2 Why You Should Eat Like an Elite
AMÄEL MOINARD IS A FRENCH MEMBER OF THE BMC PROFESSIONAL CYCLING team who has completed eleven Grand Tours, including six Tours de France. He is also among the many elite endurance athletes who supplied me with a one-day food journal when I was conducting research on the Endurance Diet.
On the particular day he chose to record his food and beverage intake, Moinard breakfasted on porridge with raisins, banana slices, and soy milk and a cup of tea. He then mounted his bike for a three-hour ride, during which he ate a scone and a cereal bar and drank a bottle of PowerBar Perform and a Coke. Immediately after the ride, Moinard drank a protein shake. His lunch consisted of vegetable-filled strudel with steamed carrots and olive oil and an orange. At midafternoon, he ate an apple and a muffin and drank tea with milk. For dinner, he ate minestrone soup, brown rice, whole wheat bread with butter, and Swiss cheese.
All five habits of the Endurance Diet are manifest in this menu. You will recall from the previous chapter that the first habit is “eating everything,” which entails regularly consuming all six of the high-quality food types (vegetables; fruits; nuts, seeds, and healthy oils; unprocessed meat and seafood; whole grains; and dairy) and not forbidding the four low-quality food types (refined grains, sweets, processed meats, and fried foods). Moinard’s food journal includes every food type except fried foods and unprocessed/processed meat and seafood. Moinard explained to me that he consumes meat or fish every other day. If he had recorded his food journal one day earlier or one day later than he actually did, we would have seen meat or fish on his dinner plate.
Habit 2 is “eating quality.” This means basing your diet on the high-quality food types and eating only small amounts of the low-quality food types. Most of the low-quality foods and drinks recorded in Moinard’s food journal were taken in during exercise, when the normal rules of healthy eating are suspended, for the simple reason that the purpose of consuming nutrition during exercise is to enhance performance, not health, and the most performance-enhancing forms of nutrition you can consume during exercise are sports drinks and other high-sugar products that are not healthy to consume outside of exercise. The only low-quality foods Moinard ate in the context of regular meals and snacks were strudel and a muffin (both made with refined grains) and milk chocolate (a sweet).
The third habit of the Endurance Diet is “eating carb-centered.” Practicing this habit is a matter of putting carbohydrate-rich foods at the center of most meals and snacks. Moinard certainly did so on this day, eating porridge and a banana at breakfast, taking in lots of carbs on the bike, eating strudel at lunch and brown rice and bread at dinner, and snacking on fruit. Over the course of the full day, Moinard got more than 70 percent of his total calories from carbs (including nutrition taken in on the bike).
Habit 4, “eating enough,” consists of regulating the amount of food that you eat by paying mindful attention to, and heeding, internal signals of hunger and satiety. Athletes who do so eat enough to maximize the benefits of their training without overeating. The alternatives to mindful eating are restricted eating (e.g., counting calories), which tends to result in yo-yoing between undereating and compensatory overeating, and mindless eating (e.g., plate cleaning), which tends to result in consistent overeating.
It is not possible to discern from a food journal whether an athlete eats mindfully, but it is possible to quantify how much he eats, and it’s clear from Amäel Moinard’s food journal that he eats a lot. There are six separate eating occasions recorded in his journal, and even the snacks are substantial. Nothing less would have sufficed to meet his energy needs. Moinard burned more than 5,000 calories on the day in question. But he did not meet his energy needs by consciously limiting himself to 5,000 calories. Instead he ate by feel, taking in just enough food to satisfy his appetite and stave off the return of hunger until it was time to eat again.
The fifth habit is “eating individually.” This entails applying the other four habits in a way that accommodates an athlete’s individual needs and preferences. Like Habit 4, this one is all about paying attention to yourself. But whereas eating enough results from eating mindfully, eating individually results from the somewhat broader practice of eating consciously, or paying attention to how your body responds to various eating patterns and adjusting them to enhance positive outcomes and eliminate negative outcomes.
Moinard’s practice of alternate-day vegetarianism is a great example of eating individually. It’s not something that many elite endurance athletes do, but Moinard has found that when he eats meat and fish more often, he gains weight, whereas if he eats them less often, he loses power on the bike.
Another elite endurance athlete who supplied me with a one-day food journal is Gwen Jorgensen, an American triathlete who won the ITU Triathlon Series World Championship in 2014 and 2015 and the 2016 Olympic Women’s Triathlon. Despite living in a different country and competing in a different sport than Amäel Moinard, she maintains a diet that is very similar to his.
The breakfast Jorgensen recorded in her food journal consisted of a bowl of oatmeal with banana slices, raisins, goji berries, strawberries, nuts, coconut oil, yogurt, peanut butter, and two poached eggs; coffee; and a piece of dark chocolate. After her first workout, she ate a snack of rice cakes with peanut butter and Greek yogurt. Lunch consisted of steamed rice with lamb and vegetables and a second piece of dark chocolate. Following her afternoon workout, Jorgensen ate dried apples, hummus, and raisins. Dinner was a one-pot dish with sweet potato, veggies, chicken, feta cheese, and avocado. Dessert was another piece of dark chocolate. Before going to bed, Jorgensen snacked on muesli with yogurt and fruit.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this menu is the sheer volume of food Jorgensen ate. If she’s not practicing the habit of eating enough, I’m Santa Claus! Almost as striking are the variety and balance of Jorgensen’s diet. Her food journal includes three servings of vegetables, four servings of fruit, four servings of nuts, seeds, and healthy oils, two servings of whole grains, three-and-a-half servings of dairy, and four servings of unprocessed meat and seafood (including the poached eggs). Clearly, she is fully on board with the habit of eating everything.
Almost all of the variety in Jorgensen’s food selections comes from the six high-quality food categories. The only exceptions are the two servings of white rice she ate (one in the form of rice cakes) and her second and third squares of dark chocolate (the first one deserves a pass, as research indicates that dark chocolate is healthy in small amounts).
Like Moinard, Jorgensen puts high-carb foods at the center of each meal and snack, from the oatmeal she consumes almost every day at breakfast to the muesli she ate before bedtime on this particular day. And like Moinard again, Jorgensen permits herself a few dietary eccentricities that demonstrate a habit of eating individually. For example, lots of people add fruit and nuts to their oatmeal, as Jorgensen does. But not many also add coconut oil, yogurt, peanut butter, and poached eggs! Jorgensen created this unusual breakfast dish as a way to get the dietary variety and balance she feels her body needs.
No Coincidence
The fact that Amäel Moinard and Gwen Jorgensen’s diets are so similar would hold no real significance if other elite endurance athletes did not eat similarly. But in fact nearly all of the professional racers whose diets I have analyzed practice all five habits of the Endurance Diet.
Even this broader pattern would mean little, however, if most recreational endurance athletes and exercisers and even nonathletes throughout the world practiced the same habits. If this were the case, then the Endurance Diet would be nothing more than the way everyone eats. But data from large-scale scientific surveys and from epidemiological research clearly shows that few people other than professional endurance racers practice all five habits of the Endurance Diet.
What’s more, even elite endurance athletes themselves did not follow the Endurance Diet. Looking at what earlier generations of elite endurance athletes put into their mouths, we find that they deviated from one or more of the five habits far more often than today’s athletes do. Here are some notable examples:
• The first great runner of the twentieth century, Hannes Kolehmainen, who lived from 1889 to 1966, did not practice the habit of eating everything. He was, in fact, a vegetarian.
• Johnny Weissmuller, the greatest swimmer of the 1920s, did not eat quality. He survived mainly on hot dogs and ice cream and consumed few vegetables except when his coach was looking over his shoulder.
• Jacques Anquetil, who won the Tour de France five times between 1957 and 1964, did not eat a lot of carbohydrates. He was raised on the high-fat, dairy-rich diet of working-class Normandy, which he supplemented as an adult professional cyclist with copious amounts of protein-packed steak and lobster as well as vast quantities of champagne (alcohol is not a carb!).
• Peter Reid, a Canadian triathlete who won the Ironman World Championship three times between 1998 and 2003, did not eat enough. A big man by the standards of world-class triathletes, Reid sometimes went to bed at night so hungry that he had a headache, all for the sake of getting down to what he considered to be his ideal racing weight of 164 pounds.
• Wang Junxia, a Chinese runner who set a women’s 10,000-meter world record in 1993, did not eat individually, adjusting her diet to meet her personal needs and preferences. Junxia was trained by an infamously despotic coach named Ma Junren, who ruled his all-female roster of athletes with an iron fist, micromanaging every aspect of their lives, diet included. Although he allowed them to eat some normal foods, like rice, he also forced them to consume turtle’s blood, caterpillar fungus, and other supplements with supposed endurance-boosting powers.
Taken together, these three facts—(1) that nearly all elite endurance athletes today share the same five key eating habits, (2) that most recreational endurance athletes and exercisers and most sedentary people do not practice all of these same habits, and (3) that elite endurance athletes of past generations were far more likely than today’s top racers to disobey one or more of the “rules” of the Endurance Diet—demand an explanation. Why did this way of eating evolve to become almost universal at the top level of every major endurance sport while remaining uncommon elsewhere?
Survival of the Fittest
The short answer is competition. Endurance races like the Boston Marathon and the Ironman World Championship determine winners and losers with brutal clarity. The rewards for winning these competitions—money, fame, glory, and the thrill of victory itself—are significant and function as strong incentives for athletes to do everything in their power to cross the finish line first.
Most races are won by the fittest participant. Technique and tactics matter less in endurance competition than they do in games like tennis and soccer, while fitness matters more. The fittest athlete on the start line of a race is very likely to be the first one to cross the finish line, even if he or she is not the best tactician and does not have the most refined technique. In a sense, then, most races are decided before they even start. The true challenge for elite endurance athletes, therefore, is to arrive at the start line with the highest level of fitness.
The three main contributors to fitness are talent, training, and diet. Talent, of course, is fixed at birth, whereas training and diet are controllable and are thus the focus of each athlete’s efforts to prepare for competition. In a race contested by athletes of equal talent, the fittest participant and the probable winner will be the one who is best prepared, and the one who is best prepared will be the one who trained and ate in the most effective ways before the race.
If there were only one way to train or eat, then almost every race would be won by the most talented athlete. But in fact there is an almost infinite variety of ways to train and eat in preparation for endurance competition. Knowing this, and knowing the importance of training and diet to fitness, elite athletes who fall short of victory in major races often try to find out how the winners train and eat and then imitate those practices.
The history of endurance sports is filled with examples of such copycatting. Consider the case of Finnish runners Hannes Kolehmainen (mentioned above) and Paavo Nurmi. In 1912, Kolehmainen won Olympic gold medals in three running events and became a national hero. In the wake of these triumphs, thousands of Finnish boys took up running in the hope of becoming their country’s next athletic icon. Many of these young runners also emulated the specific methods that were perceived as the secrets to Kolehmainen’s success.
There were two salient ways in which Kolehmainen’s methods of preparing for competition differed from the methods used by most of his contemporaries. On the training side, Kolehmainen was innovative in his use of high-intensity intervals. On the diet side, he stood out as a vegetarian. Paavo Nurmi was fifteen years old when the Summer Games of 1912 were staged in Stockholm. He took up running and became a vegetarian the very same year. For whatever reason, though, he did not immediately incorporate high-intensity intervals into his training routine. After showing initial promise, Nurmi struggled to improve. Then, at age twenty-one, he gave up vegetarianism and started doing high-intensity intervals. Soon thereafter, Nurmi experienced a breakthrough, lowering his 5000-meter time by 32 seconds and qualifying for the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, where he won the 10,000 meters and the individual cross country event and led Finland to the team cross country title.
This example perfectly illustrates how the evolution of training methods and dietary practices has occurred at the elite level in endurance sports. Most of the major endurance sports can trace their origins to the late nineteenth century. (The first European Rowing Championship was held in 1893, for example, and the first Olympic Marathon in 1896.) Among the first few generations of modern endurance athletes, training methods and dietary practices were extremely diverse and constantly changing. But as up-and-coming athletes like Paavo Nurmi emulated champions like Hannes Kolehmainen, an evolutionary process began to unfold.
Not everything that the champions did differently was necessarily better. In those early days, exceptionally talented athletes were able to win despite making mistakes. But things sorted themselves out over time, as up-and-comers with varying degrees of talent tested out training methods and dietary practices borrowed from the champions. Some methods and practices, such as high-intensity intervals, proved to be effective for everyone, whereas others, such as vegetarianism, proved to be less effective than a specific alternative (in this case eating everything).
As the decades passed, two things happened. First, there was a gradual convergence of the training methods and dietary practices used by elite endurance athletes all across the world. At the same time, the top racers got fitter and faster—proof that this evolutionary process was moving elite athletes inexorably toward optimal, unimprovable ways of preparing. Kolehmainen’s best time for 5000 meters was 14:36.6. The women’s world record at that distance now stands at 14:11.5.
Each of the five habits of the Endurance Diet traveled its own path toward universality within the elite athlete population. Prioritizing carbohydrates in the diet, for example, has been the norm since the 1960s. Eating quality, on the other hand, did not become universal until more recently. The most dominant marathoner of the late 1970s, Bill Rodgers, for example, had a notoriously junk-filled diet.
There is compelling evidence that it is no longer possible for even the most extraordinarily talented athlete to win major international competitions despite defying one or more habits of the Endurance Diet. Consider the case of Peter Reid, the three-time Ironman champion who defied the Endurance Diet habit of eating enough. Only once since Reid won his last Ironman title in 2003 has the winning time of that event been slower than Reid’s best winning time. Two of those faster victories were achieved by Chris McCormack, who weighed 177 pounds, or 13 pounds more than the weight that Reid starved himself down to for race day. Notably, McCormack’s first Ironman win came in the Australian’s sixth attempt, and he’d been as light as 171 pounds in some of his previous attempts. Only when he stopped worrying about being as light as possible and started to eat enough did McCormack break through to victory.
What’s true of the habit of eating enough as it relates to the Ironman World Championship is also true of the other four Endurance Diet habits and for every other major international endurance sports race. Over the past 120 years, the crucible of championship-level competition, by rewarding superior fitness and mercilessly punishing its lack, has led elite endurance athletes to discover the very best way to eat for endurance fitness. Athletes who do not eat this way simply cannot win at the highest level.
The Science of Trial and Error
We have just seen convincing historical evidence that the Endurance Diet is in fact the optimal diet for endurance fitness. But historical evidence is not scientific proof. Nowadays, people expect diets to have a scientific basis. Can we really trust that a real-world process of blind trial and error enabled elite endurance athletes to discover the diet that supports endurance fitness better than any other way of eating?
Why not? Trial and error solves all kinds of real-world problems. Most notably, natural selection, which influences how living species survive in challenging and changing environments, is a form of trial and error. Natural selection parallels the process by which the Endurance Diet evolved in the environment of elite endurance competition. Like endurance athletes, animals, plants, and other living species seek fitness—not endurance fitness, in their case, but the fitness of being well adapted to their environment. The individual members of a living species have different physical traits that confer varying degrees of fitness in relation to their environment. Each trait represents a distinct potential solution to the problem of the species’ survival. These traits are the functional equivalent of the various training methods and dietary practices that athletes use to pursue endurance fitness.
Whereas endurance athletes compete for race victories, organisms compete to procreate. Individual organisms whose traits render them better adapted to their environment are more likely to live long enough to produce offspring. Consequently, favorable traits tend to spread throughout a species over succeeding generations, whereas unfavorable traits tend to get weeded out.
The trial-and-error approach to problem solving—whether the problem is the survival of a species in a changing environment or discovering the optimal diet for endurance fitness—is essentially a form of random guessing. The downside of random guessing is that it’s inefficient. Consider how long it would take you to guess a randomly chosen number between one and one million (unless you got incredibly lucky). The upside of trial and error is that, given enough time, it’s guaranteed to succeed. As biophysicist John Mayfield wrote in his book, The Engine of Complexity, “Random guessing will eventually answer any question.” If you’re given a million chances to guess a randomly chosen number between one and one million, you can’t possibly fail.
There are far more than one million combinations of dietary patterns that could conceivably combine to define the optimal diet for endurance fitness. The human body produces an estimated 2,709 enzymes that facilitate approximately 896 chemical reactions. In athletes, all of these enzymes and reactions serve as direct or indirect links between diet and fitness. Each specific change in diet—for example, altering the ratio of cooked foods to raw foods that are consumed—has the potential to influence this complex biochemistry in ways that may in turn affect endurance fitness. A very large number of “random guesses” are therefore needed to answer the question of how to eat for maximum endurance fitness.
Not an infinite number, however. The past 120-plus years have given elite endurance athletes around the world enough opportunity to test just about every possible solution to the problem of how to eat for maximum endurance fitness. The fact that, after fourteen or so generations, elite athletes across all disciplines and on every continent have settled on a common solution assures us there is little left to try.
Does this mean that science has no role to play in identifying the optimal diet for endurance fitness? Not at all. Sports nutritionists and exercise physiologists contribute to the process by testing the relative effectiveness of different dietary practices in a more formal and focused way than real-world racing does. Research of this kind has consistently demonstrated that Endurance Diet habits yield better results than the alternatives, and that the various popular diets often followed by recreational endurance athletes fail to live up to their promises.
A good example is the Zone Diet. The creator of the Zone Diet, Barry Sears, was working as a biochemist when he came across a scientific paper that caught his interest. In it, Sanford Byers and Meyer Friedman of Mount Zion Medical School in San Francisco reported that they had reversed symptoms of atherosclerosis in rabbits by injecting them with phospholipids, a type of fat used mainly in cell membranes.
Several years later, Sears learned of new research on a class of molecules called eicosanoids, which are synthesized from phospholipids and participate in many biological functions, including inflammation. This new research convinced Sears that eicosanoids were much more important than he had previously known. Many years later he wrote, “These hormones . . . are among the most powerful and important substances in the body. They act as ‘master switches’ that control virtually all human body functions. . . . Eicosanoids are so crucial to our health and well-being that I came to think of them as the ‘molecular glue’ that holds the human body together.”
Having come to this conclusion, Sears set out to discover a way to balance eicosanoids for maximum health. This mission led eventually to his development of the Zone Diet. The original version of the diet offered a very simple prescription: get 40 percent of your daily calories from carbohydrates and 30 percent each from fat and protein. A later iteration of the program introduced an element of essential fatty acid supplementation. Sears brought the Zone Diet to the masses with his first book, Enter the Zone, which was published in 1995 and became an international bestseller. The Zone Diet gained popularity with recreational endurance athletes after Sears licensed the 40-30-30 concept to a sports supplement company that incorporated the formula into a line of energy bars and marketed them aggressively to athletes.
Although the Zone Diet was not created for endurance athletes, Barry Sears was able to create a post factum argument to support the idea that it was optimal for endurance fitness nevertheless. Specifically, he argued that his diet increased the body’s production of particular eicosanoids involved in muscle growth and repair, blood flow and muscle oxygenation, and inflammation. If eicosanoids truly were as all-important as Sears contended, this argument probably would have stood up to formal testing. But in a 2002 study, researchers at England’s Kingston University found that switching over to the Zone Diet reduced running performance by almost 10 percent in a group of moderately fit young men.
One of the reasons the Zone Diet became so popular among recreational endurance athletes was that it seemed so scientific. But there’s a difference between seeming scientific and being scientific. A biochemical explanation for why a certain diet ought to maximize endurance fitness should not be mistaken for proof that it does. And if that biochemical explanation is based on just one or two small pieces of the huge and complex puzzle of human metabolism—such as eicosanoids, which do not, in fact, “act as ‘master switches’ that control virtually all human body functions” and are not, in fact, “the ‘molecular glue’ that holds the human body together”—then it really isn’t much better than a random guess. A stronger hypothesis would have to consider the complete metabolic puzzle—all of the human body’s estimated 2,709 enzymes and 896 chemical reactions—and that is simply impossible. It’s better just to skip the hypothesizing and revert to trial and error, a process that, thankfully, has already been fully played out in the real world.
Other popular diets that are followed by endurance athletes have similar flaws. Proponents of plant-based diets, high-fat diets, and other regimens offer very scientific-seeming biochemical explanations for why they ought to maximize endurance fitness. But like Barry Sears’s case for the Zone Diet, these explanations are nothing more than highly reductionistic stories of “biological plausibility”—wild guesses dressed up in the language of biochemistry—so it shouldn’t be surprising at all that, when actually put to the test, these guesses turn out to be wrong.
But although human metabolism is just too complex to allow scientists to deduce the optimal diet for endurance fitness through biochemistry, science can, in addition to testing the effectiveness of different dietary practices in a more formal and focused way than races do, shed light on why the most effective practices work and why the least effective ones don’t. For example, recent research indicates that the problem with the Zone Diet is that it’s too high in protein. (To meet the 30 percent protein requirement of the Zone Diet, the average American would have to almost double his or her protein intake, and the average American’s diet is already high in protein by global standards.) A 2013 study by Japanese scientists found that eating a lot of protein inhibits the development of endurance fitness by reducing the number of mitochondria—the little “factories” inside muscle cells where aerobic metabolism occurs—that the body creates in response to training. This is not to say that 30 percent protein is “bad”—in fact, as I will discuss in Chapter 9, it’s actually good for short-term weight loss—it’s just not good for building endurance fitness.
In the coming chapters I will share much more scientific proof that the Endurance Diet habits are essential to maximizing endurance fitness, as well as research showing how these habits work. But the most persuasive argument in favor of these habits is the real-world evidence we’ve already seen: winners use them.
We’re All Human
In 2015, I gave a presentation titled “Why You Should Eat Like an Elite” (sound familiar?) at a summit for running coaches. Halfway through my talk, an audience member raised a hand and said, “I don’t get it. Elite athletes are completely different from the people I coach. How can the diet of an Olympic champion possibly apply to someone who runs a 25-minute 5K?”
It was a fair question, and perhaps one that has crossed your mind as well. If so, I’m glad, because it means I’ve probably succeeded in convincing you that the Endurance Diet is at the very least the optimal diet for elite endurance athletes. But does it really work for everyone?
Here’s what I told that skeptical coach: Elite endurance athletes aren’t as different from the rest of us as you might think. DNA analyses have demonstrated that a mere handful of genes, such as certain variants of the FIF5B gene, distinguish Olympic champions from the average Joe and Jane. Most of these genes relate to body size, natural speed, and aerobic capacity. They have nothing to do with how food is digested and metabolized.
Nor, for that matter, do these genes have anything to do with how the body responds to training. Scientists have determined that the genes that confer the ability to gain aerobic fitness in response to training (or “trainability”) are quite widespread in the human population. In one study, exercise physiologists created a system for scoring trainability based on how many of the relevant genes a person had. Although there was a significant degree of interindividual variation, a greater number of subjects (52) had the highest possible score than the lowest (36).
Recreational endurance athletes and exercisers typically do not train nearly as much as the pros do, and it is widely assumed that most of them couldn’t match elite training volumes even if they wanted to. But genetic findings like those I just described indicate that a majority of nonelite endurance athletes actually could get much fitter if they emulated the high-volume training of the pros.
Running is a bit of an exception. Most recreational runners could not handle 120 miles of running per week. But this limitation is mainly related to body size, not trainability. Recreational runners tend to be much larger than the pros (the current world record holder in the men’s marathon is five-foot-seven and weighs 121 pounds), and therefore their bodies absorb much more impact force with each mile, causing greater wear and tear.
Another popular assumption is that recreational athletes can and should “make up for” training less than the elites by doing more of their training at high intensity. This assumption is also false. Studies have shown that recreational athletes who exercise less than 45 minutes a day, on average, get the best results when they spend 80 percent of that time at low intensity and 20 percent at moderate to high intensity, just like the elites.
The science is clear: elite and recreational endurance athletes are similar enough physiologically that the training methods that work best for the pros are also most effective for the rest of us.
And diet? Some proponents of popular diets for endurance athletes have proposed that recreational athletes and exercisers, because they do not train as much as the elites, cannot “get away with” eating as the elites do. These Endurance Diet skeptics see habits such as eating everything, eating carb-centered, and eating enough as forms of dietary laxness that require several hours of daily training to neutralize. But elite athletes don’t practice these habits because they can—they practice them because they must.
If the goal of elite athletes were merely to look good naked, many of them could eat fast food three times a day and still maintain their washboard stomachs by virtue of burning thousands of calories a day through exercise. But elite athletes are trying to achieve something far more difficult than looking good naked—they are trying to win major international competitions. To achieve this goal, they need to be significantly leaner and fitter than they would have to be merely to look lean and fit. Therefore, they cannot afford to have any true laxness in their diet.
A 2009 study involving elite runners drives this point home. Twenty-one top-level Ethiopian milers—ten women and eleven men—were statistically lined up in the order of their best race times. All of these athletes were very fast, but some were marginally faster than others. In a second part of the experiment, the same runners were statistically lined up in the order of their body fat percentage. All of them were very lean, but some were just slightly leaner than others. As it turned out, the two lineups—the speed-based arrangement and the fat-based arrangement—were almost identical. The fastest runner among the twenty-one was also the leanest, the second fastest was the second leanest, and so forth.
These findings make it clear that elite endurance athletes do not have any margin to “get away with” sloppy eating habits. Whatever may appear like sloppiness to some—such as eating lots of carbs—is actually necessary to attain the razor-thin advantages that separate winners from losers at the elite level.
It is interesting to see what happens when an elite athlete whose diet really is substandard—meaning it does not fully conform to the five habits of the Endurance Diet—brings it up to standard at midcareer. One such case involves the American triathlete Hunter Kemper. Through the first several years of his professional career, Kemper was a somewhat careless eater with a weakness for Krispy Kreme donuts. Despite this weakness, Kemper performed very well, winning three national championship titles between 1998 and 2004 and finishing as high as eighth in the world championships—and he certainly looked lean and fit. But he wanted more.
After a disappointing ninth-place finish at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Kemper decided to make some changes. He consulted with a sports nutritionist and subsequently improved his diet quality by eating more vegetables and unprocessed meats and fewer donuts and other sweets. He lost a couple pounds of hidden body fat and finished the 2005 season as the ITU World Cup champion and the number-one ranked triathlete in the world.
Recreational endurance athletes with far less talent and significantly milder training schedules than Hunter Kemper achieve similar results when they make similar changes. Take Cassandra, a formerly overweight fifty-something triathlete and network specialist from Spokane, Washington. Cassandra used my Diet Quality Score tool (which I’ll describe in Chapter 4) to improve her diet and subsequently lost 110 pounds without making any other changes to her eating or exercise habits. “It was pretty easy to drop the weight without ‘dieting’ or adversely affecting my triathlon training,” she told me via Facebook.
As you see, the eating habits that work best for athletes at one end of the talent and training spectrum really do work just as well for athletes and exercisers at the opposite end. It’s a simple fact: if you want to become as healthy and fit as you can be given the amount of time you’re able to invest in your training, you need to eat like an elite.