July 9, 2003
A: FROM MENTOR LAUREN BATTE IN MD
Hi Ashley! I can only speak from personal experience as I'm not a
nutritionist but have been an athlete my whole life and most recently
was a Division I college athlete. The diets of myself and my teammates
varied to an extent and I've watched many young women engaged in high
level athletics go to extremes with what they eat and prescribe to
highly regimented diets.

I'm a strong advocate of a well-balanced diet consisting of fruits,
vegetables, carbohydrates, protein, as well as fats: all of the major
food groups. I don't advise extreme eating where you cut large
categories of foods out of your diet. With time, you'll be able to feel
your body and know what it needs so that you can adjust your diet if
you're not getting enough of something.

Finally, DRINK WATER before, during and after excercising! As you're
working out, your body is losing A LOT of water. I try to carry a water
bottle that I can refill. All the best, Lauren Batte.
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A: FROM MENTOR JOAN LUSK IN RI
This question has been languishing unanswered for a long, long time -
so I went looking for an answer. I didn't find one (not that I
looked _terribly_ hard), but I'd suspected that a good all-around
diet is also good for athletes and that there isn't any special
answer. This government site didn't lead me to an answer, but it
might lead you to information you'd be interested in.

http://www.4woman.gov/faq/diet.htm

Different sports have different requirements on our bodies -
endurance vs. speed, strength vs. agility. Certainly training can
emphasize one type of skill over another, and individuals are endowed
with different rations of fast and slow muscle fibers. It's less
clear to me that dietary requirements for different sports would be
very different, though some sports would clearly burn more calories
than others. We need enough protein for the essential amino acids to
keep renewing our own proteins, including muscles - but eating more
protein won't in itself cause us to have more muscle. The energy
used by muscles comes primarily from burning carbohydrates and fats.

These sites discuss the effects of exercise on muscle protein
metabolism - but they are just random finds, nothing you'd want to
change your diet on! Nevertheless, they might interest you and open
up new questions.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&l
ist_uids=7900797&dopt=Abstract

http://www.mmu.ac.uk/c-a/exspsci/research/crm/energyturn.htm