2023-10-05 07:24:50
Being fit and doing physical activity does not completely compensate for the damage of an excessive or unbalanced diet. Junk foods also worsen athletic performance. Here’s why
Maybe you jog every morning but regularly eat fast food for dinner, or you keep track of calories from Monday to Friday but binge on weekends, or you’re an athlete with a pantry full of chips, biscuits and sugary drinks because training keeps you thin.
Have you ever thought about what happens to your body when you eat poorly even if you do sport every day and are fit?
In the case of an athlete, the idea of eating everything you want without consequences might seem like a dream come true, but only in appearance. Burdening yourself with an abundant, unnecessarily excessive and particularly high-fat diet because you compensate for this with training is, in fact, certainly a component of risk for your health, but also for your athletic performance (as we will see below, ed.).
If you practice a daily workout of 2-3 hours a day every day of the week or almost every day of the week, the excess energy that an unregulated diet entails can somehow be disposed of – explains Michelangelo Giampietro, Doctor specialist in Sports Medicine and in Nutrition Science — and an increase in visceral adiposity, especially in athletes who must have significant muscle mass, is not so dramatic. Exercise, however, cannot completely reverse the effects of a poor diet.
First of all, an athlete might have little subcutaneous fat – the fat right under the skin – but a lot of visceral fat. This layer of fat is less evident because it envelops the internal organs. Large amounts of visceral fat throughout the body could cause hardening and narrowing of the arteries, a condition known as atherosclerosis, a blockage that prevents blood from flowing to the rest of the body’s tissues and increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. This is why it is advisable to intervene to prevent possible pathologies both during sports practice and after the sports career.
As long as it is active, many dietary errors can be spontaneously compensated for by physical activity – observes the specialist -. If these incorrect eating habits (both in quantity and quality) persist even at the end of sporting activity or when it slows down for various reasons (school, work, family commitments), without adequate nutritional education one risks the end of some great champions of the past who became very obese.
Another mistake around the corner is falling into the trap of an unbalanced diet: hyperprotein (too much protein) and hyperlipidic (too much fat). The consumption of carbohydrates has always been demonised, which instead not only are not harmful to the general population (obviously if taken in the appropriate quantities), but are essential to have a good performance in training and therefore to arrive at the races well prepared – specifies Giampietro and adds —. The athlete’s protein requirement is certainly greater, but decidedly lower than the much more significant increase in the need to supply the body with carbohydrates. Following “fashionable” diets (ketogenic ones, intermittent fasting, unnecessarily high-protein and, even worse, dangerously low carb diets) could create energy deficits that generate hormonal and neuroendocrine imbalances and alterations which then lead to serious clinical pictures.
The amateur athlete is even more often the victim of wrong advice, because he does not have the support and support of specialists, he follows fashions, he reads up on the internet, he receives advertising via cell phones and he does not have the ability to understand whether the indications are good or not. bad.
Finally, an athlete who eats poorly also loses a fundamental part of what his program for improving technical abilities is: Athletic abilities improve with three elements – explains the expert -: training, nutrition and rest. If one of these three elements is missing, or not calibrated to the actual needs and possibilities of the athlete, the effectiveness of the training (and therefore also the performance capabilities) inevitably worsens.
Processed foods (like soda and candy) are full of empty calories and almost no nutrients. The lack of fibre, vitamins and proteins generates hunger and makes it difficult to train: fatty foods can initially give a temporary boost of energy, which however will not be sufficient to maintain a long or high intensity workout; you will feel tired sooner.
Getting nutrients from poor-quality foods will also make it more difficult to build muscle mass and fully recover from a strenuous workout.
October 5, 2023 (modified October 5, 2023 | 07:24)
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