With so many different “special” diets, it is difficult to choose the one diet that is good for you. This article shows you three wonderful and proven diets that can enhance your athletic performance.
Alkaline diet
This type of diet is based on the belief that the food we eat can alter the PH value of the body. When the system undergoes metabolism and extracts calories (energy) from the food, the leftovers are called “ash” which can be alkaline or acidic.
Here’s how alkaline diet works
Alkaline diet helps to balance the food in our body by consciously replacing acid-forming foods with alkaline foods to improve our health.
Why is alkaline diet one of the best diets for sports players?
When you eat food that produces acid “ash”, it increases your vulnerability to diseases, and illnesses; which can slow down your athletic performance. However, if you eat food that produces alkaline ash, it makes the body system alkaline (neutral) and just as the name “neutral” implies, it has no effect.
Is your food alkaline, neutral or acidic?
The best way to answer this question is to know what the food we eat contains;
Alkaline: nuts, fruits, vegetables, and legumes.
Neutral: starches, sugars, and natural fats.
Acidic: alcohol, dairy, poultry (eggs inclusive), fish, and meat.
Benefits of alkaline diet
- It protects the body against hypertension and stroke by reducing inflammation and increasing the production of growth hormone.
- It protects bone density and muscle mass
- It eliminates magnesium deficiency and improves the absorption of vitamins
- Protects the body against cancer
Ketogenic diet
It is not just the name that is appealing to everyone but the benefits and how ketogenic diet works. Going keto is the best, and it is the ideal diet for runners, cyclists, triathletes, and swimmers.
Ketogenic diet helps put the body into ketosis which lowers the level of ketones in the blood and enhances your focus to bring the best athletic performance. Some people might also take exogenous ketones to improve their performance.
How does Keto work?
The basic of a keto diet is to enable the body to get into a mild state of ketosis. Ketogenic diet enables our body to utilize our fat and turn it into energy. To achieve this, we need to increase our fat intake and reduce the amount of carbohydrate to less than 20 grams per day for most people. The way we do this is to understand what to eat and what not to eat which can be found in keto diet recipes.
The keto diet increases your energy level and decreases hunger; it is the reason why keto is a preferred diet for any sports player. Furthermore, ketogenic is not the same as starvation. Starvation occurs when the body has no food sources which result in your body pulling glucose from your muscle (converting protein to glucose) causing muscle loss. The ketogenic process preserves the muscle tissue through the use of ketosis and the ketone bodies we create for fuel.
The interesting part of a ketogenic diet is the ability to control the insulin problem that mostly comes with dieting.
Paleo Diet
Paleo diet is one of the oldest and also a healthy way to stay fit and to improve your athletic performance because of it nutritional approach. It works perfectly with your genetics to keep you strong, energetic and lean. Apart from improving your athletic performance, Paleo diet works against depression, heart disease, obesity, Parkinson and Alzheimer’s disease.
How does Paleo diet work?
The Paleo Diet causes slow and limits the rises in blood sugar and also insulin levels (low-glycemic index). Furthermore, the paleo diet is a simple routine; it is essentially eating unprocessed food (emulating the eating habits of our hunter-gatherer ancestors).
What to eat and what not to eat
A typical paleo diet involves seafood, meat, eggs. Fruits, nuts, herbs, healthy fats & oil, and spices (unprocessed food)
What not to eat; processed food, soda, artificial sweeteners, margarine, trans-fats, sugar, legumes, dairy products, and vegetable oils.
The three diets listed above can and will help you improve your performances especially as a sports player. However, the whole idea will not be effective if the important ingredient is not involved, water! Add water to your diet to get the maximum result.