Haile Gebrselassie is widely considered to be history’s greatest runner. It would be difficult indeed to argue that any other runner has achieved more than the Ethiopian great’s two Olympic gold medals, eight world championship gold medals, and 27 world records. His range—from 3:31.76 (indoors) for 1,500 meters to 2:03:59 for the marathon—is certainly unmatched. So is his longevity. In 1992 Gebrselassie won gold medals at 5,000 and 10,000 meters at the World Junior Championships in Athletics. Twenty years later he won the highly competitive Great Manchester run (a 10K) with a time of 27:39.
One of the keys to Gebrselassie’s spectacularly prolonged success was a consistent routine that he once described as “breakfast, running, lunch, running, dinner.” A highly successful businessman and active civic leader, Geb actually squeezed a good deal of work between his runs and meals, but he never gave training short shrift or compromised the quality of his diet.
His typical breakfast consisted of several pieces of bread with butter and jam, orange juice, and tea with sugar. Lunch is traditionally the biggest meal of the day for Ethiopians, and so it usually was for Gebrselassie. Most days he ate injera, a spongy bread made with whole-grain teff, which he used to wrap cooked vegetables and traditional Ethiopian meat preparations, such as doro wat, a spicy chicken dish. He washed these foods down with more tea and perhaps also a small cup of Ethiopian coffee or tege, a mildly alcoholic drink made from honey and barley.
At the dinner table Geb favored pastas, such as spaghetti and macaroni. While pasta is not a traditional Ethiopian dish, it has been quite popular there since the Italians tried to colonize the country in the 1940s. A well-traveled man, “The Emperor” enjoys many Western foods, including fast food, but he only allowed himself to eat that after victories.
Even more striking than the overall quality of the diet of history’s greatest runner was its extremely high carbohydrate content. Almost everything he ate and drank in a typical day, aside from a little lean meat, was carb-rich. In this respect Gebrselassie’s diet was not unlike that of other Ethiopian runners. An analysis of the diets of 10 world-class Ethiopian runners conducted in 2011 by a team of European and Ethiopian researchers determined that on average these athletes consumed nearly 10 grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight daily, or about 2.5 times the amount of carbs (adjusted for body weight) that the typical American eats (Beis et al. 2011).
There are some sports nutrition authorities who believe that no athlete should get more than 40 to 50 percent of his calories from carbs. If they are correct, then the East African runners eat far too much carbohydrate. That’s an absurd idea. East Africa’s runners are by far the best in the world. Remember, the dietary habits and training methods of the world’s best endurance athletes define what works. These athletes hold most of the records, they win most of the big races, and they eat a lot of carbohydrates. We need no other proof that a high-carbohydrate diet is good for hard-training endurance athletes.
Yet there is other proof. A number of studies have demonstrated that endurance athletes are able to train harder and perform better in hard training when they eat a lot of carbs. In fact, scientific evidence suggests that many endurance athletes in Western countries don’t consume enough carbohydrates to support their training loads optimally. So why does a vocal minority in the endurance sports community—including proponents of the Zone Diet and the Paleo Diet—believe that a low-carbohydrate diet is best for endurance athletes?
Anticarb sentiment in the endurance sports community is an ideological spillover from the weight-loss diet culture. Low-carb diets for weight loss have been popular for many years. These diets are based on the idea that carbohydrates are responsible for weight gain and on its logical corollary: that cutting carbs is the most effective way to lose weight. Advocates of low-carb diets for endurance athletes believe that the same principles apply to those who train hard every day, but they also believe that low-carb diets are better for endurance performance because they train the muscles to burn fat more effectively, which in turn boosts fatigue resistance.
In fact, carbohydrate consumption per se is not responsible for weight gain in the general population. While cutting carbs from the diet can be an effective way to lose weight, it is no more effective than other dietary approaches to weight loss. So for nonathletes the decision to use a low-carb diet for weight loss is a matter of personal preference. But for endurance athletes low-carb diets are not the best way to get leaner because, as I’ve suggested, they compromise training capacity. High-carb diets increase training capacity and enhance training performance, and these effects in turn tend to improve body composition. Remember, anything you do as an athlete that helps you perform better is likely to make you leaner as well; including enough carbohydrates in your diet is another example of this principle.
HIGH-CARB DIETS INCREASE TRAINING CAPACITY AND ENHANCE TRAINING PERFORMANCE—EFFECTS THAT IN TURN IMPROVE BODY COMPOSITION.
All three of the energy sources, or macronutrients, in the diet—carbohydrate, fat, and protein—are important. But for the endurance athlete carbohydrate is most important because carbohydrate needs increase drastically as training increases, whereas fat and protein needs increase more moderately. Failure to get enough of any macronutrient will hurt your training, but few endurance athletes fail to get enough fat or protein, whereas inadequate carbohydrate intake is common. Of course, getting enough carbohydrate matters little if your diet quality is low, you manage your appetite poorly, and you don’t follow the other steps of the Racing Weight plan. But real-world and scientific evidence suggest that if you do adhere to the other steps, you will perform better and get leaner on a high-carb diet than you will on a carb-restricted diet for athletes such as the Zone Diet or the Paleo Diet.
One of the earliest champions of the idea that carbohydrate was the chief culprit in weight gain was Alfred Pennington, a physician and researcher for the Du Pont chemical company in the 1940s. Pennington was led to this conclusion through his search for a diet that would yield weight loss “automatically” without consciously enforced calorie restriction. Evidence at the time suggested that pyruvic acid, which the body produces through carbohydrate metabolism, was responsible for excess fat storage. Pennington hypothesized that a reduction of carbohydrate in the diet would correspondingly reduce pyruvic acid production and fat storage even while the dieter continued to eat enough fat and protein to fully satisfy his or her appetite.
Pennington was aware that the body requires stable blood glucose levels for normal functioning and that carbohydrate restriction threatens blood glucose stability. But it had recently been shown that the body is able to maintain stable blood glucose levels despite carbohydrate restriction by breaking down stored body fat to produce glucose “substitutes” known as ketones. Thus, it seemed that low-carbohydrate diets offered a unique way of causing the body to aggressively break down its fat stores to meet its own energy needs.
Another advantage of low-carbohydrate diets for weight loss, Pennington noted, was that they did not cause the body’s basal metabolic rate (or the rate of calorie burning at rest) to decline, whereas general calorie-restriction diets did. What more could a dieter have asked for? Current knowledge in human nutrition and metabolism indicated that low-carb diets would reduce fat storage, increase fat burning, allow unrestricted eating, and keep the body’s metabolic rate from falling—a “perfect storm” of conditions for quick and easy weight loss. All Pennington needed was evidence that they actually worked.
Pennington got his proof when he devised a low-carb diet and tested it on Du Pont employees. The diet required that subjects eat at least 8 ounces of fatty meat three times a day along with a small portion of either white potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, grapefruit, melon, banana, pear, raspberries, or blueberries. Almost everyone who tried the diet lost weight, and the 20 obese individuals who followed it lost an average of 22 pounds over a period of three-and-a-half months.
In 1963, some 10 years after Pennington published his findings, a young physician named Robert Atkins, who was himself overweight, read about them and was inspired. He tried a low-carb diet, lost weight, and then began to prescribe the diet to his patients. In a 1972 book about the “Atkins Nutritional Approach,” Atkins expanded Pennington’s original theory about why carbohydrates were fattening. He argued that high-carbohydrate diets caused the body to overproduce insulin, a hormone that plays a role in delivering excess carbs to adipose tissue for conversion into fat. Atkins also believed that eating too much carbohydrate caused large fluctuations in blood glucose and insulin levels, which in turn led to cravings for more carbohydrates and hence to overeating. Overweight persons were essentially addicted to carbohydrates, he said.
THE WEIGHT LOSS THAT MANY PEOPLE EXPERIENCE ON LOW-CARB DIETS IS ATTRIBUTED TO REDUCED CALORIE INTAKE.
By 2000 the Atkins Nutritional Approach had become the most popular weight-loss diet in history. Members of the nutrition science establishment, who preferred to blame dietary fat for making people fat, subjected low-carb diets to more rigorous scientific testing than they had been subjected to previously. If they hoped to prove that such diets were ineffective, those hopes were dashed. A study led by Will Yancy at the Duke University Medical Center found that obese individuals lost an average of 26 pounds in six months on the Atkins diet (McClernon et al. 2007). Another group of subjects placed on a low-fat diet lost only 14 pounds in an equal span of time.
Even as low-carb diets were validated as a means to lose weight, however, their theoretical underpinnings were dismantled by other research. Careful studies revealed that the weight loss that resulted from low-carb diets had little to do with ketones, insulin, and cravings. The real reason people lost weight on the Atkins diet and other low-carb diets was that they ate fewer calories. Scientists were able to show that when calories were held equal, low-carb and low-fat diets yielded equal amounts of weight loss.
Low-carb diets might nevertheless be judged superior to other weight-loss diets if research could show that it was easier to eat fewer calories on them, but this evidence is lacking. After 10 years of intensive scientific comparisons of low-carb and other diets, the most that can be said for them is that they are about as effective as any other type of diet that reduces calorie intake.
And how effective is that? Not very effective in the real world. The true goal of any weight-loss diet is not short-term but permanent weight loss. Short-term weight loss is much easier to achieve. But only an estimated 20 percent of cases of significant short-term weight loss ultimately become permanent. The trouble with most studies of weight-loss diets is that their duration is short. Almost any reasonable dietary intervention will result in short-term weight loss that investigators can crow about in their published reports. But the few existing long-term studies have consistently shown that, regardless of what sort of diet is used, adherence drops after six months or so and subjects start to regain the weight they’ve lost. By two years after the diet began, the vast majority of dieters have regained all the weight they lost initially.
The only truly reliable proof of what works for permanent weight loss is data collected from people who have achieved such a loss on their own. Studies involving large groups of “successful” losers have found that no single particular type of diet is favored over any other. Some use low-fat diets, others use low-carb diets, still others rely on commercial plans such as Weight Watchers, and yet others make up their own rules. There is no pattern.
The real secrets to success in this population, research suggests, are behavioral factors such as self-monitoring (primarily through frequent weighing) and highly consistent eating patterns (Wing and Phelan 2005). The ratio of macronutrients in the diet is totally irrelevant to long-term weight-management outcomes. The effects of high-carb and low-carb diets on body weight in endurance athletes have not been studied, but there is no reason to believe that low-carb diets are any more likely to yield permanent weight loss in endurance athletes than in non-athletes. A highly motivated endurance athlete could use a low-carb diet to get leaner, but not without risking a drop in training capacity and performance that would in turn limit his or her improvements in body composition.
Unlike fat and protein, carbohydrate is not incorporated structurally into any body tissues. It is used only as fuel. Carbohydrate is stored in the liver and muscles as glycogen, but these stores are small—not even enough to fuel a marathon. This is why our carbohydrate needs are sensitive to our activity level. A desk worker who engages in no formal exercise needs very little carbohydrate and in fact shouldn’t consume much carbohydrate because any excess is converted to fat for long-term storage in adipose tissue. But a serious endurance athlete may need two or even three times as much carbohydrate as the average person.
The importance of glycogen availability to exercise capacity and the known depleting effect of low-carbohydrate diets on glycogen stores caused some scientists to wonder if low-carb diets might hurt exercise capacity in weight-loss seekers on the Atkins Nutritional Approach and related diets. Studies involving overweight, sedentary individuals have found that their exercise capacity—which is low—is not made any lower by a low-carb diet. Even though glycogen stores are depleted by such a diet, subjects have been able to maintain their original (low) exercise capacity by relying more on fat to fuel exertion.
That’s good news for overweight couch potatoes on low-carb diets who are contemplating starting an exercise program. These findings have little relevance to endurance athletes, however. Research going back to the 1960s has proven that the performance of trained athletes in racelike endurance tests is significantly affected by glycogen storage levels. When glycogen stores are maximized by a high-carbohydrate diet, endurance performance goes up. When glycogen stores are depleted by a low-carb diet, athletes bonk much sooner. The discovery of this causal link by Swedish scientists inspired the practice of pre-race carbo-loading (Rowell, Masoro, and Spencer 1965).
Most endurance athletes carbo-load before races. But they often overlook the importance of keeping muscles well stocked with glycogen throughout the training process, when glycogen stores are being drawn on heavily day after day. Numerous studies have demonstrated that athletes who eat more carbohydrates are able to maintain a higher performance capacity during periods of heavy training.
One such study was performed by Asker Jeukendrup and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham, England, in 2004. A triathlete himself, Jeukendrup compared the effects of a high-carb diet (8.5 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per day, or 65 percent of total calories) and a low-carb diet (5.4 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram per day, or 41 percent of total calories) on running performance during a period of intensified training. Seven high-level runners spent 11 days on each diet. Their training load was substantially increased for the last week of each 11-day period. At the beginning and again at the end of each heavy training period, the runners completed an 8-km time trial on the treadmill and a 16-km time trial outdoors. On both diets, the runners ran worse in the 8-km time trial after heavy training, but performance in the 16-km time trial worsened after heavy training only on the low-carb diet (Achten et al. 2004).
The more an athlete trains, the more carbohydrates that athlete needs in the diet to maintain performance. A good illustration of this principle is to be found in the diet of Greek ultrarunner Yiannis Kouros during a five-day, 600-mile race. To get through that event, Kouros had to eat and drink a tremendous number of calories—almost 12,000 per day—and nearly all of these calories—95.3 percent—came from carbohydrates. Kouros was wise to fuel his body in this seemingly unbalanced manner, as the body of a trained endurance athlete cannot store more than about 800 grams of carbohydrates (nonathletes store less than 400 grams) yet burns carbs at a rate of nearly 1 gram per minute even during moderate-intensity exercise such as ultrarunning. Thus, if Kouros had consumed “only” the 9.7 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight that Ethiopian runners who run “only” 110 miles per week consume, his glycogen stores would have been depleted long before he reached the finish line (even though the body can convert a certain amount of dietary fat into carbohydrate).
THE AMOUNT OF CARBOHYDRATE IN YOUR DAILY DIET SHOULD FLUCTUATE BASED ON YOUR TRAINING LOAD.
Most endurance athletes exercise a lot more than the overweight sedentary folks whose exercise capacity is not affected by low-carb eating and a lot less than Yiannis Kouros during his running stage race. Therefore, the carbohydrate needs of most endurance athletes also fall somewhere between these extremes. Studies in which the carbohydrate intake of moderately trained athletes has been manipulated have generally shown that the average American diet—which supplies a moderate 3 to 4 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight—maintains glycogen stores well enough to prevent a drop in performance. For example, a study by William Sherman at Ohio State University showed that runners and cyclists performed just as well in exhaustive exercise tests after seven days on a moderate-carbohydrate diet as they did after seven days on a high-carbohydrate diet, despite the fact that the moderate-carb diet reduced their muscle-glycogen stores by 30 to 36 percent compared to the high-carbohydrate diet (Sherman et al. 1993).
What lands athletes in trouble is switching to low-carbohydrate diets, such as the Zone Diet, that promise to increase endurance performance by boosting the fat-burning capacity of the muscle. Such diets do increase the muscles’ reliance on fat for energy during exercise, but they also reduce training capacity because the body always burns some carbs during exercise and when those carbs are not adequately replenished, performance plummets.
The Zone Diet recommends that carbohydrates account for 40 percent of total calories. The typical endurance athlete gets 50 to 55 percent of his or her daily calories from carbohydrates. In 2002 researchers at Kingston University in England studied the effects of switching to the Zone Diet on high-intensity running endurance in a group of young men. Before the switch, the men were able to run for 37 minutes and 41 seconds on average at 80 percent of VO2max. After a week on the Zone Diet that time had dropped all the way down to 34:06—a 9.5 percent decline in high-intensity running endurance.
It is worth pointing out that reducing carbohydrate intake has never been shown in any study to increase training capacity. Nor has increasing carbohydrate intake ever been shown to reduce training capacity. Increasing carbohydrate does not always increase training capacity, but it does under heavy training loads. The natural conclusion to draw from these facts is that endurance athletes should take pains to ensure that they are consuming enough carbohydrates to meet the demands imposed by their training load.
Most of us are familiar with carbohydrate intake guidelines in the form of recommendation percentages of total calories (such as the Zone Diet’s 40 percent guideline). These recommendations are not very useful because they make carbohydrate intake dependent on total calorie intake, which is only marginally relevant to actual carbohydrate needs. Carbohydrate needs are actually dependent on body weight and activity level. Therefore, they should be expressed as absolute amounts (grams) rather than as percentages of daily calories.
Based on my review of the scientific literature, I suggest that you aim for a daily carbohydrate intake target that is based on your training workload as indicated by Table 6.1. Be sure to use your optimal racing weight instead of your current weight to make these calculations, as you’re not trying to fuel your excess fat stores for optimal performance! Many athletes with higher training loads are surprised by the large recommended carbohydrate intake values that result from Table 6.1 calculations. That’s because the nutritional needs calculators that athletes may be familiar with do not account for how increasing training loads disproportionately increases carbohydrate needs versus fat and protein needs. Trust me, the numbers yielded by calculations based on Table 6.1 are valid. They are not absolute musts in all cases, however. If your carbohydrate intake is slightly lower than the amount recommended by this table, and your training and recovery are going very well, you may not notice any improvement after increasing your carb intake to the recommended level. Then again, you might.
One obvious implication of these recommendations is that not only should some endurance athletes eat more carbohydrates than others, but also any single endurance athlete’s carbohydrate intake should vary as his or her training workload changes. If your training load increases, then your carbohydrate intake should rise, and if your training load drops, then your carbohydrate intake should also come down. The proportions of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that nonathletes eat are as irrelevant to your body-weight management as an endurance athlete as they are to nonathletes’ efforts to lose weight and prevent weight gain. All that matters in this regard is the total number of calories that are consumed daily.
On the practical level of food selection, what does it take to meet your daily carbohydrate requirements? If your training load is moderate, it requires only that you include a few high-quality, high-carbohydrate foods in your daily nutrition regimen. If your training load is high, it may require such foods in every meal and snack throughout the day. Table 6.2 presents a selection of high-quality high-carbohydrate foods that you can rely on to meet your needs and the amount of carbs in each. Generally, the richest sources of carbohydrate are grains, dairy foods, legumes, and certain fruits (especially fruit juices).
As I mentioned earlier, endurance athletes do not need as much fat or protein as carbohydrate and they are much less likely to fail to meet their fat and protein needs. Nevertheless, it’s helpful to be acquainted with the minimal fat and protein requirements for optimal training performance.
The diet of the average American—which is also the diet of the average endurance athlete—is 30 to 35 percent fat. This is more than enough fat to support optimal training performance. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends that athletes aim to get a minimum of 20 percent of their calories from fat. However, a 2009 analysis of the diets of elite Kenyan runners revealed that on average they got only 13 percent of their calories from fat (Onywera, Kiplamai, and Pitsiladis 2004). Such real-world evidence suggests that a balanced diet of natural foods that supplies enough total energy will meet any person’s fat needs, regardless of the specific numbers.
While few endurance athletes take in insufficient fat to meet their needs for that macronutrient, there is some evidence that athletes who try too hard to limit their fat intake fail to take in enough total energy to support their training, which may have negative consequences. A 2008 study of female runners found that those who ate the least fat had the highest injury rate (Gerlach et al. 2008).
One of the reasons that fat needs are low and easily met even in endurance athletes is that the body can readily convert excess carbohydrate to fat. But there are a few specific types of fats that the body cannot synthesize from other nutrients. These essential fats must be obtained directly from food. Some essential fats are classified as omega-6 fatty acids and others as omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-6 fatty acids are abundant in commonly eaten foods, but omega-3 fatty acids are not, and omega-3 fatty acid deficiency is widespread in our society. Omega-3 fatty acids play vital roles in the formation of healthy cell membranes, nerve cell function, and the formation of anti-inflammatory compounds in the body.
A BALANCED DIET WILL MEET YOUR FAT NEEDS.
Preliminary research also suggests that omega-3 fatty acids may promote a lean body composition by enhancing the fat-burning effect of exercise (Hill et al. 2007). What’s more, they may even boost aerobic exercise performance. A solid body of scientific research has shown that omega-3 fats increase the elasticity of the blood vessels, which improves circulation and lowers blood pressure. Omega-3 fats may boost cardiac efficiency during exercise through the same mechanism (Peoples et al. 2008).
The best food sources of omega-3 fats are certain types of fatty fish (wild salmon, herring, anchovies), flaxseeds, and flaxseed oil. Experts recommend consuming omega-3-rich fish at least twice a week to avoid deficiency. I recommend that everyone, regardless of how much fish he or she eats, take a daily essential fat supplement. The two most important omega-3 fats are DHA and EPA. A daily dosage of 2 to 3 grams of EPA and DHA (combined) is recommended.
As we’ve seen, some in the endurance sports community believe that athletes should not merely ensure that they meet their minimum fat requirement but should go out of their way to maintain a high-fat diet of around 40 percent of total calories. The rationale is that this teaches the muscles to rely on fat to fuel exercise, sparing precious glycogen stores and increasing endurance capacity.
Studies have found that increased fat intake does result in greater fat oxidation during exercise. Researchers from New Zealand compared the effects of a 14-day high-carbohydrate diet, a 14-day high-fat diet, and an 11.5-day high-fat diet followed by a 2.5-day carbo-loading diet on fat oxidation and performance in a 15-minute cycling test and a 100-km cycling test (Rowlands and Hopkins 2002). Performance in the 15-minute test was slightly better after the high-carb diet, but not to a statistically significant degree, while performance in the 100-km test was slightly better, but again not to a statistically significant degree, following the high-fat diet. Fat oxidation was significantly greater during the 100-km test following the high-fat diet.
By and large, studies of high-fat diets have found that they boost performance in only the longest tests of endurance while reducing performance in shorter, higher-intensity efforts. This was shown in a study from the University of Connecticut (Fleming et al. 2003). Twenty volunteers were divided into two groups and placed on either an endurance training program and a high-fat diet (consisting of 61 percent fat) or an endurance training program and a moderate-fat diet (consisting of 25 percent fat) for six weeks. They performed a VO2max test and a 45-minute time trial before and after the study period. Members of the high-fat diet group exhibited a marked increase in fat burning during the 45-minute time trial, but their work output dropped by 18 percent relative to that of the moderate-fat group.
The greater problem with high-fat diets, as we have seen, is that they necessarily limit carbohydrate intake and thereby reduce training capacity. A diet cannot be both high fat and high carb. The benefits of a high-fat diet are small and the downside significant. The benefits of a high-carb diet are potentially large and the downside nonexistent.
So exactly how much fat should you eat? There’s no need to put a number on it, except in the specific case of omega-3 fats. If you maintain a high-quality diet, consume enough total energy by eating according to your appetite, and consistently meet your carbohydrate needs, you will consume an appropriate amount of fat—neither too much nor too little.
According to the World Health Organization, the minimum protein requirement for good health is 10 percent of total calories. The average American gets 18 percent of daily calories from protein, and the typical endurance athlete does the same.
As with carbohydrate, it is somewhat misleading to express dietary protein requirements as a percentage of total calories. This is especially true for athletes because exercise increases carbohydrate needs more than it increases protein needs. According to the study I mentioned earlier, elite Kenyan runners get approximately 10 percent of their calories from protein. So it would appear that they are just barely meeting their minimum protein requirement. However, these athletes run 110 miles in a typical week. This training load greatly inflates their carbohydrate needs, which they meet by consuming a whopping 9.7 grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight daily. This massive carbohydrate intake diminishes the fractional contribution of protein to their total calories. But because the Kenyan runners’ total energy intake is also very high, their absolute protein intake is also more than adequate.
There is a general consensus among researchers that athletes need to consume roughly 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily—compared to 0.8 g/kg for sedentary individuals—to meet basic health requirements and to adequately replace protein in the body that is broken down during and after workouts. The Kenyan runners whose diets were analyzed consumed an average of 1.3 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.
It is not difficult to eat 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight in a day. A sizable majority of endurance athletes do. Although this minimum requirement is 50 percent greater than the requirement for nonathletes, the typical diet for nonathletes and endurance athletes alike provides between 1.3 and 1.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.
The daily protein requirement for vegans is approximately 10 percent higher because the proteins in plant foods are less “bioavailable” than those in animal foods. So if you avoid all animal foods including dairy products, you’ll want to aim for at least 1.3 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily. The irony of the higher protein requirement of vegans is that most plant foods contain far smaller amounts of protein than animal foods do. Nevertheless, with a little planning it is not at all difficult to get enough protein as a vegan athlete, and plenty of people do—most notably champion ultrarunner Scott Jurek, whose diet you can get a look at in Chapter 12.
It is best not to consume much more than your minimum requirement of protein because this will proportionally reduce your carbohydrate intake and possibly lower your training capacity. Researchers in New Zealand found that cycling time trial performance was significantly impaired by one week on a 30 percent protein diet (Macdermid and Stannard 2006).
There is a time for higher protein intakes in the life of an endurance athlete, and that’s during the quick start period that precedes the beginning of a new race-focused training cycle. At this time fat loss becomes the top priority as performance recedes to second priority. Research has shown that high-protein diets increase fat loss and reduce muscle loss resulting from energy deficits. High-protein diets also attenuate the increase in hunger that typically accompanies an energy deficit. I’ll say more about protein intake in quick start periods in Chapter 10.
In the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, our nation was gripped by a positive mania for weight-loss diets based on ratios of carbohydrate, fat, and protein. Every new diet that came along touted a new and supposedly better way of balancing energy sources—a certain magical macronutrient ratio—as the key to rapid and permanent weight loss. Nobody could agree on exactly what the perfect breakdown was, but everyone seemed certain that a perfect ratio of carbs, fat, and protein did exist.
The lack of agreement on the perfect ratio was the first clue that there was no perfect ratio. Research then made it abundantly clear that it is possible to manage weight effectively on a wide range of macronutrient ratios. Consequently, diets based on macronutrient ratios are not as trendy as they once were, but they have a legacy. Conscious eaters have been trained to be aware of the balance of energy sources in their diet.
I tried to make this point as clearly as I could in the first edition of this book, but I presented my guidelines for carbohydrate, fat, and protein intake in such a way that readers who wished to try calculating the exact percentages of their total calories should come from carbs, fat, and protein could. So I’ve changed the presentation of my guidelines to make such backdoor calculations of personal magical macronutrient ratios impossible.
To balance your energy sources appropriately to reach your optimal racing weight and maximize your performance, you do not need to know these percentages. You don’t even need to know how many calories you need or consume. You will be assured of consuming the right amount of energy if you eat according to your appetite while maintaining high diet quality and practicing the appetite management techniques discussed in Chapter 5. You will be assured of meeting your carbohydrate requirements by following the guidelines in Table 6.1. This will maximize your training capacity and performance, which in turn will enhance all of the benefits of your training, including improvements in your body composition.
To meet your fat requirements you need only keep your diet quality up and eat fish at least twice a week and/or take a fish oil supplement. Finally, to get enough protein, count the number of protein grams you consume in a typical day and adjust your diet in the unlikely event that you’re getting less than 1.2 g/kg of body weight if you’re omnivorous and 1.3 g/kg if you’re vegan.
That’s all there is to it.
