| While it's not beyond an athlete to weigh or measure foods, most athletes eat too often and on the fly to pull this off with any regularity. It's a great exercise to do at some point during the year so that you really know the difference between a cup or a liter of fluid or 3 vs. 6 oz of meat. Let's take it step by step. |
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| When it comes to anti-oxidant rich foods it's hard to say how much is too much from this category. You have seen the "five a day" campaign by experts who establish our dietary guidelines. Typically that is where athletes start because our servings sizes for athletes are about double that of the general public. Figure five servings is the daily minimum here, but when you are under stress you had better be ready to increase your servings, regardless of your body composition goals. These foods are mostly high fiber-water foods, so don't flinch! Get some color on your plate and more of it when the weather changes, during finals week or as two a days start. The only time we might ask an athlete to be conscious of their intake of foods from step one would be if they were intentionally trying to eat for inactivity while training to mobilize body fat. This is something we might do during the offseason (never inseason) and we might ask the athlete to use fresh fruit over fruit juice or dried fruit (very concentrated calories). |
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| SERVINGS: 1 c Cooked & 2 c Raw Vegetables, 8 oz Fruit Juice, 1 lg. Piece Fruit, 1 c Fresh Fruit, 1/2 Cup Dried Fruit, 1 tbsp Herbs & Spices, 1 tsp Oils, 1 tbsp Salad Dressings, 1 oz Nuts or Seeds, 1.5 c Cold Cereal & 1 c Hot Cereal, 8 oz Tea |
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| When it comes to carbs, the smartest way to calculate daily requirements would have to factor in body weight and activity. When active, we might factor somewhere between 3 - 5 grams of carbohydrates per pound body weight, only reaching the 5 gram mark during exhaustive phases of training like two a days or ultra endurance events. Simply put, get about half the food on your plate from carbs on active days! |
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| After a couple of days of inactivity, we might factor as low as 1-3 grams of carbs per pound of body weight. Take it down to about 1/4 of the food on our plate. Athletes are very vulnerable to gain body fat when inactive, if they eat out of habit the same amount of food. The problem is universal in that our appetites just don't adjust down as fast as our metabolic rates. Something has to give. The carbs we have to be the most careful with after a couple of days of inactivity are the simple sugars we get in soft drinks, sports drinks, desserts and snack chips made from white flour. |
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| Running high blood sugars after our muscle stores of carbohydrate (glycogen) are reloaded will rapidly escalate body fat stores. While we don't advocate low carb diets for active growing athletes, we do have to give athletes a heads up about reckless consumptions of sugars during those breaks between seasons and when injured. If you are active six days per week don't worry about reducing your simple sugar intake on day seven unless you have the genetics to lay down body fat in a very rapid fashion around the mid section. The fat around our organs (visceral fat) fluctuates up and down very rapidly compared to that under our skin (subcutaneous). As you will see, reducing carbs when inactive is only part of the equation to minimize body fat accumulation. |
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| SERVINGS: 30 g Carbs or 2 Exchanges, 1.5 c Cold Cereal & 1 c Hot Cereal, 2 Slices Bread, Whole Bagel or English Muffin, 4 Pancakes or 2 Waffles (4"), 1 c Beans, Corn, Peas, or Potatoes, 6 oz Fries (50 ct), 2/3 c Rice, 1 lg. Baked Potato-6 oz, 6 c Popcorn, 1.5 oz Snack Chips, 12 Saltines, 2 Granola, Breakfast or ENERGY BARS, 20 oz Sport Drink, 12 oz Soft Drink, 2 tbsp Honey, Jelly or Syrup, 1 c Ice Cream, Pudding or Jello, 2 Danish or Doughnuts, 4" sq. Frosted Cake or Brownie, 4 sm. Cookies |
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| As important as protein is for recovery from muscle soreness, athletes have to watch the fat content of their protein sources when inactive. Unlike carbs, you have to move towards lower fat sources of protein-day one of inactive. While it may take a day to replenish carbs in a glycogen fatigued muscle, fat stores won't require any attention to replenish. And for those of you who feel that eating healthy all week and binge eating on the weekends is the way to go I have bad news. Binge eaters are slow to recover and very vulnerable to hang onto visceral body fat! |
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Lean Protein
When you look at a label and see about half as many fat grams as protein grams, you are looking at a lean source of protein. For a food to be considered a good protein source is has to yield at least 7 grams of protein per serving. |
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Medium Fat Protein
When you look at the label and see the same number of grams of fat (or less) than the protein grams, it comes in as a medium fat protein source. |
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High Fat Protein
When you see more fat grams on the label then protein grams...well you had better make your next protein meal a lean one so you averages out Medium Fat for the day. You just don't want to try and live off of high fat protein sources and I must warn you. Most of the protein sources you are going to have a shot at when eating on the fly are going to rank out as high in fat. Fast food was never meant to be anything more then a night off for mom 30 years ago as it grew in popularity. It was never meant to be the default that it has become for so many on the go Americans. |
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When trying to calculate protein requirements, the best way to estimate your needs would be to base it on your lean mass vs. total body weight. This would require an accurate method of assessing your body composition (see www.bodpod.com ). Typically hard training athletes will come in around 1-1.36 grams of protein per pound of lean mass. It's fine to base it on .75-1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, but you don't want to protein feed fat mass, so the less lean athlete use the lower end of the range to determine protein requirements. When factoring protein requirements for women based on body weight, you will typically see them on the low end of the range due to having more sex specific body fat then male athletes. However, when factoring based on lean mass, female athletes would require the same feed rate as their male counterparts. In both cases the protein requirements of active and often growing athletes will exceed that of sedentary adults who are done growing. Once you have total grams of protein you can divide that by 7 to get servings per day. Figure you will try to eat some protein every four hours or so while awake from a diverse number of sources (animal, dairy and vegetable). More on protein trends we see among male and female athletes in the next menu. |
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| SERVINGS: 7 g Protein, 2 Egg Whites, 1 Egg, 1 oz Beef, Pork, Lamb, Poultry, Fish, Shellfish or Cheese, 1/4 c Cottage or Ricotta Cheese, 2 tbsp Parmesan Cheese or Peanut Butter, 3/4 c Yogurt, 8 oz Milk or Soy Milk, 4 oz Tofu, 2 oz Soy Cheese, 1 oz Nuts, 1/2 c Beans |
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