Nancy Clark is the Low-Carb Anti-Christ

The title of this article refers to one of the “queens” of sports nutrition, Nancy Clark , who is prominently featured on many sports-oriented websites loudly propounding the benefits of high-carbohydrate nutrition. If you peruse any typical athlete website, like www.runnersworld.com, www.athletesadvisor.com, www.roadcycling.com, etc etc, you will inevitably find “hit piece” articles that exclaim loudly that “trendy” low-carb diets are unhealthy, terrible and damaging for endurance athletes! These articles are of course founded on the concepts of mainstream nutritional dogma, and assume that everyone can and is willing to follow their recommendation to always make sure your muscle glycogen stores are 100% full by eating large quantities of carb-laden food throughout the day.

So how then do you explain the large and ever-growing number of athletes who follow a low or moderate carb diet and still manage to compete successfully? In my personal case, I would have to be on acid-reducing medication for life in order to follow these dietary recommendations! Can you imagine actually voluntarily going on expensive prescription medication that makes you feel like crap 24 hours per day, just so you can follow mainstream nutritional dogma?! That is truly insane thinking. I have never eaten more than 200 grams of carbs in a day since I started running (that is less than 25% of my daily calories), and I am making great progress so far. Normally I get 15-20% of calories from carbs per day. According to Nancy Clark and other nutritionists, that would be utterly impossible… yet here I am. I look forward to getting stronger and faster over time, and proving them wrong again and again!

There is no established protocol for low-carb athletes to follow – we must each find our own way. There are runners out there like Kent Altena who do not supplement carbs at all, even during exercise, and still finish marathons and half-marathons! Kent keeps getting faster, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he qualifies for Boston eventually. Another runner on Jimmy Moore’s low-carb discussion page says he only eats meat and fat, and he has run some pretty impressive times himself!

Stuart Trager, who is famous for being the medical director for Atkins Inc., has done 10 Ironman Triathlons, and I saw it written somewhere that he “never ate more than 300 grams/day of carbs”. This is from a man who has gone under 10 hours for Ironman, and had to have trained at least 15 hours per week, and probably eaten over 4,000 calories per day in the peak of his training! 300 grams would be about 25-30% carb calories max.

I have spoken to several runners on running forums who say that they do extensive training on “zero carbs”. Many others like myself do supplement carbs to some degree, but still eat low-carb during non-exercise times. The bottom line is that it is done, it can be done, and that it does work!

I hope I can make the way a little bit easier for some low-carbers who have gotten to the point of wanting to pursue serious athletics, but who don’t want to sacrifice their health and weight loss by thinking that they “need” to eat a high-carb diet in order to participate in sports. What makes you an athlete is training in a sport over time, not eating bagels! Your body will make the necessary adaptations to use protein and fat for fuel (for the most part, or all the way, depending on your individual makeup). The important part is putting in the time in your sport, just like every other athlete, whether they are chowing down on steak and veggies, or brown rice and tofu!