“You’re only as good as your last meal.”
Nowhere is this idea more ingrained than at the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, where hundreds of elite runners, triathletes, wrestlers, water-polo players, and other aspiring Olympians spend weeks, months, or, in some cases, years on their quest for gold. About 130 athletes live at the center, while another 15,000 visit annually for short-term camps, most of them teenagers who rank in the top 10 percent of their sport.
Athletes come here for the center’s state-of-the-art training facilities—to tweak their strokes in the aquatic center’s 50-meter pool, learn more about their bodies in the physiology lab, or nurse injuries in the world-class physical-therapy department. But perhaps the most important building an athlete will visit is the food-court-size cafeteria on the north end of the sprawling 35-acre grounds.
The Caf, as the residents call it, is the OTC’s nutritional nerve center, where all meals are eaten and where new thinking about food is giving America’s top-tier athletes their high-performance edge. This past summer, the U.S. Olympic Committee sent a staff of chefs and dietitians from Colorado Springs to London, where they re-created the menu Team USA had been living and training on back home. The result: Americans won more medals than in any previous Olympics.
I’ve often wondered what might happen if recreational athletes put the same emphasis on nutrition as Olympians do preparing for the Games. As a fortysomething outdoor athlete, I’ve jazzed around over the years with numerous dietary programs—the Zone, paleo, the Blueberry Muffin Diet (not recommended)—in hopes of improving performance, but nothing stuck, except to my waist. I was confused. If you trained hard enough, didn’t it all burn up in the lactic-acid fire anyway? Hoping to gain deeper insight into high-end performance nutrition, I made a pilgrimage to the OTC.
A lot of stories trickle out during every Olympic Games about the eating habits of the stars, like Michael Phelps’ reported 4,000-calorie breakfast—including a five-egg omelet, French toast, and chocolate chip pancakes—or the 16 bananas Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake supposedly eats every day. But as my OTC guide, 32-year-old registered dietitian Jennifer Gibson, assured me, the real secret to performance nutrition is keeping things simple. Gibson has worked with everyone from skiers to wrestlers to professional soccer players, but she says the OTC’s nutritional principles can be applied by anyone, from age-group experts to enthusiastic neophytes.
I spent a day with her and put together the following eight-step peak-performance nutrition plan based on what I learned. I also discovered that, when it comes to eating right, the stars, well, they’re just like us. “We can’t follow our athletes around constantly, but we do try to be the voice in their head,” Gibson told me. “You think just because you’re burning 4,000 calories in a workout, you can eat whatever you want. And we’re here to say, um, actually no, you can’t.”
STEP 1: KNOW YOUR NUMBERS
Before
any dietary interventions take place, OTC nutritionists put their
athletes through an extensive clinical screening. This includes
urinalysis to assess hydration, skinfold tests to determine body
composition (your fat-to-muscle ratio), resting metabolic rate, or RMR
(how many calories you burn at rest—dietitians rarely want their
athletes to consume less than this in a day), and blood work to identify
nutrient levels and deficiencies like anemia. “If there’s anything
systemically wrong, we need to fix that before we can go to the next
level,” Gibson says. Clinical testing provides the baseline data to help
measure progress (or lack thereof). Olympians are rescreened as
frequently as once a month. Being tested a couple of times a year by a
doctor or sports nutritionist should suffice for the rest of us, she
says.
STEP 2: ADDRESS YOUR ISSUES
One
of the biggest problems Gibson has worked to correct in athletes is
iron deficiencies. Iron is essential for helping your blood transport
oxygen to hardworking muscles. Female athletes are particularly
susceptible to iron loss through menstruation. High-mileage runners may
also suffer something called foot-strike hemolysis, where hemoglobin
cells are destroyed by stride impact. And a growing body of research
suggests that chronic inflammation may trigger a hormone that blocks
iron absorption. “Optimizing iron is huge for us here,” says Gibson. “As
many as 90 percent of my female athletes, and 50 percent of the males,
have low readings when we first test them.” Iron supplements usually
correct the problem, says Gibson. Vitamin D is another keen area of
interest. Compelling evidence suggests that vitamin D helps reduce
inflammation, increase VO2 max, boost immunity, and promote stronger
bones. In 2008, when Olympic marathoner Deena Kastor broke her foot at
the Beijing Games, it turned out that she had only half the recommended
vitamin D levels (normal measures are 35 to 55 nanograms per
milliliter). Gibson told me that 80 to 90 percent of the athletes she
has screened have turned out to be low in vitamin D, in some cases
despite training for hours outdoors (sunscreen blocks vitamin D
absorption). She recommends supplements to help bring D levels back up
to baseline.
STEP 3: EMBRACE WHOLE FOODS
Gibson
and the other dietitians at the OTC push a whole-foods philosophy for
an athlete’s core diet, with a heavy emphasis on organic, sustainably
produced fruits and vegetables, lean proteins (like chicken and fish),
healthy fats (like avocados and olive oil), and complex carbohydrates
(like steel-cut oats and sweet potatoes) that ensure a steady stream of
nutrients to training-ravaged bodies. The quality and quantity of
vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fiber, and phytochemicals provided by
fresh whole foods simply can’t be matched by processed alternatives, no
matter how sophisticated that protein shake may appear. This is where
the Caf comes in. A sign at the entrance outlines the three
commandments: 1) Get more veggies, nuts, and seeds in your diet. 2)
Adjust the amount of carbohydrates you’re eating based on activity
level. 3) Add a lean protein to every meal. The Caf line progresses
through a salad bar, soup station, vegetable side dishes, and entrées,
like baked tilapia and pad Thai, that vary every day. Each item has a
full nutrition panel accompanying it, along with an Athlete’s Plate
diagram, a pie chart showing exactly what your plate should look like,
with appropriate portions of vegetables, protein, and carbs. (Many
athletes go so far as to take photos of their plates to send to their
trainers.) This spring, as part of its makeover, the OTC will open a
gourmet demonstration kitchen to teach athletes how to prepare meals at
home. “We lay it out to make it as appealing as possible, to ensure
they’re getting enough good food,” says Jacque Hamilton, the OTC’s
senior executive chef. “Generally speaking, at this level there are very
few athletes who do the low-carb or no-carb thing. It’s just not
conducive to performance. You need carbohydrates if you’re going to
perform at 100 percent.”
STEP 4: MAP OUT YOUR MEAL PLAN
“A
meal plan isn’t static,” says Gibson. “It’s based on activity, so
nutrition will vary according to activity level or phase.” This
interplay—what some athletes call nutritional periodization—is a
functional way of scheduling when, what, and how much you eat. That may
involve raising or lowering total calories; manipulating ratios of
proteins, carbs, and fats; or timing food based on energy output. Gibson
produces detailed eating guidelines for some of her athletes, so they
simply follow the plan. Others manage their regimens more intuitively.
“I typically try to front-load my food,” says Olympic triathlete Gwen
Jorgensen, 26. “I do my workouts throughout the day, so I try to get a
lot of calories early. That’s usually a hearty breakfast of oats mixed
with peanut butter, raisins, bananas, cinnamon, honey, and poached eggs,
which I stir right into the oatmeal. During the off-season, I’ve been
trying to put on a little muscle mass, so that means getting a complete
meal with protein soon after a workout. These are the kinds of things
you’re always working on.”
STEP 5: ADJUST THE LAST ONE PERCENT
The
final tier is sports nutrition, when athletes dial in race-day fueling,
adjust ergogenic aids—any substance that enhances physical performance,
like caffeine—and might try supplements like beta-alanine, an amino
acid that fuels muscles during exercise. “This last stage is dictated
entirely by your sport, your activity level, and your goals,” says
Gibson. These tweaks make up a small fraction of an athlete’s total
caloric intake but help you get the most from your body in training and
competition. Once you’ve committed to eating whole foods consistently,
Gibson recommends that you experiment to see what kind of sports
nutrition works best for you—carbohydrate loading the night before a
race, for example, or drinking beetroot juice, a high-octane energy
booster, before a hard training day. She warns against relying on
shakes, bars, pills, gels, and drinks, however. “It’s the Wild West out
there,” she says. “Everyone’s an expert about nutrition, and everyone’s
got a product for you. But we’re not flashy or trendy here.” Olympic
triathlete Lukas Verzbicas, 20, restricts caffeine until the day of a
race to feel its maximum effect. He’s also a big fan of chia seeds, a
complete protein that contains antioxidants and anti-inflammatory
flavonoids. Triathlete Jorgensen tries to get in good fats by gulping
down a spoonful of coconut oil after a hard workout or race.
STEP 6: HYDRATE OR BONK
Gibson
calls hydration “the other macronutrient” and says it’s too often
neglected in a high-performance diet. She tests the composition of her
athletes’ sweat and formulates custom sports drinks—with water, sodium,
and sometimes potassium, as well as glucose, fructose, or maltodextrin
for carbs—to replace the appropriate amounts of sodium and electrolytes.
(She also occasionally flavors them with lemonade or Crystal Light
packets.) Recreational athletes may not have access to such precise lab
analysis, but they can approximate their needs by weighing themselves
before and after a race or a hard training session. You should be
hydrating enough to lose less than 2 percent of your body weight during
exercise. If your clothes are marked with white salt rings, your sweat
has a fair amount of sodium in it, so experiment with an existing sports
drink, adding sodium as needed to replenish the salt.*
* ED'S REMARK: If you're the type of person who never salts food, or always tries to avoid 'salty foods' - stop this. In fact - eat a 'salty food' at least once a day. In particular - become AWARE of the POTASSIUM/SODIUM RATIO in foods by READING THE LABEL. Look for 2 to 1 ratio of K/Na (2x as much potassium as sodium - or foods generally 'richer' in potassium than sodium) We will discuss electrolytes and physiology in later lectures.
Read more:
Salt and our Health: Exposing Mainstream Myths
Salt, We Misjudged You by Gary TaubesSTEP 7: CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD
“Nutrition
is ultimately behavioral,” says Gibson. “Athletes are under a lot of
stress, and sometimes food is the only thing they can release with.** A
lot of them don’t drink, and they don’t have much of a social life
because they’re training all the time. So, like a lot of busy people,
they’ll turn to food for comfort.” One trick Gibson and others use is to
avoid demonizing foods, since designating something off-limits makes
the temptation greater. The key is to emphasize the value of healthy
foods and how they’ll improve performance. This begins to override the
mindless emotional eating that can derail the hard work athletes put in
every week.
Also dispell the belief to your clients, the idea that 'atheletes, dancers, or other professional physical performers know what to eat' - necessarily and consciously based on 'science' or 'secrets'. Many athletes do not know how to eat according to how the body works and they do not possess secrets. After all the 'clinical testing' aimed to 'optimize' - the secret in the sauce comes down to knowing the basic purpose of nutrients and experimenting on your own - as Gibson said in this article, "Once you’ve committed to eating whole foods consistently, Gibson recommends that you experiment to see what kind of sports nutrition works best for you."
STEP 8: COMMIT
For
weight-class competitors like boxers and wrestlers, managing weight
while continuing to improve performance is the holy grail of any diet
program. “Sweets are my kryptonite,” says wrestler Adeline Gray, 22.
“And I love sweets.” Gray, who has her sights set on a gold medal in Rio
De Janeiro in 2016, is one of the full-time OTC residents. A couple of
years back, she was working with Gibson to optimize her nutrition when
she had a particularly depressing Oreo bender. “I was lying to myself
about it. I’d eaten a whole box of them, then tried blaming it on my
roommate,” she says, laughing now. The bingeing was making it tough to
reach her weigh-in targets. After the Dark Night of the Cookie, Gibson
had her quit sweets cold, filling her diet with vegetables, lean
proteins, and good fats like avocados and almonds. “I logged everything
into my phone. I drank two glasses of water before every meal and a
gallon throughout the day. I started losing a kilo a week. It wasn’t
that I didn’t want an Oreo. I just wanted a gold medal more.” She adds,
“The main thing is commitment and consistency. Until I decided that this
is what I was going to do, it didn’t happen.”
ARTICLE 2: Advice from Our Fittest Real Athletes
Serious careers? Check. Committed to their families? Check. Able to beat the pros at their own game? You know it. Five hard-charging desk jocks who manage to do it all share the secrets of their success.
Eat Smarter
Case Study: Triathlete Sami Inkinen, 38
Bona Fides
Since
launching the real estate website Trulia in 2005, Silicon Valley
resident Inkinen has climbed to the top of the amateur triathlon ranks.
He’s a two-time overall amateur champion at the highly competitive Wildflower Triathlon,
near Paso Robles, California, and was the 2011 world cham-pion in the
70.3 distance for
the 30–39 age group. In June, Inkinen and his wife
began their attempt to row a 5-by-20-foot boat from San Francisco to
Hawaii.
How He Does It
Though his company is
now well established, Finland native Inkinen still keeps a startup
schedule, regularly putting in 70-hour weeks. So how does he maintain
elite-level endurance fitness? “Really intense hour-long workouts,” he
says. Inkinen will bust out ten intervals of minute-long sprints on a
treadmill or stationary bike followed by a minute of jogging or
spinning, then jump in the pool and swim 100-yard sprints. “It’s all the
time I can afford,” he says. But the most dramatic improvement in his
racing came when he rebooted his nutrition plan. Disillusioned with a
low-fat, high-carb diet that left him constantly hungry and caused his
weight to fluctuate dramatically, Inkinen experimented with different
foods, ultimately adopting a high-fat diet made up of ingredients like
olive oil, macadamia nuts, and avocados. “After a few months, I started
becoming healthier and performing better,” he says.
Follow His Lead
According to Dina Griffin, a sports dietitian at Fuel4mance,
which counsels elite athletes on nutrition, there are four key signs
that you might be ingesting too many carbs: you frequently bonk, you’re
hungry all the time, your stomach hurts, and you’re not recovering well
from workouts. “We’re seeing that most athletes—from weekend amateurs to
serious professionals—perform better with moderate carbohydrate
intake,” she says. “If you eat pasta every night, cut back to once or
twice a week and see if you notice a difference.”
Article 3: The Truth Behind the High-Fat-Low-Carb Cult
Proponents of the Banting diet claim that cutting carbs is the key to weight loss and improved health. There's just one problem: it'll make you slow.
Before Dr. Robert Atkins launched his low-carb diet in 1972, there was Banting, the fat British undertaker who designed coffins for England’s elite in the 1800s. According to Men’s Health, the guy needed to drop a few kilos, so his doc put him on a high-fat-low-carb (HFLC) diet and, presto change-o, he lived to 82 and was buried in a skinny man’s coffin.
It may seem silly to talk about Banting now, but he’s back from the dead, courtesy of a controversial sports scientist who has been vehemently championing the Brit’s diet for the past few years. Professor Tim Noakes, from the Sports Science Institute of South Africa at the University of Cape Town, even published a book of Banting recipes that sold out not long after hitting shelves earlier this year. There’s just one problem with the diet: It’ll make you slower.
Matt Fitzgerald, author of the new book Diet Cults,
has some sobering words for athletes who try to train on fat. “Decades
of research indicate that high-carb diets are optimal for endurance and
that ingesting carbohydrates during endurance exercise enhances
endurance,” Fitzgerald says.
Sports nutrition scientist and European Journal of Sport Science editor in chief Asker Jeukendrup, for example, recently published a paper
outlining carb needs during exercise to enhance endurance, suggesting
athletes take in small amounts of carbs during training sessions lasting
an hour, 60 grams of carbs per hour for exercise lasting two to three
hours, and 90 grams per hour for exercise lasting longer than
that—regardless of body weight or training status.
Noakes’ diet,
on the other hand, advocates eating as little as 25 to 50 grams of
carbs per day. While upping your healthy fat intake to around 40 percent
of your total daily calories is fine, Noakes promotes a diet that's 80
percent fat and only 10 percent carbs. Most endurance athletes,
Fitzgerald says, should not be cutting carbs.
It’s not just science that shows carbs make athletes better. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence as well. Eating carbs “is almost a universal practice among the world’s best endurance athletes,” Fitzgerald says. “The typical Kenyan diet is 78 percent carbs, and they destroy the rest of the world in distance running.”
Clearly, there’s a lot going on behind Kenyan running prowess, but the carbs can’t be discounted. “If you care about your performance as an endurance athlete, the safe way to go is a high-carb diet,” Fitzgerald says. “If you go on the high-fat bandwagon, it’s a crapshoot.”
ED'S COMMENTS: The thinking person must disagree it is a crapshoot. This is because you can't know if you will benefit (performance and/or health-wise) unless you experiment. Experimenting (N=1) is the only way to see how to 'play your body' like the fine instrument it is.
Assuming you train or perform as an endurance athlete - you are the wolf running at high speeds for 1 to 3 hours - do not lower carb intake AND elevate fat - just increase fat intake and keep carb intake steady. Do this by eating more of the following: butter, olive oil, coconut oil, almonds, cashews, walnuts, red plam oil, and lard.
Proponents of HFLC claim the Banting diet is the key to weight loss and improved health and encourages the body to burn fat for fuel. But studies comparing HFLC to nonrestrictive diets found that, over time, people lost no more weight “banting” than they did otherwise. Celeste Naude, a researcher from the Center for Evidence-Based Health Care at Stellenbosch University, told the Mail and Guardian that “the dietary pattern and food choices promoted with a low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet are not well aligned with healthy dietary patterns and food choices known to, along with a healthy lifestyle, reduce the risk of diseases like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancers.”
Why the fervor? Fitzgerald says the desire to follow a restrictive diet is fulfilling mental, rather than physical, needs. He calls the phenomenon “sour grapes syndrome,” after Aesop’s fable about the fox who couldn’t reach some hanging grapes. Rather than admit he couldn’t jump high enough to get them, the fox decided they must be sour anyway. As Fitzgerald writes on his website, the victims of sour grapes syndrome:
...are endurance athletes who cannot cope psychologically with being slower than they would like to be and who resolve this cognitive dissonance by replacing the goal of doing their sport well with that of doing it “right.” The syndrome is being spread by various movements that promote alternative methods that are contrary to those practiced by the most successful athlete … By latching onto [HFLC], athletes can claim a kind of victory over superior competitors.
At some point, Fitzgerald writes, when a movement grows large enough, “it begins to win converts among athletes who are not, in fact, wracked with jealousy of faster athletes but who simply don’t know any better.” To enlighten those athletes, he cites a study recently published in the journal Nutrients in which researchers compared HFLC athletes with those eating a balanced diet. While HFLC made athletes leaner, it also caused them to lose power due to “impairment of the muscles’ ability to burn carbs.”
ED'S COMMENTS: Fitzgerald's words: 'inability to burn carbs' is utter nonsense - the condition is 'out of gas' - i.e. no glycogen in muscles. In fact muscles do not burn carbs to produce high intensity exercise. We will examine what this means in several lectures.
Additionally, Fitsgerald's comments on sour grapes syndrome vis-a-vis with he idea certain athletes 'latching onto HFLC" is more nonsense - as revealed by Inkinen's experience from article 2 above.
The athletes had, essentially, trained their bodies to use fat for fuel and decrease reliance on carbs. The result, Fitzgerald writes, is a reduced tolerance for high-intensity training and impaired “performance in all races except perhaps ultra-endurance events such as 100 km trail runs.” If you want to go fast, your body needs carbs for fuel. Training on a Banting diet makes your body less efficient at doing so, ultimately hobbling most athletes on race day.
The next time you’re thinking about cutting carbs, check your motives. If you’re doing it to look lean or run 62 miles or more at once, HFLC may work for you. But if you want to perform optimally at nearly any other endeavor, don’t ditch your bagels.
QUESTIONS BASED ON FIRST ARTICLE: The Secret Foods of Athletes
1. Why can non-athletes follow the same nutritional principles as athletes?
2. Why would vegans or non-meat eaters – especially female athletes and runners be more susceptible to iron deficiencies?
3. What is the purpose of downing a spoonful of coconut oil after a hard workout or race?
4. What do I mean by following the ’80/20 rule’?
5. What use is it pointing out to a client the concept: “athletes react similarly to psychological stresses as non-athletes.”
COMPARE AND CRITIQUE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS FROM ARTICLES 2 AND 3
Article 3 statement: . “If you care about your performance as an endurance athlete, the safe way to go is a high-carb diet,” Fitzgerald says. “If you go on the high-fat bandwagon, it’s a crapshoot.”
Article 2 statements: Disillusioned with a low-fat, high-carb diet that left him constantly hungry and caused his weight to fluctuate dramatically, Inkinen experimented with different foods, ultimately adopting a high-fat diet made up of ingredients like olive oil, macadamia nuts, and avocados. “After a few months, I started becoming healthier and performing better,” he says.
There are four key signs that you might be ingesting too many carbs: you frequently bonk, you’re hungry all the time, your stomach hurts, and you’re not recovering well from workouts. “We’re seeing that most athletes—from weekend amateurs to serious professionals—perform better with moderate carbohydrate intake,”
CRITIQUE THE UNDERLINED WORDS (HFLC = high-fat-low-carb diet)
Fitzgerald writes, when a movement grows large enough, “it begins to win converts among athletes who are not, in fact, wracked with jealousy of faster athletes but who simply don’t know any better.” To enlighten those athletes, he cites a study recently published in the journal Nutrients in which researchers compared HFLC athletes with those eating a balanced diet. While HFLC made athletes leaner, it also caused them to lose power due to “impairment of the muscles’ ability to burn carbs.”
CRITIQUE FITZGERALD'S STATEMENT
The result, Fitzgerald writes, is a reduced tolerance for high-intensity training and impaired “performance in all races except perhaps ultra-endurance events such as 100 km trail runs.” If you want to go fast, your body needs carbs for fuel.
ED'S CRITIQUE:
It is misleading to say the athletes cannot ‘tolerate’ high intensity movement. This is because the muscles of said athletes did NOT become detrained, weaker, or less able to work – the muscles are simply out of the gas that fuels fast muscle contractions, i.e. short of glycogen. After simply feeding a 'trained muscle' with fuel, the muscles of trained humans will be able to perform just fine. The problem is not the muscle itself.
Again imagine you are the wolf who must run for a few hours at a very fast pace to hunt down prey. If you begin with a shortage of glycogen your muscles will not be able to contract repeatedly at high intensity - and so your pace slows down. If you are running a ultra long endurance race at a slower pace - then a shortage of glycogen may not matter - since muscles do not use much glucose or glycogen to produce low intensity or slow pace work.
So, Fitzgerald is correct by saying, “If you want to go fast, your body needs carbs for fuel.”
The reason why performance in ultra-endurance events is not impaired is simple; THE PACE TO RUN AN ULTRA-ENDURANCE EVENT IS SLOW. Shorten the race up – and everyone would try to run faster to beat the competition – and then performance would ‘suffer’ again because the ‘fuel… glucose/glycogen’ to contract muscles quickly is not there!
CRITIQUE THE AUTHOR'S WORDS BELOW FROM: “Secret Foods of Athletes”
The author writes: "I’ve often wondered what might happen if recreational athletes put the same emphasis on nutrition as Olympians do preparing for the Games. As a fortysomething outdoor athlete, I’ve jazzed around over the years with numerous dietary programs—the Zone, paleo, the Blueberry Muffin Diet (not recommended)—in hopes of improving performance, but nothing stuck, except to my waist. I was confused. If you trained hard enough, didn’t it all burn up in the lactic-acid fire anyway? Hoping to gain deeper insight into high-end performance nutrition, I made a pilgrimage to the OTC."
ED'S QUESTION BASED THE AUTHOR'S STATEMENT:
What is wrong with saying: didn’t it all burn up in the lactic-acid fire anyway?
*Advanced lesson derives from here: