How 33Fuel Changed My Life
33Fuel transformed my performance first, then it transformed my life. This may sound like exaggeration, and as one of the company co-founders, it may also sound like shameless self-promotion, but bear with me because I think you'll like this. Some of you may also recognise yourselves in my former self
In 2011 I'd been a serial ultramarathon runner for several years and was loving it but my performance had hit a major plateau I just couldn't break.
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Regarding nutrition I was using a ton of ordinary ultra-processed (UPF) products I didn't even enjoy, yet still believed I couldn't do without and - even worse - which I seemed to need in ever-increasing quantities.
Regarding performance I was surviving races, but on horribly unstable energy levels that rocketed up and down as I rode the rollercoaster from energy high to energy crash. My mental state rode the same rollercoaster too, which made the already tough game of endurance even harder. Even worse, I had all manner of stomach issues and race recovery took forever with dead legs hanging around for a week or more after big events.
As for overall health, I was supposedly a super-fit ultrarunner who ran marathons as training runs, yet I caught every bug going. Someone only had to sneeze near me and I'd get a cold. Flu season was an actual season for me as I lurched from one dose to the next - my immune system was shot. I remember visiting friends when one of their daughters had a mild stomach bug. She laughed it off in 24 hours, I caught it and ended up in hospital on a drip.
Step one on the road to recovery at the end of 2011 was dropping all of the sports nutrition I was using in a bid to use real food instead. Gels, carb powders, energy bars, protein shakes, they all went in the bin and were replaced with real food - bananas, nuts, sandwiches and water. This provided an immediate and noticeable improvement.
Step two that same year, along with 33Fuel's two other co-founders, Erica and Dan, was starting our first trials with tons of recipes, formulas and methods to pack the most powerful whole natural foods into a new type of sports nutrition because there simply wasn't anything even close to natural on the market back then.
These were the beta products that would go on to become 33Fuel's Elite Meal Replacement Shakes and Chia Energy Gels.
My health (and performance) began to rocket once I swapped ordinary ultraprocessed sports nutrition for whole food alternatives including our very own Chia Energy Gels
In early 2012 the performance tipping point really kicked in. Using the Shakes and Gels regularly for all of my training and racing the performance plateau I'd been stuck on simply vanished.
My energy levels at last had stability, letting me push steady and strong in races for 24 hours and more. The horrible peaks and troughs I'd suffered before were gone, replaced with a strong, reliable baseline instead. Not only did I look forward to my nutrition when racing, the stomach issues I'd thought were a normal part of endurance sport had simply disappeared.
Races hadn't suddenly become easy, but it felt like an invisible handbrake had been removed and I was happier and faster right away as a result.
I took an hour off a previous year's 50-mile PB on the same course and in similar conditions, despite no change in training. I ran a tough and testing lead-in to that year's A-race, the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB) via the Transgrancaria and Lavaredo Ultra Trail events and just got stronger and faster from one to the next.
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Finishing the UTMB strongly helped in no small part by total wholefood fueling without any of the usual UPF gels, powders and other nonsense
My recovery times were halved and despite racing eight ultramarathons in as many months, I didn't get sick once. As Erica, Dan and myself further refined and tweaked the products throughout 2012 we knew we were onto something too good to keep to ourselves. What had begun as a fun experiment to solve our own fueling had become something much bigger. By late 2012 we took the plunge, with 33Fuel opening for sale to UK customers via a three-page website we built ourselves.
33Fuel had already transformed my performance, now it began transforming my life.
Because no matter how fit I'd ever been - running cross country for my school, playing rugby for my university or racing motorcycles through my 20s - I had never been able to break free of the asthma inhalers I'd needed since the age of three. Closing in on 40 the chances of growing out of it were basically nil - that either happens in teenage years or not at all as a rule. So while I was in the best shape of my life I was still gulping down eight doses of powerful steroid inhalers daily.
But as I continued my daily use of our Meal Replacement Shakes as breakfast, for the first time in my life, I began forgetting to take my inhalers and getting away with it because the asthma just never came. Where all previous attempts to wean myself off the inhalers had uniformly been met with a sharp and breathless reminder I was still an asthmatic within 24 hours or less, here I was going days, and then weeks without touching them despite still training hard.
Taking the Meal Replacement Shakes regularly transformed my performance
Fast forward to today and I've not used an inhaler in years, and I get ill very rarely if at all despite a work schedule that is off the charts and which co-exists with a full training schedule too.
While I'm not wild enough to say our Meal Replacement Shakes can cure asthma I can honestly say their addition to my daily diet was the only significant change throughout the transition period when my own lifelong wheezes left my life for good.
The simple takeway is this: good fuel is everything. Put UPF crap in and you will only ever get crap out. Put the best natural foods into your body however and you may just find - as I did - that the sky's the limit.
Warren Pole, co-founder 33Fuel®
What's your 33Fuel story? Email contact@33Fuel.com to tell us how 33Fuel has helped you - we'd love to hear from you!
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