The Endurance Diet with Matt Fitzgerald | EP#153

​​The Endurance Diet with Matt Fitzgerald | EP#153

In this Episode you'll learn about:

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About The Endurance Diet

Eat everything

Eat quality

The Diet Quality Score

12:01 - 

• When scientists do work in the field of nutritional epidemiology they use large populations to answer questions such as: do people who eat more fruit have lower rates of cancer. 
• Through this work, scientists have been able to identify foods that are generally associated with positive health outcomes. 
• To do this type of work they need ways of exploring diet quality. 
• Every natural food type is good for you in a certain amount. 
  
  Fruits, vegetables, fish, dairy (but not all types).
• Things like sweets, excessive alcohol, fried food and refined grains tend to be associated with negative health outcomes. 
• These scoring tools for assessing diet quality already exist for this type of work, but they are a little complex for everyday use. 
• I created my own: the diet quality score. 
  
  It's more user friendly and is intended to be a simple way of putting a number on the overall quality of your diet. 
• There are tables in the book that show you how many points your second serving of fruit in a day would get. 
• I also have a smart phone app that's easy to use: DQS. 
• It takes a bit of effort, but the point is to pay more attention to what you eat. 
  
  This makes it easier to systematically improve the quality of your diet.
• From this, I have identified ten food groups which can be ranked from highest to lowest quality:
  1. Vegetables 
  2. Fruit
  3. Nuts, seeds and healthy oils
  4. Whole grains
  5. Dairy 
  6. Unprocessed meat and seafood
  7. Refined grains
  8. Sweets
  9. Processed meat
  10. Fried foods 

Eat carb-centred 

Eat enough

Eat individually

25:04

• The first four habits are universals - they establish a framework that you want your diet to follow as an endurance athlete. 
• However, we're not all the same, so there's plenty of room within these parameters to eat in different ways. 
• I spent a few days in Spain with the Lotto-Jumbo cycling team from the Netherlands.
  
  16 cyclists were all eating together, but no two plates had exactly the same food choices on them. 
  
  They all had the same options but they chose slightly different options, which they all had reasons for. 
• Popular diets are often 'one size fits all', which I don't agree with. 
• I think you should change your diet as little as necessary in order to achieve the results you want. 
  
  You eat the way you do for a reason. It's okay to stick to your preferences.
• It's all about building habits, and you're more likely to stick to the habits you come up with if it feels easy. 
  
  It needs to be enjoyable, culturally relevant, etc. 

Should age-groupers be eating like the elites?

27:33

• Yes - we are all human!
  
  Some people think that elite endurance athletes are a different species, but they're not. 
• Genetic research has found that a very small number of genes make elite athletes different from the rest of us.
  
  As a cohort, elite athletes are as genetically different from each other as cohort of recreational athletes are.
  
  The 'must have' genes for elite performance have nothing to do with how food is digested and metabolised. 
• There's also the training volume side, but that is just a matter of scale. 
• For example, the 80/20 ratio applies whether you're elite or age-group, but you apply it individually to your training.
• Training like the pros doesn't mean also doing 30 hours a week - you emulate their patterns but with appropriate scaling. 
  
  You do the same with diet. The way the elites eat is also optimal for you but with proper scaling. 

Nutrition periodisation

29:41 - 

• Most athletes are familiar with periodisation in training where you break the training process into phases. 
• The same can be done with nutrition.
• I don't like to see athletes overthink diet too much because it's usually just stressful and unhelpful. 
• Once you've started to practice these five habits, there are refinements you can make to get even better results.
  
  This includes making changes to what and how you eat based on where you are in the training cycle.
  
  It can also be about how you eat on easier days compared to harder workout days.
• For example, if you're coming off an off-season break and you've gained a little weight, you might want to do a short weight-loss focus phase as you begin the next training cycle. 
  
  The best way to do this is not the same as the endurance diet, so you might set aside a few weeks to shed the weight, and then shift back to the endurance diet habits and focus on building fitness. 

Fuelling workouts 

32:42 - 

• If you're doing a race, you want a very precise plan so you can do what works best. 
• A workout is not a race, and they can be varied depending on their purpose. 
• For longer harder sessions, nutrition consumed during them start to matter. 
• The big ones are fluid for hydration and carbohydrate for fuel. 
• It's best to know what the rules are for races for you, and then you can understand what you might want to do during workouts. 
• However, there are some workouts where you may want to intentional withhold supplemental energy such as carbohydrates, as this withholding is an added stress to your body and it may help improve fitness. 
• The studies in the area of fasted workouts are interesting and compelling, but some of them are protocols you'd never want to do in the real world (e.g. hard intervals 4 days in a row).
• If you want to do a depleted training session, it makes sense to do it first thing in the morning as you've essentially fasted through the night. 
• You can also do them in the afternoon if you've done a hard workout in the morning and not utilised carbs for refuelling after the first workout. 
• Mikael: I have utilised this with athletes, for example an athlete who was doing a particularly long bike race, and it was very successful. 

Supplements

38:41 - 

• There tends to be two camps on supplements, either all good or all bad, but I think they need to be evaluated individually. 
• I have found there doesn't seem to be any 'must have' supplement for endurance athletes as a performance enhancer.
  
  However, the supplements that are close to necessary are ones for health rather than performance enhancement. 
• The big three would be:
  1. Omega-3 essential fats - it can be difficult to get enough of these through diet alone. 
  2. Iron - it's not universally necessary but often can be conditionally needed. Runners and triathletes are often Iron deficient. It's important to track your levels and consider low Iron as a culprit if you're regularly fatigued. 
  3. Vitamin D - it's a common deficiency and the symptoms can look similar to Iron deficiency. In the winter, people with darker skin are very commonly deficient so it's good to track this and supplement as necessary. 

Listener question

42:02 - 

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