Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance by Matt Fitzgerald

Author:Matt Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781937716264
Publisher: VeloPress

Again, from day to day your diet should have a consistent balance of macronutrients that favors carbohydrate, but ideally this will not be the macronutrient balance of every meal. For example, let’s suppose that your normal diet is 65 percent carbohydrate and 15 percent protein. In this case your breakfast should be closer to 80 percent carbs and 10 percent protein, your lunch 65 percent carbs and 15 percent protein, and your dinner 50 percent carbs and 25 percent protein. The exact numbers don’t matter. What’s important is that you make some effort to frontload your daily carbohydrate consumption and backload your protein intake while maintaining the right overall balance of macronutrients from day to day.

EAT ON A CONSISTENT SCHEDULE. How many times a day should you eat? Three times? Four times? More? There is no single optimal meal frequency for everyone. While three meals a day seems to be a universal minimum requirement for controlling appetite and maintaining energy levels, whether it is necessary to eat one or more snacks in addition to breakfast, lunch, and dinner is an individual matter. Even though a “grazing” approach to diet is recommended by many diet authorities, the results of research on its effects are equivocal, and in the real world many successful endurance athletes, including Olympic and World Championships bronze medalist Shalane Flanagan, seldom snack between meals.

There is a popular belief that eating frequently increases metabolism and thereby promotes weight loss, but research does not support such a mechanism. A 2008 study by Dutch researchers compared the outcomes of normal-weight women who spent 36 hours in a metabolic chamber under two different conditions (Smeets and Westerterp-Plantenga 2008). In one session they consumed two meals per 24-hour period, and in the other they consumed three meals. Measurements taken in the two sessions revealed no differences in either resting metabolic rate or the amount of energy subjects expended through voluntary activity.

This study was limited by its short duration and the small difference in the number of meals eaten. It did not rule out the possibility that metabolic rate increases as a long-term adaptation to greater eating frequency or that those who habitually eat 6 times a day have a higher resting metabolic rate than those who eat just 2.7 times per day, as the average person does. But other studies have addressed the limitations of the Dutch study. For example, an interesting study by undergraduate researchers at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (Goodman-Larson, Johnson, and Shevlin 2003) compared the resting metabolic rate and eating frequency of 22 women on their habitual diets. Statistical analysis revealed no correlation between the two variables.

RESEARCH HAS SHOWN THAT EATING ON THE SAME SCHEDULE EVERY DAY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EATING MORE FREQUENTLY THROUGHOUT THE DAY.

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