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Improve your kitesurfing when there’s no wind
Is there a perfect diet for kitesurfers…
Probably not.
But…
that doesn’t mean there isn’t a perfect diet for you as a kitesurfer…
Confused?
Let me explain…
Just how we all look different on the outside, we are even more different on the inside. Our bio chemical individuality means that we all have very different needs when it comes to diet.
This is why you see so many different diets all claiming to be the one perfect human diet…they probably are for the person pushing that particular diet, but may well, quite literally, kill the next person to come and try them…the next person who is biochemically very different to the one for whom the diet worked.
Dietary needs also change naturally with age and lifestyle changes, it seems obvious that a triathlete will have very different dietary needs to a couch potato but what’s not so obvious are all the much smaller dietary differences that exist between these 2 opposite ends of the scale.
Simply put…
You have to find the right diet for you.
Great…but how to do this?
By figuring out what works for you.
An easy starting point is your ancestry, people from certain regions generally tend to tolerate certain food groups better than others for example:
- Northern European will probably do better on a diet higher in fish
- Mexicans, Hispanics, Chinese generally require more folate-rich foods such as leafy greens.
- Japanese & Continental Europeans do better when consuming diets higher in starch
- Those of Northern European descent are more likely to be lactose tolerant.
Of course these are very generic guidelines and there’s huge amounts of variation within these populations….take it for what it is a starting point.
If you want to go into more detail, then a genetic test will not only give you in depth ancestry data but can also highlight certain genetic factors which influence what you should be putting on your plate.
Factors such as if you have a MTHFR or an APOE-4 genetic mutation which might mean you want to eat more folate and muscle meat or cut down on saturated fat respectively.
On top of this you can run food sensitivity tests which will tell you which foods to avoid. These are becoming increasingly more accurate over time and while not cheap, adhering to the results and eliminating the recommended foods can shift the dial enormously for many people.
You could also run a detailed gut/microbiome test to see if you have any underlying issues, such as IBS, leaky gut or underlying parasites.
This test will also go a long way to identifying the specific bacteria (good or bad) present in your gut which can help us identify which foods to include to encourage the good bacteria to thrive whilst starving out the ones we don’t want.
All this might sound like a lot of work and to be fair it is, however once you dial in the unique diet that works for you, high performance becomes child’s play. Mysterious, often apparently incurable conditions simply disappear, aches and pains vanish, sleep dials in, learning improves and you have all the energy you need to rip it up like a boss every time you hit the water!
Check out out kitesurfing case study, “How You Can Massively Improve Your Kitesurfing, Even If There’s No Wind.”