The Endurance Diet Summary
An overview of the Endurance Diet and its Diet Quality Score (DQS) system used
As a recreational athlete and someone who leads a healthy life, eating well is often on my mind. That doesn’t mean I eat well all the time, though. I am just constantly aware of what I’m ingesting, even if only in the most basic sense of balancing the “medicine” or “poison” I ingest, for “good” and “bad” foods, respectively. Tracking my nutrition quantitatively, to be able to gauge the quality of my diet better, has long been a curiosity just to see how well I’m actually doing, even if it were only for a short period to offer a small glimpse of my diet quality at the time. However, the negative reaction to the effort that would require, plus variances in the approximate ways I cook to complicate things for precision and accuracy, was stronger than my curiosity to know given the sense I already had that my diet was generally good.
Every handful of years, I try to improve my diet beyond small minutiae. In this most recent attempt, I read The Endurance Diet, by Matt Fitzgerald (2016). It’s a well researched book that I don’t think needs much updating, at least not on the main concepts, proposing a flexible dietary approach commonly used by elite athletes of all endurance sports the world over, rather than something rather prescriptive. The common approach was the surprise finding of his research, and generally agrees with what I think of as healthy eating rather than endurance specific eating. I am already on the Endurance Diet, in other words, and so are you, technically speaking. It only remains to be seen to what extent via its practical Diet Quality Score (DQS) system for assessing diet quality without calorie counting or food weighing. Instead, one gauged amounts by easily obtainable estimates like a “fistful”, or commonly provided servings like bread slices and spreads for each, etc. I think that’s a better approach rather than with absolute values as bigger people would tend to eat more, getting higher scores, when it’s no better for them than someone smaller who ate less, but ate equally well in terms of proportions for similar daily activities. This lets the Endurance Diet meet you where you are or want to be, rather than judging if you’re succeeding or failing as you decide that. So for the first time in my life, I will attempt to quantify and rate my diet, with quantitative measures for detailed comparison as I work improve it rather than through vague generalities like less McDonald’s foods is better. I am very excited about this, and will document my progress for my future reference, and to share with others interested for whatever reasons they might have.
Principles of the Endurance Diet
The Endurance Diet has five principles that should be thought of as guidelines rather than strict rules:
Eat everything. No food you can safely consume is forbidden. Humans evolved eating “everything”, and what nutrients we need for good health from food is easiest to get if we ate “everything”. How much, in what forms, etc. are another matter, but variety is encouraged as being good.
Eat quality. Choose good quality foods or ingredients over bad ones, like natural sugars in fruits rather than refined sugars added, or whole grains rather than refined grains. Studies have shown that general ingredients like sugar or carbs that get a bad rap are often those of poor quality, like refined sugars, not those of good quality, like natural sugars.
Eat carb-centered. Carbohydrates are the most nutrient dense fuel that is best for endurance activities. But since everyone uses energy from foods, it’s good for everyone. Just be careful about ingesting unhealthy carbs (like fast food French fries), and overeating anything that is easy to do.
Eat enough. Meaning not too little for your needs, but also not too much from mindless eating. How you’d best know is to listen to your body, along with some general guidelines to follow.
Eat individually. Customize the heck out of the possibilities available so you can enjoy the food, meet your energy needs, budget, schedules and routines, taste preferences, cultural requirements or tendencies, Endurance Diet principles, etc. This may well be the principle that makes the Endurance Diet suitable for more people than any other diet.
The Endurance Diet Food Groups
The Endurance Diet, and its Diet Quality Score system used to assess one’s diet quality, organize foods into seven food groups of good quality, with six other groups being somewhat like the poor quality versions of the six good quality groups, and a catch all “Other” group. Summaries and notes for these groups will be presented in more detail in the next post, as well as what’s included or excluded (and how they should be classified), and examples of servings.
VEGETABLES
FRUITS
Sweets
NUTS, SEEDS, and HEALTHY OILS
Fried Foods
WHOLE GRAINS
Refined Grains
UNPROCESSED MEATS (including seafood)
Processed Meats (including seafood)
DAIRY
HIGH QUALITY PROCESSED FOODS
High Quality Beverages
Low Quality Beverages
OTHER
The DQS System Points Assignment
The DQS system scores each daily serving of each food category with an integer from -2 to +2. Healthy foods are generally given a positive score, unless in excess for the day, for which no additional points are given or for which points may be deducted. Meanwhile, unhealthy foods are always given a negative score. Given how easy it is to consume unhealthy foods, one’s daily diet score could range from -73 to + 35 (108 points span), starting with 0 each day. It is tempting to truncate this span to a 100 points span and add 65 to the score derived so it spans from 0 to 100, assigning adjusted scores below 0 as being 0, then letter grading scores as if converted from percentages in school grades. However, I’m not yet convinced that starting each day with a C would be a good approach for mindset, but reserve the option to change my mind.
Otherwise, scoring in the DQS is given by whole servings, which I find unnecessarily simplified since values assigned for servings are integers so that, at worse, scoring for half servings would result in a value ending in 0.5, not some more complicated decimals or fractions. Yet, half servings are very practical in our diet to allow variance in how much we consume, especially with listening to our bodies that we might be full at a half serving of something just ingested. You want to be able to credit that, but not force someone to eat another half serving just to get a legitimate point total for it. As a result, I have created my own scoring table that’s more refined to accommodate for half servings. Round up or down to a half or whole serving if you consume fractions of servings other than a half or whole.
Specific values for scoring in the DQS are listed in this post. For summary purposes, that is also practical for choosing daily good foods, these are the number of daily servings it takes to max out for each good food group, and where penalties may start to apply:
Vegetables max out at 4, no penalties
Fruits max out at 4, no penalties
Nuts, seeds, and healthy oils max out at 3, penalties after 5
Whole grains max out at 3, penalties after 5
Unprocessed meats, including seafood max out at 3, penalties after 4
Dairy maxes out at 3, penalties after 4
High quality processed foods max out at 1, penalties after 2
High quality beverages max out at 2, penalties after 4
Bad foods are generally deducted at 2 points per serving, aside from a few initial servings in some categories (refined grains, other), where it is only 1 point.
An Reframed Endurance Diet Philosophy
From the principles, food groups, and DQS summaries above, for what you can consume daily to maximize your daily DQS shown in a future post, the Endurance Diet can be reframed in the following manner of daily intake:
At least 4 servings of vegetables;
At least 4 servings of fruits;
3-5 servings of whole grains;
3-5 servings of nuts, seeds, and healthy oils;
3-4 servings of unprocessed meats and seafood;
3-4 servings of dairy;
2 servings of high quality beverages;
1-2 servings of high quality processed foods;
Avoiding sweets, fried foods, processed meats, refined grains, low quality beverages, and other foods not classfiable in the previous categories;
All customized to your needs beyond nutrition, like lifestyle, budget, allergies, enjoyment, etc. as you feel hungry enough to consume, applied to, both, recommended and not recommended foods.
Next Post
In the next post, I will go over the definitions for food groups in the DQS system in detail. Please leave any questions or comments you have in the comments section. Thank you.