Female athletes need solid nutrition to boost athletic performance and build lean muscle mass. But should female athletes carb load before events?
This idea is popular, but it isn’t ideal. In fact, it might do more harm than good. Instead, the keto diet may deliver all the fat, protein, and micronutrients that you need to stay strong and perform your best.
Find out how the ketogenic diet can boost athletic performance in women.
Are You Athletic? Here’s What “Athlete” Really Means
If you’re working out a few times each week, are you an athlete? If you’re competing regularly, are you an athlete? The term athlete is not limited to professionals or even those who compete in sports competitions regularly.
An athlete is any person who engages regularly in both anaerobic and aerobic exercise. This includes marathoners (or 5K-ers), hobbyists (who are part of a racquetball club or ski club), and even those who just love a good time at the gym.
Even if you’re not a professional basketball (or any other sport) player, the definition of an athlete still matters. If you’re an athlete, your nutritional needs are different from the average person’s.
Depending on how active you are, you may need more calories, more protein, more fat, or even more vitamins/minerals to fuel your workout and assist with recovery.
Fueling Your Workout Keto Style
Your body is a fat-burning machine, and it needs fuel to power your activity and get through a workout. The two options for fuel are glucose and fat, but many athletes focus on glucose.
Because carbs are metabolized into sugar and are used for energy, some athletes will carb-load before events.
They hope that they are loading up on their body’s preferred energy source, but this method of fueling up is outdated. Keto can help you get the fuel source you need without resorting to carb-loading.
When you focus on the other fuel source – fat – your performance won’t suffer. When you cut out carbs, you won’t lose energy or decrease your performance as long as you’re getting enough fat into your diet.
Studies show that athletes – in this case, cyclists – performed just as good on a high-fat diet. This means that high-carb isn’t your only option.
The bottom line: High-fat won’t make you sacrifice energy or endurance.
Why Carb Loading Isn’t Worth It
While the above study highlighted that high-fat diets won’t compromise your performance, there’s another reason to skip the carb-loading: carb-loading only boosts performance by a maximum of 2%… which means all the carbs create just a minimal difference.
Carb loading can cause spikes in blood sugar, fat gain, and it can kick you out of ketosis. It’s not worth it.
Macros and Micros Requirements for Female Athletes
All athletes, regardless of sex, need to follow a well-balanced diet filled with whole foods to stay healthy and energized. Female athletes, however, have a few additional needs. For example, women need a slightly higher intake of iron to keep energy levels high.
Pre-menopausal women (aged 19-50) should consume about 18mg of iron each day. Men only need about 8mg of iron. Female athletes also need to focus on folate (especially during the child-bearing years) and calcium (to prevent osteoporosis).
Keto-friendly dishes can supply both the macronutrients as well as the micronutrients that female athletes need. Here’s a quick peek at how these macros and micros impact a female athlete:
Fat: Fat is essential on the keto diet, but it can also play a crucial role in improving athletic performance. Many athletes flourish on high-fat, low-carb diets.
For instance, fat-adapting on a keto diet helps your body spare muscle glycogen, which can increase endurance and maximum power output
Protein: Protein helps your body build lean muscle mass. For an athlete, the most bioavailable forms of protein are animal products.
Animal protein sources include meat (such as chicken, red meat, pork, duck), eggs, fish (especially fatty fish), and whey protein. All of these protein sources are keto-friendly.
Vitamins: Vitamin B12 (found in beef liver) supports energy metabolism. Vitamin B3 helps prevent fatigue during exercise, which means you can power through your favorite activity.
Minerals: There are many minerals that promote athletic performance. Magnesium helps you build muscle and reduces the risk of muscle cramps. You can find magnesium in dark, leafy greens – which are also keto-friendly.
Calcium helps with muscle contraction, and most dairy products are keto-friendly. Calcium also helps women build strong bones to prevent osteoporosis later in life.
You can mix cream cheese and spinach into a tasty filling for stuffed chicken and get a healthy serving of protein, magnesium and calcium. Another mineral, sodium maintains your fluid balance and prevents dehydration.
Keto, Exercise, and Menstrual Health
Exercise can impact menstrual cycles, especially when the workouts are intense, and the caloric intake is slashed.
Too much intense exercise can cause your body to not ovulate, which affects your entire menstrual cycle. On the flip side, light exercise can help reduce PMS symptoms like cramping.
Exercise and keto work well together to help improve your athletic performance, but also your overall health. Specifically, the ketogenic diet can support female health. For example, it can balance hormones and improve menstrual cycles.
If you notice your period is changing, it may not be because of keto. It could be tied to intense workouts, fatigue, or even not getting in enough calories.
Things All Keto Female Athletes Need to Know
Keto Diets Defined
1. Standard Ketogenic Diet (SKD): Beginner
Low carbs, moderate protein, high fat; fat types can include saturated fat or poly- or monounsaturated. Max is 25 to 50 net carbs daily depending on the person. (Three cups of kale has approximately 28 grams of carbs.)
2. Targeted Ketogenic Diet (TKD): Advanced
Carb limit is higher around workout times. Max is 25 to 50 grams of high-glycemic, glucose-based (not fructose-based) carbs 30 to 60 minutes before training.
3. Cyclic Ketogenic Diet (CKD): Advanced
Alternate keto days with carb-loading days, such as five keto days and one to two “refeed” days. On keto days, max is about 50g of carbs; on carb-loading days, it’s about 450 to 600g.
4. MCT Ketogenic Diet (MKD): Intermediate
The type of fat emphasized is medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs) rather than other fats (mostly long-chain triglycerides, or LCTs, like animal fat) because MCTs produce ketones more easily; 30% fat from MCTs, 30% from LCTs.
Body Benefits of Ketosis
Experts agree that there are actually a few benefits to possibly going into ketosis, whether it’s to change your body composition, get control of cravings, or more.
1. Blood Sugar Control
Going keto may be useful for “helping to improve insulin resistance, as does exercise,” says Megan Roberts, the scientific director of Nourish, Balance, Thrive, an online health-coaching company.
“It may also help improve conditions associated with insulin resistance like PCOS [polycystic ovarian syndrome].”
By cutting carbohydrate and protein intake, ketosis can also help with other diseases of high insulin, including type-2 diabetes, obesity, and Alzheimer’s disease, adds Jason Fung, M.D., author of The Complete Guide to Fasting.
And for those who grew up in the era of “low-fat everything,” adding in healthy fats can help hormonal balance and brain health, Roberts explains.
2. Weight Loss
A growing body of evidence points to at least short-and medium-term weight-loss effects.
A British Journal of Nutrition review of 13 studies (totaling more than 1,400 people) showed that those on a very low-carb keto diet (with less than 50g carbs daily) had a decreased body weight and blood pressure at studies’ end compared with those on low-fat diets.
You can also see rapid weight loss on a keto diet because insulin causes salt and water retention in the kidneys, and lowering insulin on a keto diet can often produce fast water loss, says Fung.
3. Appetite Suppression
“There’s no better diet than a ketogenic-style diet if you have always had trouble controlling cravings and body composition, aka once a fat kid, always a fat kid,” says Mark Bell, a champion powerlifter, owner of Super Training Gym, and author of The War on Carbs.
An analysis of appetite studies in Obesity Reviews reveals that appetite does seem to be suppressed on low-energy, low-carb ketogenic diets, despite calorie restriction, which usually makes people ravenous.
Surprisingly, even butter contains a fat-loss dynamo called butyrate, which has been shown to affect the gut-brain neural circuit by boosting metabolism, suppressing calorie intake, and raising fat burning, according to the journal Gut.
4. Endurance
“Keto diets train the body to burn fatty acids directly, which is often beneficial during prolonged training sessions and endurance athletics. Training muscles to use fat for fuel means the body is able to carry large amounts of fuel. Also, because keto diets are more satiating, they often lend themselves well to restricted time eating or intermittent fasting,” says Fung.
5. Longevity
A keto diet may add more years to your life, according to a study in the journal IUBMB Life.
Researchers say that by reducing glucose, you may limit free-radical damage and decrease insulin/insulin- growth-factor-receptor signaling, which in turn boosts the FOXO (fork head box O transcription factor) proteins, which raise antioxidant enzymes.
Keep It Short ( And Unsweetened )
Yet, if weight loss is your ultimate goal, some experts say keto is best kept for its original use.
“It might help decrease the severity and incidence of seizures in epileptics resistant to medication, but for fat loss there are better options,” says Marie Spano, M.S., R.D., C.S.C.S., C.S.S.D., a sports nutritionist for the Atlanta Braves, Atlanta Hawks, and Atlanta Falcons.
Burning fat may produce more ATP (the molecule that powers you during activity), but during high-intensity exercise the body cannot produce ATP fast enough from fat to meet its energy demands, and your intensity will slow down, she explains.
And some experts say there’s nothing magical about the ketogenic diet for weight loss. “Just because you’re burning ketones does not mean you’ll lose weight,” Spano adds.
Roberts agrees that keto is not a diet she recommends for the long term. “Women, especially those who exercise regularly, tend to do better with more carbs from both a health and performance standpoint. Our hormones are more sensitive than men’s, and when you top off exercise and life stressors, with a very low-carb, ketogenic diet, it’s often a recipe for burnout,” she explains.
In fact, many of us simply can’t stay on a keto diet for too long. “The ketogenic diet is not sustainable for the majority of people, and it can be difficult to go on and off the diet easily,” says Spano.
That could be partially due to the time it takes for the body to become fat adapted and start utilizing ketones, which for some can take several weeks.
This stage is sometimes referred to as the “keto flu” (or carb flu) and simply is a sort of sugar/carbohydrate withdrawal phase that can be marked by fatigue, nausea, dizziness, brain fog, trouble sleeping, and stomach irritability.
“It’s also not ideal for muscle gain, as the carb cutting interferes with the muscle-growth-signaling processes,” Spano says.
And to restrict something—carbs, calories, etc.—for too long and abstain from eating it forever is not realistic, Bell says. Instead, he says, “you should go through different time periods where you’re on different diets.
If you’re looking for performance, and fat loss isn’t the most important thing, then a low-carb diet [as opposed to a ketogenic, which is very low-carb in comparison] is the way to go.
But if your aim is to control body-fat levels and lose body fat, then a ketogenic diet is the way to go. Once your desired amount of weight has been lost, switch from a ketogenic to a low-carb diet.”
