In the realm of health and wellness, there’s a cacophony of advice clamoring for attention. From intermittent fasting to ketogenic diets, the landscape is littered with trendy solutions promising improved health and vitality. Yet, for athletes—those individuals pushing their bodies to the limits in pursuits like triathlons, marathons, and cycling—these mainstream trends can be not just misleading but potentially harmful.
In my last post, I discussed the meeting point between athleticism, aesthetics and longevity and how creating a stable foundation and then changing the colour of the icing on your cake, is the real secret to success when it comes to nutrition to feed any of these areas. But it can be really hard to identify what advice to take and what to leave when it comes to making sure you’re feeding your body for long term health AND your hobby for long term fun!
It’s become increasingly apparent that the one-size-fits-all approach propagated by the general health and wellbeing industry simply doesn’t cut it for those with high athletic demands. Here’s why athletes should be cautious about adhering to mainstream fitness and nutrition trends:
- Fueling Performance vs. Aesthetic Goals: The vast majority of mainstream health trends focus on weight loss or aesthetic ideals. Even those that claim to focus on health, are not fit for purpose in highly active individuals – and yes, that’s you, because remember the general public isn’t even working out every day in a lot of cases… Athletes require nutrition that not only feeds them as humans, but also gives them the quantity and quality of nutrients to perform. Restrictive diets like intermittent fasting or ketogenic diets may deprive athletes of the necessary energy stores, leading to decreased performance and even potential health issues. So while that little TikTok told you that fasting was going to help you live to 100, the opposite is true if you’re an athlete!
- Nutrient Timing and Recovery: Trends like “restricted feeding windows” and 16:8 diets of 5:2 methods of fasting have no place for you. You’re an athlete. Your nutrition supports you as a human but most of the time it needs to work around your busy life and training. Skipping meals, withholding food when you’re hungry and ignoring the common sense of refuelling after workouts, just because some faddy diet said “it’s good for you”, is going to dig you a very deep hole and see your energy levels and your capability of getting out of bed for the gym in the morning, drop of a cliff very quickly.
- Muscle Maintenance and Repair: Again, as an athlete, you’re not just looking at replenishing the everyday protein deficits from low level physiological stressors. You’re looking at making significant gains. You’re stressing your body SPECIFICALLY so that it grows back stronger and more resilient. You cannot do this if you’re not eating the right things at the right time to fuel and refuel. And in fact, you could end up even more damaged rather than repaired or stronger if you’re paying attention to average Joe philosophies.
- Hydration and Electrolyte Balance: Certain dietary practices, such as prolonged fasting or strict carbohydrate restriction, can disrupt fluid and electrolyte balance, increasing the risk of adverse events during training and competition. So it’s not just your fuelling you could be getting wrong if you’re following silly advice; considering the overall impact and interactions of nutrients and hydration is paramount to really nailing down your training and racing fuel strategies.
- Mental Health and Wellbeing: In a world of people who are inherently more vulnerable to disordered eating habits, taking on trendy diet regimes, setting strict dietary rules or simply trying to shoehorn in methodologies that weren’t mean to fit you, is a really easy way to slip down the slope of energy deficiency, leading to all sorts of health concerns, not just performance losses. Athletes are better off learning to trust their own bodies and work with their lifestyle than trying to work against it, purely because Instagram said so!
While some principles of these trends may have merit for the general population, they often fall short in meeting the unique demands of athletes. Rather than succumbing to the noise of the influencer crowd, work with people who have experience – and successes! – in a world like yours. Always ask “why” and then ask “does it work for me?” And then seek to understand yourself and your own needs and how to meet those first.