At the heart of a sportsperson's life there are two crucially important moments, which decide how well your athletic condition turns out: training and diet — meant not as giving up food, but as choosing the right foods.
Training and diet are part of a single overall picture. Very intense training without an adequate diet makes no sense, just as a very restrictive diet has no effect at all without training. Combining the two lets you achieve the right ratio between fat mass and muscle mass.
The problem with complicated diets
We have read about any number of different diets: pineapple diets, starch-free diets, meat-free diets, protein diets. Diets in which the sportsperson has to measure quantities precisely — 80 g of pasta, 20 g of cooked ham, an apple, a spoonful of honey — are completely unworkable. Which of us, in real life, is able to manage family, children, home and work and measure food so precisely? Most of the time we simply eat whatever is in the fridge.
A diet perfectly scheduled in quantities, timing and rotation of foods is pure utopia — unless you are a professional athlete, but that is another story.
A plant-based diet
The diet that has worked best for me — organisationally too — has been to combine training with a mainly plant-based diet.
Human beings behave as omnivores, but their nature as mammals suggests that we are in fact frugivores. Everything we need is in plants, often even in raw ones alone. Meat, pasta, bread, biscuits and industrial snacks are simply devastating for our bodies.
In practical terms, a trip to the greengrocer is enough: broad-leaved vegetables, salads and fruit of every kind. Having a fridge full of fruit and vegetables is the best way to eat healthily, regulate your glycaemic index and save on the shopping — fruit and vegetables are notoriously cheaper than meat and cheese.
Fruit salads, salads and smoothies
For preparation, big fruit salads, salads and smoothies are ideal.
Fruit salads take a bit more time to cut up the fruit. Salads — especially ready-washed bagged ones, already cleaned by the greengrocer — are quick to prepare and leave plenty of room for imagination. Fruit and vegetable smoothies, on the other hand, are the real novelty of this approach to eating.
We are not talking about milk and fruit smoothies, but smoothies made from mixed fruit and vegetables. A few examples: beetroot, peaches, banana, raw spinach leaves, mint leaves and water. The taste doesn't belong to our culture the way a plate of bucatini all'amatriciana does, but the effect on your health is total.
There is no limit to the possible combinations: carrots, blueberries, apples, chard leaves, raw cauliflower, lettuce, pears, melon, oranges, fennel. Three glasses of mixed smoothie fill you up more than a 200 g plate of pasta.
It is worth preferring the smoothie to the centrifuged juice: the juicer favours the liquid part of the plants, while the smoothie keeps all the fibre of the fruit and vegetables, which cleans the intestine and helps evacuation.
The three advantages of the smoothie
A smoothie-based diet is not as tasty as we are used to, but it has a more powerful effect on our body than any medicine or supplement. It acts on digestion, on the sleep-wake cycle and, finally, on body weight. During sporting activity, moreover, there is no better vitamin or salt supplement than fruit and vegetables themselves.
Fruit and vegetable smoothies have three fundamental advantages:
- They are cheap
- They are quick to prepare
- They are healthy
The sportsperson's diet should never lack at least one meal a day based on fruit and vegetable smoothies.
My personal experience: I went from 84 to 76 kg in just five weeks, combining training with a diet based on green smoothies. The weight loss was consolidated with physical activity two or three times a week. Blood tests in hand, I was in excellent physical shape, with all values within the normal range.