I’d like to bring a little information up from the comments so that it’s accessible to people using Search to find material. Today’s is about how competitive athletes should eat.
We’ve had several questions about proper diets for athletes, the most recent from Lindsay:
I was just having a conversation with a friend this morning about body fat % and BMI. She is an endurance athlete who is currently training for an ultra marathon. This means she is running about 15-20 hours/ week and weight training two days/week. I am generally the one to give her advice on food intake and so on, but with such a massive exercise load it has become tricky. She recently had her body fat measured and it’s 17% (pretty low for a woman). She was then told she needs to gain at least 10 pounds, preferably in the form of muscle. What is in your opinion the best way to do this for someone with such high calorie needs? Obviously the most calorie dense foods are generally grains, but logically that seems like a bad choice. Thoughts?
Our basic recommendations for athletic training diets don’t vary much for different sports. Diets are designed to meet the body’s nutritional diets; assure there are no nutrient deficits which might slow training progress; and prevent toxicity from too much of anything.
For people who are purely focused on athletic performance, we recommend carb intake of 500 + 50-100 calories per hour of intense training, protein around 600 calories, plus fats adjusted to appetite.
So for Lindsay’s friend this would translate to 600-700 carb calories and 600 protein calories and I would guess 2,000-3,000 fat calories daily.
Carb calories should come from our safe starches: white rice, taro, sweet potato, potato, cassava/tapioca, sago, etc., plus some fruits and berries. Rice is a good choice for runners, since with its low fiber content it doesn’t create a sense of fullness.
Protein calories should come largely from fatty meats plus a bit of whey powder. About 3/4 to 1 lb meat per day would provide optimal protein, plus maybe 100 calories whey powder.
Fat calories should come from fatty meats (ribs, bacon, fatty cuts of beef like ribeye, salmon, lamb), fatty plant foods (e.g. avocado, nuts), egg yolks, dairy (cream, butter, whole fat yogurt, cheeses) and low omega-6 oils: coconut oil, butter, beef tallow.
To make the fats more palatable, mix them into the other foods: e.g. make mashed sweet potato with coconut oil and butter, or put lots of butter or cream cheese on the potato. Put butter on top of the steak or salmon, if more calories are needed.
This should provide sufficient calories. If more calories are needed, just add more fat.
Some tweaks can be added to this:
- Intermittent fasting enhances growth hormone levels and promotes muscle development. Fasting 16 hours and eating in an 8 hour window each day is one way to implement this. Another way is to implement a longer fast – 36 hours coconut oil and water only – one day a week. Athletes should continue normal training while fasting.
- Carb loading before competition is often desirable. We discuss how to do this in the book. It basically involves very low-carb eating for a few weeks, to dissipate glycogen reservoirs, then extremely high carb eating a few days before an event to saturate them.
Athletes should also strive to be replete with micronutrients. We give micronutrient recommendations in our book, and I’ll put up a page with those sometime this week.
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