High Quality Nutrition vs. High Quality Training
Mark Hatmaker
Chances are that if you are reading this article you engage in some form of physical conditioning to bolster your combat sport performance. I would also wager that if you are serious about your training, to any degree, that you have some pretty specific ideas regarding nutritional intake. You might be a Paleo-enthusiast in one of its many forms, possibly you're still hanging on to the Zone, or the South Beach Diet, maybe you're an old schooler and an Atkins' proselytizer. Perhaps you're a low-fat is healthy proponent, or maybe it's high fat is healthy this week. Maybe you go the carbs are good route and carbo-load, or adhere to the Okinawa protocol, or perhaps the Mediterranean diet. Maybe you're a strict vegetarian, or maybe you're an all-meat, grass-fed, I-shot-it-myself carnivore.
If I missed your particular take on fuel I would still place a bet that it is merely a subdivision, or variant of the above panoply. After all, there are only so many ways to juggle the proportions of the three primary constituents of nutrition (protein, carbohydrates, fats).
I will also wager that you've got some pretty good reasons for why you eat what you do and why those who don't follow the same path are a bit misled and not living up to their full potential. Forgive me if this estimation sounds a bit dismissive, but, let's face it, it's true--many of us place a lot of faith in the foods we eat imbuing them with qualities that seem to fall just short of magical for the "good" foods and bad juju for the "no-no" foods. Hell, I've been there myself, I've been a vegan (in a variety of forms), a food-combiner, a low-carber, an all-meat guy, a this-er, a that-er, a fellow searcher who knew that if I got the dinner plate alchemy just right I would be that much faster, this much stronger, have this much more endurance.
I could find proof for the success of each faith-based path of nutritional wisdom I aligned myself with at the time. I could point to good "science" that supported the belief du jour (while conveniently ignoring the null hypotheses). I could lean hard on my own anecdotal evidence of personal feelings about each "awesome diet." I could point to performance numbers showing improvements in tasks and somehow downplay, or ignore the idea that these improvements in performance had less to do with the actual training and more to do with with what I chewed or what supplement I popped.
I will wager that my experience is common for many of you--you've either been on this search for the "right thing" treadmill yourself, or have personal experience with fellow athletes who pursue a variety of nutritional religions which we all treat with short memories as soon as we become converted to the next true thing.
Folks, I've got some good news for you-- it's the work and not what you eat.
Wanna eat a large cheese pizza? How about chocolate chip pancakes? Bowls of grits? Pasta? Pop-Tarts? Ben & Jerry's cheesecake brownie ice cream? Beer? Beer, my friends, that get your attention?
These are just some of the foods that appear on the menus of Olympic athletes. These are not off-season, out-of-training foods. These are "Hey, I'm here in London ready to compete at the most elite level there is" food choices. These aren't food splurges, these aren't "cheat day" foods. These aren't even isolated "Oh, I had these four slices of French toast so I'd better not have any thing else" foods. These are just some of the so-called "junk foods" that the best of the best consume in a 6,000 calorie a day, look-at-me-I'm still-ripped-to-shreds-like-a-superhero regimen. Candy bars, cookies, pizza, and beer--How's that for supplementation?
Sure, there are some Olympic athletes who consume their calories in ways that more resemble those listed in the opening paragraph--carefully measured "correct" foods. But what we've got to keep in mind, is that those who eat "junk", those who eat "right", those who eat carbs, those who eat meat, those who eat whatever belief you adhere to, all performed at levels beyond the expectations of the common person either because of or in spite of their food choices.
So, what if it isn't necessarily what we chow down on that's the magic formula? If it's not a one-size-fits-all elite nutrition program that is the secret to Olympic caliber performance or aesthetics what exactly is it that all of these top-performing athletes do have in common? Well, the answer is hard qualitative work in high quantities. And it is this fact of hard, hard grueling work that causes a lot of the magic food ideas to begin to take root.
Composing a shopping list and resisting a few no-no food items while sticking to those foods with good ju-ju is a far, far easier job than pushing the body to extremes. We, human beings are economical animals and we look for easy/cheap solutions whenever and wherever possible (BTW-this is a good thing overall) and there's no seemingly cheaper or easier answer to elite fitness than magic food. If I can get the magic potion just right, the menu tweaked just so, then, I too, can be golden.
Unfortunately, the evidence says this just isn't true. You can cast about for evidence to support practically any side of the performance nutrition morass and find reams of bolstering information, on the other hand you can find just as much evidence to tear down much of the positive support you can find for the view you wish to support.
These 6,000 calorie a day athletes, whether a "junk food" diet or a "healthy" diet put in enormous tons of strenuous work. (BTW-I quibble with the word "junk" as it pertains to food. Tell a starving citizen of a third world nation that a Twinkie is garbage and a poor health choice and then after that bit of cruelty see if you can realign your priorities a bit). This prodigious amount of work supports a calories in/calories out model no matter the source of the calories. (BTW-Our starving brethren in some regions of the world are always stark evidence that if you kill those calories the weight comes off whether you want it to or not).
Let's face it, we aren't Olympic athletes and our workloads simply will not justify 6,000 calories per day no matter their source. But it does seem that whether we use the models of Olympic consumption, or our own anecdotal evidence of being on this diet or that diet and our body still doing what it does, as long as the work-load is of high quality we can be a bit less dogmatic about we we eat. We don't have to go whole-hog candy shop crazy as, again, we are not doing Olympic caliber work, but we do have more latitude about what we consume than many of us believe.
For weight control we've got two ways to go we can adjust caloric intake up or down, or we can adjust workload up or down. The optimum mix is to tweak both avenues simultaneously.
For some this info is going to be great news, I mean it does seem to allow hard-working athletes a little room on the leash in regard to food.
For some this info may be bad news in two different regards--
The first, sure, it is possible to eat bunches and bunches of "bad for you" stuff and still be a lean, mean, hard-charging athlete, but you gotta work H-A-R-D to get away with it. You can't shortcut the work and some will remain happier with the easier job of composing restrictive grocery shopping lists.
The second way the info may be a bit of bad news is that if you are firmly committed to your current "scientifically proven high-performance nutrition program" du jour the cognitive dissonance may make eating whatever you damn well please as long as you are willing to do the work a bit hard to swallow.
I get that skepticism--I really do. Those immersed in in physical training are (and always have been) confronted with conflicting fuel ideas every which way we turn, how could there not be something to it? I point again to Olympic diets whether deemed good, bad, or indifferent--and again to the similarity of excellent results and see that the only commonality is eat enough calories to support your workload and then burn those calories off with ultra-high quality work. | 
