"Judo" diet?

How do you deal with proper diet, both as an individual and in giving advice to others?

It's always interesting to me that people (coaches especially) tend to speak about diet with confidence when, in fact, they understand very little about how weight gain works and the effects of the macronutrients that we consume. If I were to come to you asking for advice on maintaining my weight for competition, how would you respond? Specifically, in terms of diet?

This comes about at my last shiai when I overheard a coach telling his student that the ideal way to stay in shape before a tournament was "egg whites." That's it. Egg whites and water only for at least a week before. As a coach whose job is ultimately to ensure success in his athletes, he holds a higher degree of influence and is expected to give advice on lifestyle in addition to what takes place inside the dojo. That said, diet is complicated and poorly understood, mostly due to a combination of poor science and food politics (margarine, anyone?). I could spout off about my own beliefs (that coach was wrong), but I really want to hear your honest opinions on diet + nutrition as it relates to personal health and athletic performance.

This is an interesting question. I cannot speak as a high level competitive athlete as I am not one, but I can speak as someone who went through a "heavy" period in my life and was able to overcome it. I was always athletic when I was younger, but after marraige and my first child I suddenly found myself 45 pounds overweight. The way I attacked my diet was to figure out the optimum number of calories that I could consume that would sustain me at my goal weight, and stay at or just slightly below that number. Then I added in excercise, which burned calories off of that number, and that led to weight loss. Once I achieved my goal weight, I tried to stick close to the calorie count needed to maintain my weight, and if I splurged in eating I made sure I worked out a little more to make up for it. As far as food types, I settled into a routine of nonfat yogurt for breakfast, quality protein bar for snack, tunafish, carrots, and a 100 calorie snack pack at lunch, and a reasonable dinner (lean protein, veggie, small carb). I find that my body responds well to this moderation approach, and it is one I still use today, over 4 years since reaching my goal weight.

OldeEnglishD wrote:This is an interesting question. I cannot speak as a high level competitive athlete as I am not one, but I can speak as someone who went through a "heavy" period in my life and was able to overcome it. I was always athletic when I was younger, but after marraige and my first child I suddenly found myself 45 pounds overweight. The way I attacked my diet was to figure out the optimum number of calories that I could consume that would sustain me at my goal weight, and stay at or just slightly below that number. Then I added in excercise, which burned calories off of that number, and that led to weight loss. Once I achieved my goal weight, I tried to stick close to the calorie count needed to maintain my weight, and if I splurged in eating I made sure I worked out a little more to make up for it. As far as food types, I settled into a routine of nonfat yogurt for breakfast, quality protein bar for snack, tunafish, carrots, and a 100 calorie snack pack at lunch, and a reasonable dinner (lean protein, veggie, small carb). I find that my body responds well to this moderation approach, and it is one I still use today, over 4 years since reaching my goal weight.

I think it's great that you've found a diet that works for you, especially one that keeps you satiated enough to sustain it without a major relapse! I think part of the discussion I want to have is where you (and other people) draw that information from and the extent to which you've looked at the science behind what you believe to be causing the weight loss. There's absolutely nothing wrong with your diet except, in my opinion, lack of dietary fat, but for the sake of dissecting it let's say you have a friend/student who comes to you for diet advice. Their food intake is an equal balance of all the "good" and "bad" types. For the sake of this, let's assume the only macronutrients are carbohydates, protein, and fat. You can only tell them to reduce one of the three- which do you choose and why?

I ask this question because like many people, you've built a diet based partially on the paradigm of calories in calories out which is not as solid of a theory as popular science makes it seem. In your case, it's manifested itself in a healthy way in that you've become more conscious of your diet and health, but in other cases this becomes tantamount to obsessive calorie counting to the point of practical starvation. While I have my own way phrasing this, Gary Taubes does a much better job in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4&t=30m37s

I suggest watching the whole thing, but the point of what I'm saying in this post ends at about 39 minutes! Let me know what you think.

I will watch later today when my youngest is napping. When he is awake, I have very little free time!

Hello Guys i think that Consuming a healthy diet has been confirmed to reduced the chance of diseases such as hypertension, cholesterol levels and diabetic issues. Consuming a healthy diet means eating a wide range of different meals. This is not only valuable, but you will not get tired with eating the same thing day in and also day out.In planning for some Judo diet I make sure that I know how much I am with a weight of a couple of several weeks out type competitors. Therefore it is important to be eating well and get the most out of the meals I eat.Thanks a lot!!

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Taiobroshi wrote:How do you deal with proper diet, both as an individual and in giving advice to others?

It's always interesting to me that people (coaches especially) tend to speak about diet with confidence when, in fact, they understand very little about how weight gain works and the effects of the macronutrients that we consume. If I were to come to you asking for advice on maintaining my weight for competition, how would you respond? Specifically, in terms of diet?

This comes about at my last shiai when I overheard a coach telling his student that the ideal way to stay in shape before a tournament was "egg whites." That's it. Egg whites and water only for at least a week before. As a coach whose job is ultimately to ensure success in his athletes, he holds a higher degree of influence and is expected to give advice on lifestyle in addition to what takes place inside the dojo. That said, diet is complicated and poorly understood, mostly due to a combination of poor science and food politics (margarine, anyone?). I could spout off about my own beliefs (that coach was wrong), but I really want to hear your honest opinions on diet + nutrition as it relates to personal health and athletic performance.

The problem you raise is unavoidable. How would a coach master that material in details unless he had some external formal education in nutrition. I think I went through about as many as 12 different judo teacher, instructor and coaching programs in different countries, some of them quite extensive, and if I remember well, only one contained an entire module on nutrition and this was actually as part of a university graduate degree in judo. In other words, it is not something people commonly involved in instructing judo would have been trained in. Nutrition is an extensive area. I have taught nutrition at both undergraduate and graduate level, and honestly even when those students are done, I would not consider them sufficiently competent to deal with the issues you raise. Why ? Because at that level they have just acquired an understanding of general and basic nutrition which is a vast area. They don't have the knowledge and skill to creatively deal with indivually-targeted problems other than applying general information. That is also obvious from open-ended questions on exam, and it isn't related to who the individual teacher is, since it is exactly the same when other professors teach these classes. Besides the whole problem is clouded by information in many nutrition textbooks that is insufficiently diversified. For example, we often say that virtually all information that is commonly distributed is obtained from experiments in white males, and expressed in averages. How much of that is relevant when you are an Asian of African-American female ? Ideal nutrition is not just optimized for sport, but also for ethnicity, gender, type of training, proneness to injury and illness. Let's consider one example. Let's say that we suggest that you would recommend protein after workout and you say that you can best take a glass of milk with milk protein. How could that make sense for anyone else but Caucasian people knowing that over 80 % of blacks, Inuits, Hispanics have lactose intolerance which worsens with progressing age ? Thus this example already illustrate that to make a proper recommendation here, you would need to know the ethnicity of the individual, not just his sport or training. From this example, it is probably also not difficult to understand that stereotypes such as "a health diet" say little since a healthy diet for you might be quite different from a health diet for me or for a postmenopausal Inuit woman.

When talking sports and relating this to diet, one probably has to consider what one is aiming for and at what level. When these questions are considered, people generally aren't talking about just being health but about optimizing recovery or optimizing performance, or in more apt terms ... doing what Lance Armstrong did but remaining within legal boundaries. Issues such as weight regulation through nutrition are complex too since fat proportion and distribution are genetically determined and mediated by a multitude of hormone interactions. These all come in addition to more visible things such as type of training, frequency of training, intensity of training and duration of training, and your basal metabolism.

I thought the proper traditional judo diet was bowls and bowls of sticky, white rice.

nomoremondays wrote:I thought the proper traditional judo diet was bowls and bowls of sticky, white rice.

All jokes aside, if you have been genetically conditioned to use rice as one of your main nutrients, no doubt that it can form the basis of a diet, judoka or not. It is, however, not a particularly ergogenic food that will either optimized performance or recovery; that being said, it also has advantages; it isn't a product that will clog up your arteries, and the fact that so few Asian people are overweight in comparison to the US population is likely not entirely separated from their heavy reliance on rice (let's not drag sumô wrestlers in here to try and prove the contrary). In other words, it probably has a role in aiding to have and maintain a low percentage of body fat, which for a judoka is not without importance.

Cichorei Kano wrote:From this example, it is probably also not difficult to understand that stereotypes such as "a health diet" say little since a healthy diet for you might be quite different from a health diet for me or for a postmenopausal Inuit woman.

Okay I get that a "health diet" can be different for nearly everyone. But, unless I am reading you wrong, your underlying assumption in your explanation is that you can figure out what a "healthy diet" is for me, you or Tom and Harry given enough time. I don't think that is true. (Meaning---I think we are overestimating what nutrition can do for us except at the grosses of levels). I have yet to meet two nutritionists, who are consistent in their approach to solve "what a healthy diet" is for me or for anyone. And I have been seriously looking for answers for nearly 35 years.

That said, I have come to a number of conclusions about diets: a) its more art than science b) solutions that appear to work are not consistent even within families c) finding a solution that works is more luck than anything else d) calories in = calories out is too simplistic and doesn't necessary work e) good genetics seem to override seemly bad diet choices f) bad genetics seem to override seemly good diet choices and g) charlatans use the numbers game to justify their diet solutions.

What did I miss?

afulldeck wrote:

Cichorei Kano wrote:From this example, it is probably also not difficult to understand that stereotypes such as "a health diet" say little since a healthy diet for you might be quite different from a health diet for me or for a postmenopausal Inuit woman.

Okay I get that a "health diet" can be different for nearly everyone. But, unless I am reading you wrong, your underlying assumption in your explanation is that you can figure out what a "healthy diet" is for me, you or Tom and Harry given enough time. I don't think that is true. (Meaning---I think we are overestimating what nutrition can do for us except at the grosses of levels). I have yet to meet two nutritionists, who are consistent in their approach to solve "what a healthy diet" is for me or for anyone. And I have been seriously looking for answers for nearly 35 years.

That said, I have come to a number of conclusions about diets: a) its more art than science b) solutions that appear to work are not consistent even within families c) finding a solution that works is more luck than anything else d) calories in = calories out is too simplistic and doesn't necessary work e) good genetics seem to override seemly bad diet choices f) bad genetics seem to override seemly good diet choices and g) charlatans use the numbers game to justify their diet solutions.

What did I miss?

Sure. Figuring out what a 'healthy' diet is, is not that difficult. If two nutritionist recommend you a different diet that does not imply that one of them or two of them are wrong. Healthy diets can be composed of many factors. Figuring out which diet is optimal in making you optimally perform, optimally recover, optimally avoid injuries, optimally recover from injuries that something quite different than what merely is a healthy diet and also more difficult.

I do not think at all that healthy diets are more art than science, but one has to be able to properly understand and apply the science, and there are many levels in scientific comprehension.

I am not really sure what you mean when you say that "solutions that appear to work are not consistent even within families". What solutions ? Simply eating healthy ? It's not that complicated. What interferes with that is personal subjectivity. You may not like the taste of certain things, and there are things you may like that are not healthy. Many people are not consistent in banning things they really like eating or crave just because they are not healthy. They feel it interferes with their social behavior, with the pleasures of life, and one tends to be less motivated when one is stressed or has personal circumstances that are not ideal.

There are other caveats. Eating healthy does not mean you won't get sick. Eating healthy does not mean you won't get the flue, and it does not mean you won't get HIV. Eating healthy also does not mean that you will live until you're 112 either. You can eat very healthy and still die from cancer at age 32 yr. Even though nutrition is the single most important factor in cancer that does not mean that all cancers find their origin in bad nutrition or can be prevented by good nutrition. Ultimately, the secret to every disease lies in the immune system. Some people have a strong immune system, some have a good immune system. An immune system also needs to be trained, and social circumstances are such that they interfere with an optimal immune system. I have explained this before on the old forum. Extreme hygiene negatively interferes with the immune system, "general wisdom" such as avoiding people who are ill negatively interferes with the immune system; hard training negatively interferes with the immune system (although the whole story is far more diverse than that, but I am simply trying to make a point). These issues are very multifactorial. If one wants optimal effects, one has to optimize a lot, and still one is not offered a guarantee.Even if all is ideal, you still may leave the door one morning and be hit by a car. Perfectly healthy people sometimes die very young, and not so healthy people sometimes live very long; that does not mean that it is better to not be very health, not at all; it means that we are looking at a multifactorial picture. Genetics and health interact. It isn't merely a matter of 'overriding'. With diseases, one can rarely hit a disease at the very origin because one is not sick and has no symptoms at the very origin. One only notices a disease when there are already symptoms and when the immune system is already (paritally) failing.

Insanity: do the same thing over and over again. Expect a different result. Spin it round and round. Now do it one more time, please. I like it like that. This is how the fitness industry machine works. Take a concept, dumb it down, give it the fad diet treatment, and then feed it to the masses.

Quote complements of Martin Berkhan.

For me, the word "diet" in itself is horrible. It should be about a long-term sustainable change in the way you approach the whole concept of eating, not something you do for 3-5 weeks before the bikini season or before your high school reunion. Now, as most humans are different, ideally everyone should undergo a series of tests to create a stream-lined, ideal, meal plan. This is however not feasible. One, it takes too much time. Two, even if there was plenty of time available, people wouldn't do it because average Joe is a stubborn, yet well-meaning idiot who prefers "bro-science" over actual facts (yeah, I might be young, but I'm already bitter. It's only a matter of time before I'll be yelling at kids to "get off my lawn!" ).
However, from what I've seen, most people should be comfortable following one of the two following:

- The slow-carb diet. There's endless variations upon this theme, here's one set of rules from Tim Ferriss:

Rule #1: Avoid “white” starchy carbohydrates (or those that can be white). This means all bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and grains. If you have to ask, don’t eat it. Instead, load up on things like beans and legumes.
Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again, especially for breakfast and lunch. You already do this; you’re just picking new default meals.
Rule #3: Don’t drink calories. Exception: 1-2 glasses of dry red wine per night is allowed.
Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit. (Fructose –> glycerol phosphate –> more bodyfat, more or less.) Avocado and tomatoes are excepted.
Rule #5: Take one day off per week and go nuts. I choose and recommend Saturday.

- Intermittent fasting. There's a multitude of alternatives here as well. I subscribe to the one laid out by leangains.com.

The Leangains protocol consists of two phases; 16 hours of fasting, followed by 8 hours of feeding. During this period, three meals are usually eaten. Depending on the day, the composition of those meals varies; on workout days, carbs are prioritized before fat, while on rest days fat intake is higher. Protein remains fairly high on all days.
(...)
- On workout days, break the fast with meat, veggies and a fruit. If you’re planning to train shortly after this meal, add a few carbs in the form of a starch source – potatoes or whole grain bread, for example. Make it a medium sized meal and don’t stuff yourself.
- On rest days, eat less calories than on workout days - do this by cutting down on carb intake, and make meat, fibrous veggies and fruit the foundation of your diet for this day. The first meal of the day should be the largest, in contrast to workout days where the post-workout meal is the largest.
- In the last meal of the day, include a slow digesting protein source; preferably egg protein, cottage cheese (or any other source of casein based protein).
- Whole and unprocessed foods should always take priority over processed or liquid foods, unless circumstance demands a compromise.

Both of these are good for me, as I don't have time to eat a gazillion tiny meals throughout the day. I don't eat much fruit anyways, and I'm fairly habitual. However, since I'm rarely hungry around breakfast (also, I have a knack for devouring large servings of double chocolate cake), I tend to drift towards intermittent fasting naturally. Working out regularly - lifting weights, as well as doing both taekwondo and judo - while on these programs are painless.

My approach to diet is simple. for breakfast if I have plenty of time, I eat 2 eggs, 2 slices of buttered whole wheat toast, and 2 cups of ridiculously strong coffee. if I'm running late I eat 3 frozen waffles. not ideal, but neither is going hungry. I take medication in the morning that must be taken with food, so skipping breakfast is not an option. also I have a thing about hot breakfasts, I hate cold cereal.

for lunch I eat a chicken salad sandwich and a big bowl of spinach with italian dressing.

for dinner (which is always late, after I get home from the dojo, usually around 8:30-9pm) I eat whatever the wife cooks. she's a health nut and a really good cook. she's full blooded Indian, so chicken curry with white rice is often on the menu.

around midnight I grab some cookies and a big glass of chocolate milk.

if a holiday or special event comes up I eat as much as I want, but stop eating when I'm no longer hungry, and never eat out of boredom. also I limit the alcohol to the weekends, but that has more to do with my difficulty waking up the next day for work (even after only 1-2 drinks, which really sucks) than it does with dietary concerns.

doing this and getting on the mat 5-6x per week (sometimes twice a day) I stay right around the same weight. I rarely go up or down more than 5 pounds. plus I'm already a heavyweight so I don't need to worry about weighing in. if my schedule changes and I can't get on the mat as many times that week due to school or work obligations I eat fewer cookies, and get a smaller glass of chocolate milk, and I maintain just the same. I never feel hungry on this plan, and I rarely feel bloated.

what matters more to me, is how I look to the wife when I'm naked. following this routine I don't have a 6 pack (you can easily see the outline of one though) but she tells me I look great, so why change it? as said above, the perfect plan for me may not be the perfect plan for you.