Eat Smart Play Hard

If you’re anything like me, you’re tired of hearing about the low-carb, high-protein diet plans like South Beach or Atkins. Not only are they boring and one dimensional, they’re expensive to maintain and sap you of the energy required to exercise and stay active. Enter Eat Smart, Play Hard by Liz Applegate.

Whether you spend all day on a golf course, hours in a bike saddle, 45 minutes at a local running trail or a half-hour on a weight bench, it’s no doubt that eating well can help you perform better. Eat Smart, Play Hard offers advice on fueling your body to maximize your effort and minimize your recovery time.

In part 1 of the book - New Fueling Basics - Applegate offers a revised food pyramid. She adapts the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid to fit an active lifestyle, relecting a greater need for nutrients, fluids and yes, fats. She also offers the latest information on how to eat smartly befor, during and after exercise. In part 2 of the book - Advances in Fitness Eating - you get the most up to date research on energy bars, gels, sports drinks, supplements and performance foods. What works, what doesn’t and what falls somewhere in between. Part 3 - Eat to Reach Your Goals - talks about eating for 14 specific fitness pursuits, including the Weekend Warrior approach to fitness.

This book has been criticised for being overly simplistic or too common sense. I found the detailed diet plans for morning, noon, afternoon and evening exercise worth the cost of the book alone. The revised food pyramid was also a refreshing dose of sound nutritional advice in the sea of high protein nonsense. Even if you think you’re nutrition-saavy, I’d recommend picking up a copy.

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