybutyrate. Effectively, any diet that you’re eating in which your body is producing ketones is a ketogenic diet. Don’t think about it from what you’re eating so much. It’s more the outcome of how your body is responding to what you’re eating. It’s the cleanest way to define it.
With a ketogenic diet, you cannot have a gram of carbohydrate effectively?
That’s not correct. You can have some. It depends on the individual. As a blanket rule, you can have up to 30 grams a day, and your body will still be producing ketones. Some people eat up to 50 grams a day and any more than that of carbohydrates, your body won’t be producing ketones because your body is only producing ketones when it’s converting its own fat to energy, so to speak. It’s the simplest way to do it. When glucose is high, you’re not converting that fat to energy, so you’re not producing those ketones.
How do you explain this because most traditional doctors, if you’re to present this, and I’ve spoken about this with multiple people. The one thing that they always throw back as a response is that they talk about, “You’re going to have a heart attack.” By eating so much or having so much fat build up, and there’s good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, how are you not avoiding the bad cholesterol that’s ultimately going to give you a heart attack?
That’s a loaded question because it’s built on the assumption that fat clogs your arteries, and that’s the reason you have a heart attack. That premise doesn’t hold.
How does that premise not hold because that’s what we’re told? That’s what you’re saying, that’s not right.
That’s 100% not right. There are a couple of ways. You can go through the science of it. You can argue with a few things, but we can go there if you like. One of the tidbits of information that cuts through it pretty quickly is that if you go through all of the medical literature, and you say heart disease or heart attack is the number one killer at the moment in the world. If you guys go through all the medical literature and say, when is the first documented heart attack in all of medical literature? Anyway, in 1912, the first one ever and they wrote a paper on it saying, “This is insane. I’ve never seen,” because they did autopsies on everyone back in the 1800s. Particularly, that was the job of a doctor.
They wrote papers on this because it was the first time they had ever seen it. They call it a heart attack because when they opened up the guy’s chest, his heart looked like it had exploded. They’ve never seen it before. The question then becomes, what’s changed? If it’s a number one big killer now, and it never existed, or we never had any evidence of it prior to 1912. It’s like they didn’t notice people not clutching their hearts and falling to the ground. It’s pretty obvious when someone has a heart attack.
Believe me, there were a lot of smart people back then. Something has changed. If you are saying, “Why don’t I have a heart attack because I’m eating meat?” I didn’t start eating meat after 1912. The meat consumption since then has gone down. How is it possible that the cause of this thing that’s causing these heart attacks is also the thing that we’ve reduced in that period? Also, when we spent our entire existence eating it, we never had heart attacks. Got to explain that.
Running 5 Marathons In A Row Without Food
With all this, you must have had so many naysayers, so many people around you like your wife, family, or close friends telling you, “Alex, you’ve lost your marbles. Seriously, you’re going to kill yourself. You’re going to have a heart attack. You’re going to die. What are you doing?” You decide, “I need to prove to you,” and to prove to you whether you’re the thesis around the fuel tank, that you say that we all have that we don’t tap into enough.
You say, “I’m going to do something radical that’s never been done before in the world or history.” You want to get into the Guinness World Records. I understand you’re inspired by a story from someone else. You can tell us a story quickly as you get into it, but you decide that you’re going to run five marathons over five consecutive days on zero food, except water and salt.
On top of it, for the record, you’ve never ran a fucking marathon in your life before and you want to do five in a row. Have I got it correct? On the fifth day, you’re joining an actual marathon with thousands of other people, and you can complete this feat. I’m having a brain explosion thinking about it. I’ve never run a marathon. I’ve done the seat to serve, which is a 14K run. I hated every minute of it. I said, “I’d never do that again.” Maybe I could do a marathon, but it’s a very painful and challenging exercise to do one, but to do one on no food and only water and salt is already a huge feat, and you’ve done five in a row and broken all records.Talk to us about that. Where was the brain explosion?
You’ve got to step into my shoes. We’ve spoken about diving. I’ve been doing it for many years, and I learned sports nutrition. Coming back to the fat stores of energy, I’ve got enough like 100,000 calories on me. I’ve been fat-adapted, as they call it. I was tapping into that very efficiently for a very long time. I’ve already set the baseline there. What I learned was 100,000 calories; you run the math on that. It’s like how many marathons could I do with that amount of energy? Staggering numbers, it’s 22 marathons on my body fuel reserves. I got inspired by Dr. Ian Lake in the UK. He’s a type-1 diabetic. He and seven others did 100 miles in five days, completely fasted.
The same thing, the water and salt?
The same thing. That’s 100 miles. It’s about four marathons over the five days, and I was like, “He’s like mid-50s. One of the women who did it was mid-50s and had never run a marathon before. If those guys can do it, I’ve got to harden up. I can do it, too.” I thought that was cool. I said, “Five days sounds cooler. That’s what I’ll do. Let’s see how far I can push it.” More than anything, it was about testing and proving to myself as much as to anyone else. It was like, “If science says this is possible and it works, if I do it myself, then I can hand-on-heart say I know it’s a real thing.” I don’t have to rely on studies and on any of that stuff.
Also, it was a way for me to do something where the naysayers will say, “I’ve read this paper that says it’s impossible.” It’s like, “Have that argument with me after you talk to the guy who has done it.” Your paper means jack all now because I’ve done it. For me, it was not being a scientist, not being a doctor, and not having a PhD. I walked to these guys and said, “I’m sorry. Your data is wrong because I’ve done it.” It was a great way to cut through all of that. Believe me, I had a lot of motivation to do this, as much as anything, to do it for myself.
You’re right, I went about it. I’ve never run a marathon before, which makes it even cooler because I’m not able to do this because of my exceptional athletic ability. I’m not a freak athlete. That’s not why I can do it. As much as anything, it was to inspire people to go, “I had breakfast. There’s no way I can get through to lunch because I’m going to run out of energy. I got run around after my kids all day. I can’t do it. I don’t have the energy.” It’s like, “This guy did five marathons on nothing. Maybe there’s something in here.” You can apply these same principles to your own life and get something out of it.
When your body has adapted to fat and freely taps into its ketones, you can unlock endless energy. Share on XTo me, all these stars aligned. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why I need to do this, so I did it. I set about training, so I went right. I committed to the fat-adapted side, cut out all carbohydrates, pure carnivore, get my body as efficient as possible, and let’s train. Two kilometers into my first-ever training run, I popped my calf. I was like, “This is going to be hard. This is serious.” I had to put in the training to build up the case to be able to work up to the volume that I did, but you’re right.
How much training did you do before you set off on the first marathon?
I gave myself a year to train. I’m starting from ground zero. The first run was 2 kilometers and pulled the muscle. I was out for three weeks, then the next run was 2Ks and 3Ks. Every week, I built that up to call it a month before. I did probably 80K to 100Ks a week in terms of volume. I worked out. I had never done a marathon before, and I still hadn’t prior to my first ever. Most ever done might have been about 32K to 33Ks on any given day. I worked my way up to it and did every training and run fasted and tracked everything while I did it, so I wore glucose monitors and ketone monitors so I could check all of that stuff.
Come the day, it was day one. I’m tracking everything. I plugged in with some nutritionists and some high-profile doctors around the world, like Dr. Paul Masson. Some people might know him. If you don’t, look him up. He has the best stuff on in this space on how all this stuff works. He was in my camp helping me out. I didn’t know beforehand.
I said, “I’m doing this. I’m crazy enough, but I’m going to track everything. Is there anything you want to test or anything you want to know?” He’s like, “This is awesome.” I said, “Here’s all my data. You do my blood tests. Anything you want to know about this, it’s all yours.” Having those guys gave me the confidence, too, that I’m not on the reservation here. I asked him, “Can I do this?” He’s like, “A hundred percent.”
Where is Dr. Paul Masson?
He’s in Sydney as well. He worked out of a couple of places, but look him up online. He has stuff on YouTube. He’s phenomenal. You can consult with him. One of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. They gave me the confidence to go. I’m not on a reservation here. I was like, “Can I do this?” Dr. Ian Lake, the guy who was a type 1 diabetic, did the 100 miles. I reached out to him. He was very helpful. You’ll do it easily. It’s like, “This is what you’ve got to do. You’re doing it the right way.” I plugged into the right people and asked the right questions. I had the confidence to go in and do it.
Turning Pain Into Gratitude
I want you to walk us through what your mental state is on day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, and day 5. Tell us that journey because if I was able to run the marathon, I can imagine I would be completely fucked at the end of it. I need to wake off to chill because I have a huge foot. You did it five times. What’s going through your head after day one? Was it like, “I got another four of these?” Where is your head at?
Let me paint you a picture.
Even during, how are you doing this?
The way to think about it is, think about the Tour de France, where you’ve got people lining the streets, crowds cheering, and everyone going like, “We’re here.” You got your support crews and the whole thing. That is the complete opposite of what I did. You had nothing. I got the car parked and I go, “I’ve got my water bottle,” and I run. I figured it loops around the river where they do the Western Sydney Marathon because I have to run past my car and change my shoes or change. Something happens, or I’ll blow a gasket. I can sort myself out. It was just me.
Day one, I had people tracking me and all those things. I’m on my GPS and I’ve got my data on that. Day one, I’m pumped. I’m ready. It’s been a year working for this. It was so good. We’re away. I did my first one, and it turned out it was 34 degrees that day. It was super hot, and it got hot out. That was the coolest of all the days of the five. I was like, “This is pretty punchy.” Call it probably about 35K in, and anyone who’s on a marathon for the first time would know this. My hips started to go. My joints started to hurt. I was like, “This is pretty hard.”
At the end of that first marathon, a funny story. I had 2K to go, I tied up with my physio to go, “You’re going to give me a rub down at the end of this to get me going again.” 2K to go on my run. He said, “Sorry, I forgot to tell you. I’ve taken the kids around the holidays. I’m not going to be there.” I was like, “Are you kidding?”
I’d mentally parked myself. I’ve been getting physiotherapy for the day. Nothing. I finished day one marathon and it was that moment of, “Holy shit. This marathon is a very long way, and I’ve got a bit off here. Four to go. This is going to be hard.” It was very real after that first marathon. I need to do this all again. I drove back home from where I did it. Again, straight to bed that night. I had to cook my kids’ dinner that night, too. I remember I was fasting, so I was trying to smell the food. Day two was like, “We’re going to do this again.” I was back out there. Day two mentally was the hardest because I know how hard it is. I’ve got four to go. Halfway through, it’s now 35 degrees. It’s tough.
What are you doing? Are you listening to music? Are you talking to friends while you’ve got your EarPods in?
Day one was nothing. It was just me because I want to listen to my body and check if anything starts to play up, be aware of it, back it off, and speed up. I was running at my heart rate, so it’s all very scientific. Day two, I was so sore. I was like, “I need music so I don’t feel the pain anymore. I need to distract my mind.” As much as I wanted to roll over with the mental game, it was now, “I need distractions. I need to play some games with my mind to get more ways through.” Mentally, there are a few things.
Everyone has that little voice in their head. It says, “You’ve got to stop doing this. You can’t do it. You’ve got to give up.” How do I conquer that? Day two was very much that. I was like, “What are you doing? You’re a lunatic. You’re going to hurt yourself,” but it was like, “I’m on here.” I have to switch that off. The more it told me you can’t do this, the more I told myself, watch me. This is happening. It was flicking into that mental mode.
One of my key tricks that I had was, and this was late. It started to hurt. Day three was like hump day. It’s exciting to get through. I’m more than halfway through, but again, it was super hot. When my legs were hurting, my mental trick was I tell myself, “Alex, if on the way home you got hit by a car and you could never use your legs again. You could never run, and you could never feel the pain that you’re feeling in your legs. How much would you give to feel the pain now?
To be able to choose to do another marathon and go, “This hurts like hell,” but I get to feel it because that’s taking on me. I tell myself that in my mind while I’m running. As soon as you turn your pain to gratitude, it’s a game changer. You’re like, “No one messes with me.” It was amazing. Turn pain into gratitude like that. It’s like, you take this away from me and I can’t experience the pain I’m in now. It was an absolute game-changer.
I like that, turning pain into gratitude.
I dialed into that. I’d say these little things to myself. It was like, “Come on, Alex. Beast mode. You have to get into beast mode and be the beast. Be that guy.” Momentum builds momentum. Once you get through three, it’s like, “I’ve already done three. What’s another one?” The thought of I’m only doing two marathons to go after having done three was amazing.
Day four was pretty incredible because it was 38 degrees that day. The marathon course I was running was shut because they’re holding an official triathlon, so I had to adjust. The one I was running was holding a food festival. They’re cooking barbecue meats as I’m running in my fourth marathon fully fasted. It was like, what other mental challenges can you throw at me? By then, it was like the harder you make this, the more I can cope with it.
Your body must be getting battered. Your feet must be hurting. I know from other guys that I know who run marathons, you have toenails coming out. You bleed and blister. When you’re back at home, are you in pain, or is it like you’ve done work and you’re feeling a bit tender? You must be feeling pain.
Do not complain about the results you did not get from the work you did not do. Share on XIt was painful. It wasn’t painful, like the big muscles were hurting. It was my joints. It’s like I shredded them. My analogy is like I was solving a fueling problem, like I’m proving I have so much energy that I might run out. If you can run your car on an unlimited fuel tank, you still wear out your brakes and tires. They are the bits that I haven’t solved for, and that was a bit that got me. My joints were excruciating. By day four, I had two great sprained ankles. In my last two marathons, I did them with sprained ankles. I have footage of my feet. I look like I’ve got elephant ankles. They’re massive.
You finished the marathon.
I did the last two with those things. You play these funny games. I put these compression pants on to stop my legs from swelling up, but I didn’t put the compression socks on. I got skinny legs and massive feet because it’s compressed everything into my feet. Now, I put the compression socks on and not the pants. I’ve set everything back up the other way. All these little things happened, but it was pretty brutal.
The last night, too, was also one. Sleep was a problem. I couldn’t sleep because mentally, I was wired. I was so sharp and I couldn’t shut down. It was incredible. I never had any hunger all the way through. I got 2 of 10 was ravenous. Zero was nothing. I was about 3, and it was great because I tracked it like how hungry I am on a scale.
If I said, don’t think of an elephant. What are you thinking of? It’s like, don’t think of food. Maybe I am hungry, but I wasn’t ravenous at all. Because of my joint pain, I took an anti-inflammatory, which was a mistake. Anti-inflammatory causes your body to retain water, and part of the swelling I had in my legs was problematic.
They are also not very good to take on an empty stomach. That can burn through your stomach lining because of the acid and everything that gets produced.
It was a mistake, but in the moment, it was like, I need something here because my joints are like daggers and needles. It was bad, but I paid the price. All my legs swelled up with fluid because of the water retention. The night before my final marathon, I weighed as much as I did prior to all five marathons before I even started, and I hadn’t eaten to think. It was all this water in my body. I called my doctor and I said, “This is a problem.” He’s like, “It definitely is. You’re overhydrated. What you need to do, when you go to bed, you need to put your feet up in the air and drain all the fluid out of your legs.”
Lay against the wall and put your feet up?
Picture in an L position with my legs in the air. I felt like that Chuck Norris joke, like, “Alex McDonald doesn’t sleep. He waits for dawn.” That was me. I was lying on my back waiting for the fluid drain, and that was me all night. I tracked all my data with my sleep. My sleep metrics are horrible. That night, I didn’t sleep. That’s me. Now I rock up at the start line. Marathon number five, I haven’t slept, and I’ve got sprained ankles. The energy was fine, but the brakes and tires were busted, as I mentioned.
Mentally, it was, I’ve been through the ringer, and you play these mental games. You line up at the start line, and you look around. All these people knew I’d done four marathons, and I’m standing up here alongside them, and I’m going to take them on. You feel pretty powerful in that moment, but you know they’re going to smash you. I turned up is what I did and I’m on that start line. I’m going to get this done.
I knew I was going to get it done when I was on that start line on day five. It was like, “Let’s enjoy the moment.” That was a bit I loved. By then, I was running along. I had a shirt explaining what I was doing in five fasted marathons, and everyone wanted to have a chat, too. They’re like, “Tell me when you did do these five fasted marathons.” I’m like, “I’m doing it.” They’re like, “When is your next marathon?” I’m like, “I’ve already done four. This is my fifth.” They’re like, “Holy shit. This is huge.” Everyone wanted to rally around it. Having that energy on that final marathon was huge because that helped me get across that line.
Finally, you had some people clapping you through.
That was it. That was what I wished for, and I planted that way. I didn’t want to start with that marathon and do four on. It’s the first night of a boy’s weekend. You don’t want to go too hot. That was it. The momentum of that day and how much fun that was got me through, but again, it was hot. Twenty-six people were taken to the hospital with heat issues by ambulance that day. There were people dropping out left, right, and center.
I’m running with the battlers at the back of the pack because I’m not trying speed records. I’d never run a marathon. I had sprained ankles, and it was hot. There are a million reasons. Watching people collapse and be on stretches as you’re running past them, I was like, “I’ve been through the ringer here. Don’t be that guy. Don’t wake up in the hospital.” That was genuinely going through my head.
What Happened Beyond The Finish Line
You finished. You cross the finish line. It’s like in a movie. What are you feeling? Tell me what’s the feeling when you’re like, “I want to eat something. I want a massage. I need to sleep.” Are you elated? What’s the feeling?
The feeling is hard to describe because it’s a feeling of elation. The last kilometers, I genuinely felt tears in my eyes because I was like, “I’ve spent a year working towards this. Every single person on the planet, except a handful, said you’re an idiot and you’re going to die.” It was like, “I did it. I had a theory. I tested it, and I’m now doing it, and I’m going to finish it.” That feeling is something that I’ll never ever forget. Crossing that finish line and going, “I’ve done it. This is official. I’ve tracked everything. It’s all here.” It was the most amazing feeling.
It’s a massive achievement.
It was phenomenal and even better in the moment. They got footage of this as well. The announcer of the Sydney Marathon got clued up on what I was doing. As I crossed the line, he made this big announcement, and the whole thing. I crossed the line, and he dragged me over and went, “I need to hear all about this.” It was on a loudspeaker. He piped out. He interviewed me, which was also cool. I’ve got all that on footage, which is awesome. It’s one of those things that marked the occasion.
Everyone is like, “What was the first thing you ate?” I ate the biggest steak I could before I did all of this because in my mind, it was running across the finish line and tucked into a steak straight away. I wasn’t angry at all. I didn’t even need to eat that day at all. I had like a hamburger patty and two eggs, or two hamburger patties and two eggs. That was it. Even then, I couldn’t finish it. I could have done another 3 or 4 days and not eating. By then, my body doesn’t need it. Hand on heart, I can tell you that when your body is fat-adapted and it taps into its fuel source like that, you genuinely have endless energy. I did not even go close to tapping out on the amount of energy that I had.
I’m mind-blown. I’ve looked at the footage and I’ve seen you speak about it on multiple occasions. Every time I hear it, it’s like, “That’s not possible. How? How could you do that?” You should be so proud of yourself. It’s a mad achievement. What you’re doing is phenomenal, and you continuously test the boundaries and what has been prescribed and challenged. You keep proving and showing that the status quo may or should be rethought.
How Alex Inspired People Around The World
I love the work you’re doing. You’ve also been sharing your knowledge, experience, and wisdom on the matter with other professional athletes. Before we finish up, talk us through. You’ve had some other professionals come out and want to take on this type of lifestyle. Can you tell us maybe some anecdotal stories on the positive impacts it’s had on lows?
It was completely unexpected. As I said, I’m not an athlete. I wasn’t doing this to prove performance. By its nature, I’ve had a lot of professional athletes, whether they be ultra runners or ultra swimmers, and anything from NRL players to UFC fighters or professional boxers. You name it. As an athlete, they’re like, “I want to get the edge.” If you’re telling me I can perform and not have to refuel, it’s like driving a Formula 1 car and not having to change your tires halfway through the race. It buys me extra time and gives me an extra edge.
They’re like, “You’re not an athlete, but what you demonstrated is something that I might be able to tap into.” Particularly in the endurance running world, a lot of the belief is the other end of the spectrum, like mass carb loading and all those things, which shuts down everything I’ve demonstrated. If you go down the carb-loading side of things with the gels and everything, it plays havoc on people’s guts, people vomiting and diarrhea, and all that stuff. People are like, “That’s part and parcel for running and endurance because of that.” They’re like, “You can do this without any of that, and all that stuff disappears? Now, I’m interested.”
There are a few reasons. Others are going, “My blood sugars are out of control. I can’t carb load. I can’t have gels because I’m a type-2 diabetic. I can’t do my passion anymore.” These guys reach out, going, “You’ve opened the door for me again because you’re saying I can do this and I don’t have to play that carbohydrate game.” It’s shifting the paradigm. You can argue which is better, but all I’m saying, my only job here is to demonstrate there is another way.
The way that I did it is by avoiding all carbohydrates and becoming fat-adapted allows people to unlock these things. Some examples of actual athletes doing this stuff. There’s a guy, and I believe he’s in Portugal or might be in Spain. He won the world championships for an ultramarathon, which is a two-day event. Ultramarathon is under 500 kilometers. It’s effectively like a double triathlon. It’s a 10K swim, 360K bike ride, and 80K run. He did it completely fasted and won the world championships for his age group. An absolute beast.
There are other guys who are like, “If you don’t have carbs, you’re not going to perform.” Ryan Talbot in the USA team, to give you an idea of how quick he is. He’s literally in the top handful in America. He’s still in college. He’s on Team USA but missed the Olympics. The guy runs a 10.6-second 100 meters, which is insane. They do ten events in that period. It’s not just sprinting. It’s over two days, the ten events in the Decathlon. He gets better as the weekend goes on.
Again, he does it completely fasted, full carnivore, and zero carb. There are guys and lots of examples of these guys that are not only tapping into what I’ve done, but proving that genuine performance can and is possible. You get the guys who are traditional carb athletes who are becoming pre-diabetic. They’re the world’s best athletes and are training harder than anyone on the planet, but now they’ve got diabetes. It’s like, there’s something broken here.
If you play the carb game, you’ve rolled the dice with your health as well. Does that mean the exercise is bad? No. You’re not going to argue that point, but there’s something you’re doing that’s bad in the methodology. I would point very squarely at the high carbohydrate content because what that does to metabolism causes a lot of problems. There are some starters of genuine athletes doing some genuinely impressive things, but I think we’re only the tip of the iceberg. We’re going to see a lot more of it.
Answering Quickfire Questions
Alex, phenomenal story. At the end of my show, I always finish off with the quick-fire questions. I’m going to shoot through them with you now. Who would you like to say sorry to, given the chance?
It’s an odd one but a genuine one. Picture this. I’m six years old. I’m at school. There’s a kid a year below me. He’s in a wheelchair, and John was his name. I remember he had an incident in the playground. He fell out of his wheelchair and fell on his back. Everyone, being six, laughed at him. I stood there in the crowd, and I didn’t help him. I forever regret that, and I learned I’m never going to be a bystander because I know it was wrong. That’s a guy I’d say sorry to. Top of my list.
What are you proud of being or doing in your life besides running five marathons in five days?
We can pot that one. That’s on the list. One that I’m generally proud of is that I lost my best mate when I was 26. He got hit by a car. That was many years ago. His anniversary is coming up. What I’m very proud of is that every anniversary of his passing, I hold an event where all our mates get together, and it’s expanded. It ends up being that everyone around the world sends you a photo of them raising a glass to him. Each year, I put together an album and send it to his family to say, “We’re looking after him.” I never miss one.
When did you receive kindness while needing it most and expecting it least?
This is a goodie. When I was seventeen, I was on a cricket tour. I got billeted with a family, and being seventeen, young, and silly, I got taken out on a big night. Very inexperienced with alcohol and played up. I came back and made a mess of myself. The house I was staying in was a total disaster, and I did what any immature person would do. I get out of there the next day and pretend it didn’t happen. The kindness that I was shown was a week later.
I received the most beautiful letter from that family thanking me for my stay and how wonderful it was for me to be there. I was like, “Are you sure? You got the wrong person here.” To me, it changed everything. They didn’t scold me. They treated me with such respect and such love that forever, I was like, “I didn’t deserve that.” They showed me more love than anyone, and I respect them for that. It had more impact on me than anything else.
What did your mother or father teach you that you frequently remind yourself of?
My mother’s saying. She put it probably not in the most delicate way, but it was, “You get nothing for nothing,” is what she would say. Another way would be, “Don’t complain about the results you don’t get from the work you didn’t do. Put the work in, you get the results, and don’t complain if you don’t do either.”
The final one is, what is your superpower?
My commitment is what I would say.
I would concur.
If I put my mind to something, I get it done, and I stand by that.
Unbelievable. Alex, one incredible conversation. Honestly, I have so many more questions, and we could talk for hours. We might do a follow-up with maybe one of the doctors that you worked with at some point. That would be good, but thanks for coming on the show. Keep going.
Thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I’m happy to chat anytime. Let’s do it again.
Important Links
- Alex McDonald on LinkedIn
- Alex McDonald on Instagram
- New Evolution Diet
- Good Calories, Bad Calories
- Dr. Paul Masson
- Keto Marathons
About Alex Mcdonald
I’m Alex, 42 and have embraced a low carb high fat (LCHF) lifestyle since January 2010. Initially, I planned a one-month test of low carb and expected to return to my original diet afterward. Yet, the drastic improvements in my well-being during that first month were so compelling that returning became impossible.
For over a decade, I’ve delved deep into the research underpinning low carbohydrate and ketogenic diets, including the completion Sports Nutrition and LCHF Advisor Training through the Nutrition Network and attendance at several global LCHF conferences. The benefits extended not only to me but also to friends and family who adopted LCHF and experienced the benefits in weight loss, increased energy and much more. Although I briefly engaged in running during my late twenties and completed 3 half marathons, more than a decade has passed without participating in long-distance events. My focus shifted to calisthenics and resistance training, but now I’m poised to embark on my first marathon, marking a fresh and exhilarating challenge.
