The Five Key Habits

The Endurance Diet comprises five eating habits that are present in the diets of nearly 100 percent of the athletes I interacted with both directly and indirectly in my research. Expressed in the form of rules, they are as follows:

1. Eat everything
2. Eat quality
3. Eat carb-centered
4. Eat enough
5. Eat individually

These five habits are the final products of a multigenerational process of dietary evolution carried out by elite endurance athletes all over the world, a process in which less effective practices were discarded and more effective practices retained until no further improvement was possible. As such, they represent the necessary and sufficient dietary conditions for attaining the highest possible level of endurance fitness— the rules that today’s professional endurance athletes must follow in order to win races. Let’s take a closer look at what each habit entails and how it benefits the pros who depend on it.

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Habit 1: Eat Everything. There are six basic categories of natural whole foods: vegetables (including legumes); fruits; nuts, seeds, and healthy oils; unprocessed meat and seafood; whole grains; and dairy. The overwhelming majority of elite endurance athletes regularly consume all six of these “high-quality” food types. The reason they do so is that a balanced, varied, and inclusive diet is needed to supply the body with everything it needs nutritionally to handle the stress of hard training and to derive the maximum benefit from workouts.

Habit 2: Eat Quality. While most elite endurance athletes eat everything, they don’t eat equal amounts of everything. Instead they skew their diet heavily toward high-quality foods and eat low-quality foods in moderation. High-quality foods tend to be more nutrient dense (i.e., richer in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants) and less energy dense (i.e., lower in calories) than low-quality foods. Basing their diet on high quality foods enables elite endurance athletes to get more overall nutrition from fewer calories, and this in turn allows them to maximize their fitness while maintaining an optimal racing weight.

Habit 3: Eat Carb-Centered. Elite endurance athletes select high-quality carbohydrate-rich foods such as whole grains and fruit as the centerpiece of most meals and snacks. As you probably would expect, there is a great deal of diversity in the specific foods that professional racers from different cultures rely on to meet their carbohydrate needs. Ethiopian runners eat a lot more teff than Chilean mountain bikers, who eat a lot more potatoes than Chinese swimmers, who eat a lot more rice than Danish cross-country skiers. But all of these foods are rich in carbohydrates, and all of these athletes maintain carbcentered diets. Overall, carbohydrates account for 60 to 80 percent of total calories in the diet of the typical elite endurance athlete. As the primary fuel for intense exercise, carbs enable these athletes to absorb their workouts with less physiological stress and to extract more benefits from their training.

Habit 4: Eat Enough. Elite endurance athletes do not consciously restrict the amount of food they eat by enforcing inflexible calorie counts or portion-size limits or by eating less than is needed to satisfy their hunger, as many recreational athletes and dieters do. Nor do they mindlessly overeat as a majority of people in affluent societies do today. Instead, they pay mindful attention to signals of hunger and satiety and allow these signals to determine when and how much they eat. This is the only reliable way to eat sufficiently but not excessively— that is, enough to meet the energy demands of training but not so much as to gain or hold onto excess body fat.

Habit 5: Eat Individually. Elite athletes are mindful of, and responsive to, not only their appetite but also their dietary needs in general. Each athlete is a unique person in a unique situation. The diet that works best for one athlete is unlikely to work best for another athlete in every detail. For example, while all endurance athletes perform best on a carb-centered diet, some function better when they get most of their carbs from nongrain sources. Elite athletes are good at listening to their bodies, paying attention to how different foods and eating patterns affect them, and modifying their diet according to what they learn. As a result, each professional endurance athlete develops his or her own version of the Endurance Diet.

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Raising your Diet Quality Score will do more for your health and fitness than switching to higher-grade foods of the same types you’re already eating.

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The whole-grain category includes whole wheat, buckwheat, barley, brown rice, corn, oats, amaranth, quinoa, spelt, bulgur, millet, rye, sorghum, and teff. It also includes breads and other baked goods, pastas, breakfast cereals, and other grain-based foods made with 100 percent whole grains and no refined grains.

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Scientists have been unable to identify precise quantitative daily carbohydrate requirements for individual athletes based on training volume or overall energy expenditure. What they have found is that, in general, athletes with moderate training loads (up to two hours of exercise per day, depending on the type and intensity of training) who consume 5 to 7 grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight per day perform worse when they eat less carbohydrate but no better when they eat more, and that athletes with heavy training loads (over two hours per day, give or take) who consume 7 to 10 g/ kg daily perform worse when they eat less but no better when they eat more.

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In Japan, professional running is dominated by corporate teams. Many of the country’s major corporations employ rosters of elite runners. The athletes work a couple of hours a day in lowlevel office jobs, live together in a dormitory, are fed and coached by full-time company employees, and represent the company at team relay road races, called Ekiden, that are hugely popular in Japan, as well as in other events.

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