1 The Diet of the World’s Fittest People
WHAT DO PROFESSIONAL RUNNERS IN THE UNITED STATES, NATIONAL-TEAM rowers in Austria, world-class swimmers in Argentina, and champion triathletes in South Africa have in common?
Their diet.
It’s true. Elite endurance athletes in every sport and in all parts of the planet eat the same way. Underneath superficial differences in their specific food choices, the world’s fittest people share a common set of eating habits that constitute what I call the Endurance Diet. Unlike familiar weight-loss and general-health diets, most of which were invented by a single person or group of people, the Endurance Diet evolved over many generations inside the crucible of international competition. Through this process, eating habits that impeded performance were gradually weeded out and only those that best supported it survived.
Yet, although the Endurance Diet is the product of real-world trial and error, not science, the best and latest science demonstrates that its five habits really do maximize the benefits of cardiovascular exercise. A good cardio training program reduces body fat levels, strengthens the heart, improves circulation, increases the body’s ability to absorb and adapt to stress, improves metabolic efficiency, sharpens the nervous system, and boosts fatigue resistance in the muscles. These and other physiological adaptations to cardio exercise constitute endurance fitness, or the specific type of fitness that elite endurance athletes need to win big races. Studies show that the habits of the Endurance Diet enable athletes to get more endurance fitness out of the same training and also to train more effectively.
Endurance fitness is important not only to elite endurance athletes seeking to win international competitions but also to everyone else who engages in cardio exercise. Endurance fitness is the key to losing weight, improving health, looking better, living longer, functioning and feeling better in everyday life, and achieving any kind of athletic goal, whether it’s finishing a half marathon or qualifying for the Ironman World Championship. And the Endurance Diet is the key to maximizing endurance fitness, not just for elite athletes but for everyday athletes and exercisers like us as well.
The only problem is that, although nearly all elite endurance athletes follow the Endurance Diet, very few others do—yet. The purpose of this book is to correct this problem. Whatever form or forms of cardio exercise you may do, and whatever your goal may be, the Endurance Diet will give you better results and a better chance of achieving your goals than any other way of eating. To become as fit as you can be, all you have to do is eat like the world’s fittest people. And it’s easier than you might think.
Discovering the Endurance Diet
If you’re like most endurance athletes and exercisers, you have been exposed to many contradictory claims about what constitutes the optimal diet for endurance fitness. You have probably heard or read that a meat-free diet, a low-carb diet, an ancestral diet, and a host of other diets are best for people seeking endurance fitness. But you probably have not heard or read that the diet shared by virtually all of the world’s most successful endurance athletes is the way to go. That’s because it was only recently discovered that elite endurance athletes all over the world share a common set of eating habits.
The road to this discovery began in 2009, when I was working on a previous diet book for endurance athletes and exercisers. That book included a chapter called “What the Pros Eat,” which presented one-day food journals from eighteen of the world’s best cross-country skiers, cyclists, mountain bikers, rowers, runners, swimmers, and triathletes. My reason for incorporating this information was that I believed endurance athletes could not possibly succeed at the highest level unless they ate in a way that supported endurance fitness.
My previous exposure to the diets of elite endurance athletes—going back to 1995, when I wrote an article about the diet of champion triathlete Mike Pigg—had revealed a noteworthy consistency. Almost every world-class performer I’d ever dined with or questioned about his or her eating habits maintained a very balanced and inclusive diet based on natural foods. But the eighteen food journals I collected for my book greatly deepened my appreciation for how similarly top athletes from all over the world nourished themselves. Even some of the same specific menu items—oatmeal, for example—kept popping up.
As I thought about these patterns, I was reminded of the work of Stephen Seiler, an American exercise physiologist who works at the University of Agder in Norway. In the late 1990s, Seiler embarked on a long-term project that entailed rigorously quantifying the training methods of elite endurance athletes in various disciplines. He discovered that world-class athletes in the full suite of endurance sports share a common training approach. Specifically, they spend about 80 percent of their total training time at low intensity and the other 20 percent at moderate to high intensity. Seiler also dug into historical data and learned that elite endurance athletes had not always followed “the 80/20 rule,” as he called it. Past generations had experimented with all kinds of methods. But, over the course of many decades, a gradual convergence had occurred.
Seiler has argued persuasively that the reason today’s best endurance athletes all train the same way is that the 80/20 approach works better than any alternative. Championship-level competition ruthlessly exposes what works and what doesn’t. Athletes who train with superior methods win; athletes who train with inferior methods lose—and then trade their methods for those of the winners. The result is an evolutionary process through which training methods move gradually toward optimal effectiveness.
Having observed that elite endurance athletes from all over the world shared a similar way of eating, I couldn’t help but wonder if this pattern did not exist for the same reason elite athletes everywhere had converged on the same training system. It seemed to me more than plausible that the dietary practices that were most broadly shared by elite athletes everywhere were the products of the same type of evolutionary process that had produced their common approach to training, and that these eating habits thus constituted the optimal diet for endurance fitness. I found myself wishing that some ambitious scientist would do the same thing with diet that Seiler had done with training: meticulously examine the eating habits of elite endurance athletes across the globe in order to identify specific practices that are universal within this special group. Then I decided to just go ahead and do it myself.
The research project that I subsequently embarked on took two years to complete. My goal was not to publish the results in a scientific journal for a few dozen PhDs to appreciate but rather to identify a concrete set of best practices for all seekers of endurance fitness to follow. I knew before I even started the project that I would find features common to the diets of most endurance athletes, because I had already seen evidence of their existence. But I hoped to distill the vaguely defined similarities I’d observed previously into a precise, replicable dietary formula, much as Seiler had already done with training.
I spent time eating with and interviewing world-class endurance athletes on five continents. I broke bread with triathletes in Brazil, with cyclists in Spain, with cross-country skiers in Canada, and with Kenyan and Japanese runners. Additionally, I designed a formal diet questionnaire that I sent to world-class athletes in many other countries. A total of thirty-two nations and eleven sport disciplines are represented in the responses I gathered. When my research was complete, I had discovered the Endurance Diet—the optimal diet for endurance fitness.
The Five Key Habits
The Endurance Diet comprises five eating habits that are present in the diets of nearly 100 percent of the athletes I interacted with both directly and indirectly in my research. Expressed in the form of rules, they are as follows:
1. Eat everything
2. Eat quality
3. Eat carb-centered
4. Eat enough
5. Eat individually
These five habits are the final products of a multigenerational process of dietary evolution carried out by elite endurance athletes all over the world, a process in which less effective practices were discarded and more effective practices retained until no further improvement was possible. As such, they represent the necessary and sufficient dietary conditions for attaining the highest possible level of endurance fitness—the rules that today’s professional endurance athletes must follow in order to win races. Let’s take a closer look at what each habit entails and how it benefits the pros who depend on it.
Habit 1: Eat Everything
There are six basic categories of natural whole foods: vegetables (including legumes); fruits; nuts, seeds, and healthy oils; unprocessed meat and seafood; whole grains; and dairy. The overwhelming majority of elite endurance athletes regularly consume all six of these “high-quality” food types. The reason they do so is that a balanced, varied, and inclusive diet is needed to supply the body with everything it needs nutritionally to handle the stress of hard training and to derive the maximum benefit from workouts.
In addition to the six high-quality food types, there are four “low-quality” food types: refined grains, sweets, processed meats, and fried foods. Most elite endurance athletes allow themselves to eat small amounts of each of these food types. Indulging in a treat here and there does them no harm and is even beneficial in the sense that it makes their overall diet more enjoyable and sustainable. (I’ll talk in much more detail about food types in Chapters 3 and 4).
Habit 2: Eat Quality
While most elite endurance athletes eat everything, they don’t eat equal amounts of everything. Instead they skew their diet heavily toward high-quality foods and eat low-quality foods in moderation. High-quality foods tend to be more nutrient dense (i.e., richer in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants) and less energy dense (i.e., lower in calories) than low-quality foods. Basing their diet on high-quality foods enables elite endurance athletes to get more overall nutrition from fewer calories, and this in turn allows them to maximize their fitness while maintaining an optimal racing weight.
Habit 3: Eat Carb-Centered
Elite endurance athletes select high-quality carbohydrate-rich foods such as whole grains and fruit as the centerpiece of most meals and snacks. As you probably would expect, there is a great deal of diversity in the specific foods that professional racers from different cultures rely on to meet their carbohydrate needs. Ethiopian runners eat a lot more teff than Chilean mountain bikers, who eat a lot more potatoes than Chinese swimmers, who eat a lot more rice than Danish cross-country skiers. But all of these foods are rich in carbohydrates, and all of these athletes maintain carb-centered diets.
Overall, carbohydrates account for 60 to 80 percent of total calories in the diet of the typical elite endurance athlete. As the primary fuel for intense exercise, carbs enable these athletes to absorb their workouts with less physiological stress and to extract more benefits from their training.
Habit 4: Eat Enough
Elite endurance athletes do not consciously restrict the amount of food they eat by enforcing inflexible calorie counts or portion-size limits or by eating less than is needed to satisfy their hunger, as many recreational athletes and dieters do. Nor do they mindlessly overeat as a majority of people in affluent societies do today. Instead, they pay mindful attention to signals of hunger and satiety and allow these signals to determine when and how much they eat. This is the only reliable way to eat sufficiently but not excessively—that is, enough to meet the energy demands of training but not so much as to gain or hold onto excess body fat.
Habit 5: Eat Individually
Elite athletes are mindful of, and responsive to, not only their appetite but also their dietary needs in general. Each athlete is a unique person in a unique situation. The diet that works best for one athlete is unlikely to work best for another athlete in every detail. For example, while all endurance athletes perform best on a carb-centered diet, some function better when they get most of their carbs from nongrain sources. Elite athletes are good at listening to their bodies, paying attention to how different foods and eating patterns affect them, and modifying their diet according to what they learn. As a result, each professional endurance athlete develops his or her own version of the Endurance Diet.
Among the dozens of elite endurance athletes whose diets I analyzed in my research was Jasmine Alkhaldi, an Olympic swimmer with a Filipino mother and a Saudi father who was competing for the University of Hawaii at the time I interacted with her. Alkhaldi’s eating patterns offer a good example of what the Endurance Diet looks like in practice. The table below presents a typical day in her gustatory life.
One-Day Food Journal of Jasmine Alkhaldi, Filipino/Saudi Swimmer
Breakfast:
Scrambled eggs with cheese and turkey, old-fashioned oatmeal, banana, coconut water
Snack:
Granola bar (whole grains, nuts, seeds), Muscle Milk™ protein shake
Lunch:
Grilled fish, quinoa, mixed-greens salad, fruit juice
Dinner:
Beef steak, grilled mixed vegetables, fruit juice
All five habits of the Endurance Diet are manifest in this sample day’s eating. For starters, it includes each of the six high-quality food types and only one of the four low-quality food types (the Muscle Milk protein shake counts as a sweet). High-carb foods (oatmeal, quinoa, etc.) are the centerpiece of most of her meals and snacks. The frequency and size of her meals are controlled by her appetite, not by calorie counts or plate-cleaning instincts. “I focus on making sure I eat enough because I know I burn all the calories,” she explained to me. “I want to make sure that I have something to burn and something that will help my body recover.”
Finally, Alkhaldi practices the habit of eating individually by tweaking her diet according to her perception of her body’s unique needs. While some elite endurance athletes avoid red meat, for example, Alkhaldi eats it almost daily. “For me personally,” she said, “having red meat is a must before any competition because it helps me feel stronger in the water and gain more energy.”
The Great Diet Divide
As a certified sports nutritionist, I work one-on-one with nonelite endurance athletes and exercisers who come to me for help with their diet. The most striking thing I’ve observed in these clients is how few of them eat like the pros before I place them on the Endurance Diet. The majority of these recreational seekers of endurance fitness instead follow popular diets like the Paleo Diet or else they eat the way the average nonathlete does—which here in the United States, unfortunately, means eating the so-called Standard American Diet (SAD), where 11 percent of total calories come from fast food and 13 percent from added sugars.
Athletes who reach out to me for help are always motivated by a specific problem they’re facing, and in almost every case the problem is a direct result of inferior nutrition. The most common problem I see in athletes on the Standard American Diet is difficulty losing weight. But the popular diets, although seemingly healthier, generate negative outcomes, too. After the Paleo Diet became popular, for example, I was contacted by a steady stream of athletes complaining of chronic fatigue and poor performance in workouts.
Why is it that nearly 100 percent of elite endurance athletes like Jasmine Alkhaldi practice all five habits of the Endurance Diet, while most recreational endurance athletes and exercisers do not? The reason has to do with where each group goes for information about how to eat. Elite endurance athletes take their dietary cues from other pros—especially the most successful ones. Nonelite athletes and exercisers, meanwhile, tend to obtain diet information from sources in the mass media and popular culture.
The best athletes do not start off eating differently from the rest of us. In childhood, they (like all of us) eat whatever their parents feed them. Because they are talented, however, they experience great success in their sport even when the food they get at home leaves much to be desired. But when these gifted young athletes finish school and begin to compete against the very best athletes in the world at the professional level, two things happen: (1) they begin to lose races (perhaps for the first time in their life), and (2) they notice that the athletes who are beating them in races eat differently.
The natural response to this situation is also the right one. The defeated younger athletes simply imitate the eating habits of the established winners. Because the overwhelming majority of successful endurance athletes follow the habits of the Endurance Diet, this process invariably consists in the younger athlete adopting any of the five key habits of this diet that he or she is not practicing already. This is how the Endurance Diet perpetuates itself. Having evolved to the point of perfection over the course of many decades, it is now handed down from veteran elite athletes to less experienced ones.
Consider Molly Huddle, one of America’s top distance runners. Huddle grew up in Elmira, New York, on what she described to me as “the typical American diet” of cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and meat and potatoes for dinner. This diet fueled Huddle to a fourth-place finish at the Foot Locker High School Cross Country Championship and a national high school record for two miles (10:01).
In college, Huddle ate like a typical college athlete. Her dietary mainstays were cold cereal with milk and bagels with peanut butter. Conscious of the need to consume vegetables, she ate salads “occasionally.” During her four years at the University of Notre Dame, this diet fueled Huddle to nine All-America selections and a runner-up finish in the 2006 NCAA Championships 5000 meters.
After graduating from college, Huddle moved to Providence, Rhode Island, to train with a group of elite female runners coached by Ray Treacy. Her professional career got off to a shaky start. Huddle struggled initially to keep up with the women she trained with and competed against at the elite level. No longer could she rely on her talent and work ethic alone to dominate her peers. So Huddle decided to change her diet. Wisely, she did not attempt a complete overhaul. She just made a few commonsense adjustments such as eating more salads and less breakfast cereal. In other words, she adopted the Endurance Diet habit of eating quality. The most important change, however, concerned not what she ate but how much. A naturally light eater, Huddle noticed that the athletes around her ate more, so she began to “eat enough” as well.
“It helped me to see that the women I was training with were eating full, carb-heavy meals and kicking my butt in races,” Huddle told me, “so I figured they were doing everything right!”
Her assumption was correct. Running and other endurance sports are so competitive at the elite level today that athletes cannot be successful—no matter how talented and hardworking they are—without doing everything right. They cannot train with inferior methods from yesteryear, use second-rate equipment, or get away with bad dietary habits that affect how their bodies perform in and respond to workouts. Huddle’s decision to emulate the eating habits of the best athletes around her just made sense, and it was validated, in the years that followed her dietary adjustments, when she won twenty-three national championship titles and set four American records.
The pattern of Molly Huddle’s dietary evolution is extremely common among elite endurance athletes. The only thing that differs from one case to the next is the specific dietary change a given athlete makes at the point of transitioning to the professional level in order to make his or her eating habits conform to the proven best practices of the most successful athletes.
Paweł Ochal is an elite Polish runner with a personal best time of 2:12:20 for the marathon. He comes from a poor family and was raised on an unbalanced diet that contained few fresh fruits and vegetables and no fish whatsoever. After gaining financial support for his running, Ochal greatly increased the variety in his diet. He now eats at least one fruit or vegetable with each meal and snack and spends three months of every year training in Portugal, where he eats fish daily, sometimes twice a day. These improvements have made a marked difference in his body’s ability to absorb the training that he must do to be competitive at the pro level and have powered him to successes that include a victory at the Warsaw Marathon.
Stone Tsang, a Chinese adventure racer based in Hong Kong, made an effort to improve the overall quality of his diet as a young professional. He cut down on snack chips and fried food and increased his intake of vegetables, fruit, and nuts. “I’ve found I feel better and stronger when I eat healthier,” he told me.
Dmitry Polyanskiy, a Russian triathlete who finished the 2014 season ranked seventh in the world, grew up on a typical Russian diet. But when he joined his country’s national triathlon team and began to share meals with other elites at training camps, his diet made a significant shift toward carbohydrate-rich foods such as pasta. He discovered that he had a lot more energy for training and racing on a carb-centered eating routine.
Naydene Smith, a South African rower who finished sixth in the 2014 World Rowing Championships Women’s Pair, grew up on her mom’s home cooking (roasted chicken was a family favorite), but after turning pro she had to modify her diet in a couple of ways to meet her individual needs. She addressed a tendency toward low iron levels with increased red meat consumption and supplementation. Smith also suffers from occasional nondiabetic hyperglycemia, so she is careful to strictly limit her intake of refined sugars.
I could supply many more examples, but these few speak for the rest: Paweł Ochal added balance and variety to his diet (Endurance Diet Habit 1). Stone Tsang elevated the overall quality of his food choices (Endurance Diet Habit 2). Dmitry Polyanskiy increased the amount of carbohydrate in his diet (Endurance Diet Habit 3). Molly Huddle began to make sure that she ate enough (Endurance Diet Habit 4). Naydene Smith adjusted her diet to better meet her individual needs (Endurance Diet Habit 5). These five dietary changes constitute a complete list of the types of dietary changes that elite athletes commonly make in order to excel at the highest level of competition. In each case, the aspiring professional athlete does not abandon the culturally normal diet that he or she grew up on. Instead, a targeted change or set of changes is implemented to make the young athlete’s diet more like those of established champions.
Too Much (Mis)Information
Recreational endurance athletes and exercisers like us are in a completely different situation. Unlike the pros, we do not belong to a peer group that clearly has the whole diet thing figured out. For us, discovering the optimal diet for endurance fitness is not a simple matter of copying the eating habits of the Olympians and world champions we train with and compete against. We are left to look for dietary guidance elsewhere. The most popular resources are books, magazines, websites, podcasts, and blogs focused on endurance or general nutrition.
The major drawback of this approach is that the guidance available through such resources is inconsistent. Whereas nearly all elite endurance athletes practice the same five key dietary habits, the authorities offering dietary advice through mass and social media channels have widely varying beliefs about what constitutes the optimal diet for endurance fitness (or weight loss or general health). This lack of consistency leaves many athletes and exercisers confused about what to eat.
A typical case is Kate, a runner in her twenties who works for a nonprofit organization in San Diego. Kate has bounced around from pescatarian to plant-based to other diets and has not been satisfied with any of them. Problems ranging from anemia to severe cravings for “forbidden” foods have caused her to abandon the various eating programs she’s tried with initial high hopes. Kate gets much of the information on which she bases her dietary decisions from running websites and publications, but she finds the recommendations they offer to be maddeningly variable.
“I read every running magazine out there,” Kate told me. “I’ve noticed advice given in one issue is completely different than advice in the next issue—and I’m talking about the same publication. How are we supposed to know what is right?”
It’s not only twenty-something female runners who are confused about what to eat and whose bewilderment leads them to jump from diet to diet without getting the results they seek. Mike is a fifty-something triathlete who works as a corporate executive in Hoover, Alabama. He has tried high-protein diets, liquid diets, “grazing” diets, and many others. Not an actual client of mine, Mike is still searching. “I have yet to find (or properly execute) a diet where I can successfully manage my weight and feel good in long-distance racing,” he told me.
The dietary confusion that endurance seekers feel is exacerbated by the fact that the popular diets they are persuaded to try don’t work. And they don’t work to the precise extent that they deviate from the way elite endurance athletes eat.
Most popular diets have rules that contradict one or more of the five habits of the Endurance Diet. Many of them explicitly forbid eating everything. Plant-based diets, which forbid meat, seafood, and dairy, are one example. Popular diets also tend to look past the simple concept of quality in favor of other, more esoteric, ways of distinguishing “good” and “bad” food types, such as glycemic index scores and pH values. A large number of popular diets place strict limits on carbohydrate intake. Others contradict the Endurance Diet habit of eating enough by prescribing calorie counts, portion-size limits, or frequent fasting. And nearly all popular diets at least tacitly discourage individuality, forcing all of their followers to start over with a one-size-fits-all solution instead of allowing them to simply improve their existing (and presumably preferred) eating habits.
Although such rules may sometimes work for people who don’t exercise much, they seldom pan out for those who vigorously pursue endurance fitness, regardless of their ultimate goal. I’ve seen the consequences of each contradiction often enough to have identified consistent patterns.
Dietary Self-Sabotage
Athletes and exercisers who try diets that eliminate entire food groups often come to me with complaints of poor performance in workouts and competitions, compromised recovery, stagnating fitness development, chronic fatigue, injuries, frequent infections, and iron-deficiency anemia. There are also psychological consequences of such restrictions, which include obsessive fear of eating the wrong thing and binge episodes followed by bouts of extreme guilt.
Those who fall for low-carbohydrate diets commonly develop symptoms of overtraining, the worst of which are persistent lethargy, declining performance, hormonal disruptions, and sleep and mood disturbances. Sad to say, the rising popularity of low-carb diets among recreational endurance athletes has been very good for my business as a sports nutritionist.
Athletes and exercisers who approach the task of regulating the amount of food they eat with a negative mind-set, always worrying about gaining weight, usually end up pinballing between overeating and undereating. The latter is just as bad as the former. Consistently falling even slightly short of meeting the athletic body’s calorie needs results in poor workout performance, slow recovery between workouts, stagnating fitness, persistent fatigue, mood and sleep disturbances, more frequent illnesses, and elevated risk of injury. There are, of course, many athletes and exercisers who consistently eat too much, but this error is caused not by paying mindful attention to the body’s true energy needs, as elite athletes do, but instead by eating low-quality foods that promote overconsumption and by eating “mindlessly” (e.g., cleaning one’s plate despite feeling stuffed).
There are also psychological consequences associated with worrying a lot about overeating. Like the mistake of eliminating entire food types from the diet, focusing on not eating too much fosters a fear- and guilt-based relationship with food. I have never met an athlete or exerciser who has an unhealthy relationship with food and yet manages to maintain a consistently healthy diet that produces the desired results.
At the very least, obsessive worry about eating too much causes stress, which sabotages health and fitness as much as healthy food helps it. In the worst cases, this error leads to disordered eating, a problem that is very common at the subelite level of endurance sports and is an outright epidemic among female college runners.
Interestingly, eating disorders are virtually nonexistent among elite endurance athletes. The reason is simple: any elite athlete who develops an eating disorder is not going to stay elite very long! The foundation of endurance fitness is all-around health, and eating enough keeps elite endurance athletes healthy in body and mind.
The most insidious damage that popular diets do to athletes and exercisers results from the discouragement of individuality. A healthy diet is only as effective as it is sustainable. Improved eating habits are more sustainable when they retain some of a person’s dietary preferences, but popular diets frequently leave little room for the exercise of such preferences. What’s more, one-size-fits-all diets systematically train their followers to ignore their bodies’ individual needs, and as a result some of these needs are not met.
For every recreational endurance athlete or exerciser who addresses his or her confusion by cycling through various popular diets, there are several more who react by throwing up their hands and reverting to the Standard American Diet, which has the virtue of being comfortable, at least. One such athlete is Stephanie, a runner and schoolteacher in Linwood, New Jersey, who told me, “I pretty much eat whatever I want, whenever I want, even though I know it’s not healthy.” Athletes like Stephanie knowingly persist in eating poorly because they are turned off by or burned out on the rigid, perfectionistic popular diets they see as the only alternative to eating “like a normal person,” as they often put it.
Features of the SAD have spread well beyond America’s borders, so that athletes and exercisers in many parts of the world are now eating too many low-quality foods and not enough high-quality foods. This is one reason why, according to a scientific survey I helped administer in 2008, three out of four recreational endurance athletes report being dissatisfied with their weight at any given time.
Here’s Your Opportunity
Chances are you do not currently eat the same way the world’s fittest people do. Even if you’re not currently following a popular diet or stuck on the Standard American Diet, it is unlikely that you are practicing all five habits of the Endurance Diet like the pros.
This book will give you the opportunity to learn from the world’s most successful racers how to eat for maximum endurance fitness. It will give you a virtual seat at the table with top runners, cyclists, and other athletes from a variety of countries so you can see that they do indeed share a common core diet—a diet that works better than any other diet for athletes and exercisers at all levels.
In Chapter 2, I will explain why it makes just as much sense for you to adopt these eating habits as it does for rookie pros like Molly Huddle. Chapters 3 through 7 will supply real-world and scientific proof that these habits are more effective than the alternatives for every endurance fitness seeker, along with specific guidelines on putting them into practice.
The remainder of the book is dedicated to showing you how to make these habits stick and how to fine-tune the Endurance Diet to fit your needs, preferences, and lifestyle. Included in this section is a collection of original recipes for delicious, nourishing, and easy-to-make meals favored by elite endurance athletes all over the world. They were created by Georgie Fear, my longtime collaborator and herself a former triathlete and ultrarunner. The concluding chapter addresses the subject of training, explaining the approach to exercise that best complements the Endurance Diet, the cornerstone of which is Stephen Seiler’s 80/20 Rule.
Are you ready for a diet that will cure you once and for all of confusion about how to eat to maximize the results you get from the time and energy you invest in exercise? A diet that will power you beyond all of the nutrition-related obstacles preventing you from achieving your goals? A diet that is as enjoyable and easy to sustain as it is effective because it accommodates individual preferences and needs? Then follow me—or, better yet, follow the athletes who have already gotten where you want to go.