What's The Ideal Nutrient Breakdown In Your Diet?
As we work our way through any training we are doing for the fall racing season, or if you are just trying to lose a few pounds, a common question is what kind of nutrient breakdown is perfect for your diet.
And, I am here to tell you that there isn't any kind of one size fits all answer.
Your diet is a very individualized thing.
I've written before on being an advocate of a lower carb approach to diet when training for any kind of endurance event. Here are a few posts:
How Many Carbs Do You Need?
Is A Calorie A Calorie?
Dietary Myths
3 Tips For Losing Weight
The book I've been reading is about the Atkins diet, which is probably similar to the Paleo diet books and also falls in line with the diet in the 4 Hour Body. All of which I think you can use with great success.
What I am going for is to try and find a nutrient ratio that drives endurance better than others.
Since I could write an entire book on how to eat for endurance training, I am not going to be expansive here, but I am going to ask you to play around with the nutrient breakdown in your diet.
Saying that, I don't want you to calorie count because I don't think that works. Everything I have learned over the years tells me that "calories-in vs. calories-out" is a bogus argument. But, it is useful as a jumping off point to track what you eat so that you can find a nutrient breakdown.
For our purposes, I am going to suggest that you never let your carbs take up more than 35% of your diet.
This week, as an example, the percentage of carbs in my diet have been 5%.
Let me know what you are going to do in the comments.