Wilderness Running Company

In my review of Racing Weight, I said I’d make a follow-up post or two covering specific topics relating to implementation. So let’s take a look at the chapter entitled Improving Your Diet Quality (Chapter 7).

The first sentence of the chapter is: “The single most important characteristic of your diet is its quality.” No word-mincing there. By this point in the book, you probably assume Fitzgerald will not only provide additional evidence for this claim, but also resolve low-grade scientific disputes on the topic and ultimately boil it all down to implementation. You would be correct in this assumption.

Cutting to the chase, Fitzgerald’s implementation advice on this topic consists of a very helpful tool for calculating your diet quality score (DQS). This is what it looks like:

The matrix above is as straightforward to use as a first impression might suggest. Every serving of food consumed during a day is converted to a score. Good stuff adds to your daily tally, bad stuff subtracts from it. The number assigned to a food item also changes from one serving to the next. In this way, your final score will emphasize the “bang-per-buck” of more nutritious fare without losing sight of the importance of balance and moderation. I find it to be a really a nice approach, very intuitive and easy to implement. Here’s a one-day snapshot from a week-long food diary I recently kept.

6:30    Gel pre 1.5-hour trail run
8:30    2 slices multi-grain toast, 1 hard-boiled egg, 10 oz. pineapple/orange/banana juice
11:00  1.5 cup fat free yogurt w/ granola
1:00    Sandwich on multi-grain bread: turkey, provolone, lettuce, tomato; 1 apple
5:30    Gel pre 1.5-hour mountain bike ride
8:00    Large plate (~4 cups) wheat penne w/ chicken, mozzarella, tomato, pesto

This was obviously a pretty good day on its face. Pretty good balance. No meals of shame. (But that’s kind of how food diaries work, right? If you’re writing it down you’re more likely to stick with your plan.) Anyway, let’s go to the judges’ score:

DQS Points: Servings/Category

4: 2/fruit
4: 2/vegetable
5: 3/lean protein
4: 6/whole grain
1.5: 1.5/low fat dairy
-1.5: 1.5/full fat dairy
Total DQS: 17

So the score indicates that this was indeed a pretty good day, although there is room for improvement (the maximum DQS is 29). A bit more fruits and vegetables and a little less whole grain is probably the main thing I would have changed on this particular day.

You might have (correctly) inferred that the hard-boiled egg counted as a lean protein. You might be wondering whether this “correct.” As it turns out, it is. In fact, Fitzgerald singles out eggs as a somewhat exceptional food in the way they support a lean body composition despite their relatively high fat content. With eggs, the principle of moderation is even more key than usual: Fitzgerald says to count the first two eggs of a given day as lean protein in calculating your DQS (by implication, additional eggs count as full fat proteins).

Like any metric, the point of figuring your DQS is to uncover strengths as well as areas that could use improvement. I like the approach because I find it quite a bit easier than counting calories and/or calculating carb/protein/fat ratios.

Speaking of which, Fitzgerald doesn’t really pretend most of us have the time or inclination to track every calorie or keep a food diary 365 days per year. Instead, he advocates careful record keeping during key periods — upon reading Racing Weight for the first time as a benchmark, during short periods around efforts to reach racing weight for a peak event, etc. — and relying the rest of the time on broader guidelines and principles. Like pretty much all the advice in Racing Weight, that strikes me as rigorous yet sane.

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