How to find the right athletic diet

After watching so many sports programs on television lately and trying to switch channels when an ad came on only to find that it seems all stations put the ads on at the same time. You can’t get away from them. The ones that caught my attention are the weight loss ads. Such a large number of success stories from the various products. I go back to when the Atkins Diet was the big rage. Now the number has increased ten-fold. The most frequent spots on TV include Weight-Watchers; Nutrisystem, GoLo, on down to Green Chef, Fuel Meals, Blue Apron, etc. Many of these are mail in meals for the person to eat. It sounds good in that it takes the burden of grocery shopping for food out of your daily life. And then the conic sections enter the picture with the dislike for broccoli, kale, and spinach from a parent-child confrontation. My dislike for spinach came from a can my mother opened and dropped a wet, soggy, mass of cold spinach on my plate. I was sure Popeye would never force a kid to eat that “healthy” food to get strong. When I found out you can get spinach as a green leaf vegetable in a salad my perspective changed.

The different diets for athletes has changed over the years as coaches started listening to nutritionists. The big change from a steak pre-game meal to pasta or pancakes was a real change for football teams. Marathon runners would ‘carbo-load’ before a marathon by eating some spaghetti the night before the race. The actual ‘carbo-loading’ plan took about a week to follow. There was a depletion phase first before a couple of days of ’carbo-loading’. The one spaghetti meal before the race was more of a mental boost than an energy boost. The big push for more protein for strength athletes is still around. Large canisters of powdered protein are still a big seller at health food stores. Strength athletes need protein but to have protein benefit the body it needs carbohydrates to make it work. A high protein drink before a workout will not be as valuable as the protein content the athlete ate yesterday.

And then the different countries came into the picture. The Asian diet of rice and bean sprouts was tried. The Norwegians had lutefisk as the primary energy meal. That was one diet that was never very successful. Especially since surveys of people on a diet say that ’taste’ and flavor rank high in a diet. The Russians had several diets depending on the sport. Meat was always part of the meal. And it is good to include Polish sausage as a pregame meal.

It gets complicated when the advice is a food like beans. Beans can be baked, black beans, lima beans, broad beans, green beans, navy beans, garbanzo beans, pinto beans, white beans, refried beans (a favorite in Texas), on down to bean sprouts. If the objective is weight loss, that leafy vegetable kale only has 33 calories per cup versus another favorite health food, tofu, with 366 calories per cup. This argument can be made for types of potatoes, squash, pumpkins and peas, etc.

For liquids, the same complications continue. A 12 ounce soda has on average 150 calories of mostly sugar. Even milk is mistaken with the percentage listed. The percentage is the amount of fat in the total volume. Skim milk has no fat and is 86 calories per cup; 1% has 102 calories per cup; 2% has 121 calories per cup; and whole milk at 3.3% fat has 150 calories. From experience, skim milk first tastes like colored water. After acquiring a taste for skim milk even 1% to 2% tastes like drinking liquid fat. It is all a matter of perspective.

For an athlete it is best to consult a registered dietician. The problem that an athlete needs to be aware of is almost anyone can call themselves a ‘nutritionist’ by reading a book. Check their credentials and background education first. Nancy Clark was one of the first sports nutritionists to publish a book on diet for athletes. Get a nutrition textbook from a college bookstore to check out some facts before trying a diet to improve performance. While the diet is a very important part of athletic performance, the extra work of running, lifting, and putting in the time working out is probably the major factor in improving an athlete’s performance. There are times when the athlete has to decide which of the favorite foods they are willing to give up to get better.