High-fat, low-carb diet for Dunfee test run
• On the days Evan Dunfee hasn’t ingested enough fat, he’ll melt butter in the microwave and then toss it back like tequila.
You’d think fat and Olympiclevel performance would be mutually exclusive.
But the 26-year-old Dunfee, who became one of the feel- good stories of the Rio Olympics when he gracefully declined an opportunity to appeal his fourth-place finish in the 50km race walk, is part of a groundbreaking study at the Australian Institute of Sport on the effects of a low- carbohydrate, highfat diet on endurance events.
“You just get used to eating packets of butter,” Dunfee said of the diet. “It kind of becomes part of what we do to keep our fat intake up. During 40K long ( training) walks, we will eat cheese and peanut butter cookies. So it’s radically different to anything any of us are used to. I don’t think anyone would ever recommend eating cheese when you’re three hours into a training session.”
Dunfee will come off the diet Friday after a challenging three weeks. Barely a f ew days i n, the 6- foot-1 athlete had already dropped almost nine pounds, plummeting to the lightest he’d been since he was 15. He tweeted a picture of the scale reading 63.90 kg ( 141 pounds). To rectify the weight loss, he consumed a glass of whipping cream, documenting it on Twitter with photo of him holding up the full cup and a stray bit of cream stuck in his red beard.
On Australia Day last Thursday, Dunfee was allowed a treat: an Atkins bar with two grams of carbs.
The science behind the diet, simply put, is that strictly limiting carbohydrates forces the body into ketosis, a state where fat is burned as a fuel rather than carbohydrates. Even a slender athlete like Dunfee carries enough fat stores to fuel days of exercise, he explained, while glucose is limited and has to be replenished during exercise.
Dunfee participated in Part 1 of the study last year, the results of which were recently published, and 10 days after coming off of the low- carb diet he obliterated the Canadian record in the 50km by over four minutes.
The Richmond, B.C., native said he isn’t entirely sure exactly what propelled him to the record. It might have been the diet and the physiological adaptations his body had made from being on it. Or perhaps it was more a mental toughness gained while training on such a strict diet. Or maybe it was just the fact he’d spent several weeks in Australia training with some of the world’s best walkers.
“That race almost felt easy,” Dunfee said. “So that really piqued my interest of saying ‘ OK, maybe there’s something here.”’
Countless top athletes certainly believe there’s something there. Canadian j avelin thrower Liz Gleadle, a 28- year- old Vancouver native, talks fondly about grass-fed butter like some of us would chocolate cake.
“Who’s ever dissatisfied with eating something that’s been covered in grass-fed butter and garlic and olive oil and salt? It’s never not a tasty option,” she said.
According to the Canada Food Guide, 45 to 65 per cent of our diet should come from carbohydrates, or between 210 and 290 grams per day as part of an average 1,800-calorie diet.