Just to jump on the derailment of this thread...
You know what you've prompted me to self-reflect a bit and if I can't answer the specific question I can still answer the more general question and maybe be of
some help.
Curious to know what professional table tennis players eat to stay in ideal shape. I lost a few pounds, but I don't feel any difference while playing. I only feel difference when I consume caffeine or sugar. The spike makes me more mentally and physically active, but my meals have no influence. Do you feel the same?
It would depend on what the weight loss consisted of - adipose, skeletal muscle, or just water weight - and over what time period, and potentially where the loss came from. Day do day fluctuations could be pretty high, so you would have to take an average over time. You would probably notice a loss in a few pounds of skeletal muscle since you'd almost certainly be weaker, slower, etc, while a few pounds lost in adipose
should make you feel lighter.
The caffeine and sugar making you feel mentally sharper and physically more active is exactly what we would expect. Caffeine, like nicotine, is a stimulant that increases alertness, and glucose is the preferred fuel of the human body (and to an even larger degree the brain) no matter what the keto bros tell you. Sugar, which is 50% glucose, is something like an injection of ATP.
So if you want to see some changes from nutrition, it would need to happen over a longer period of time. A simplified hierarchy in terms of importance goes like this:
1. Calories
2. Macro Distribution
2.A (sport specific) - Timing
4. Micros
Much like physical training plans, professional athletes (who pay attention to this kind of stuff) will also periodize their nutrition plan. That means the diet will change depending whether they're in the offseason, training up for a minor vs major competition, etc. This is because the demands on the body will change, and strict diet plans can be mentally draining.
Just to give an example, an athlete might be allowed to eat whatever they want in the offseason as long as they adhere to a calorie quota to limit weight gain or loss. But in the train up to the beginning of the season they would tighten up the diet to include macro distributions, etc. (This is a very generic way of describing the process and is in no way representative of what
anyone might be doing.)
Now the richest athletes have a whole entourage that will take care of everything and they just eat what's put in front of them, but everyone else would have to do their own leg work. The best nutrition plan is the one you'll stick to, meaning there's no point in eliminating something that will make you miserable even if it has a theoretical negative effect on your performance, because the net effect is positive.
For example, we know that
ANY amount of alcohol is deleterious to your health - there's no such thing as a "healthy" amount. However, some people really enjoy wine. So while in a perfect world, an athlete would never sniff a bottle of Bourdeaux, in reality they're still humans, and humans need their little joys. (Honestly, if we were worried about their "health" we would council them against being professional athletes - being one is in itself an unhealthy endeavor)
First, you need carbs - probably a lot more than you think you do - depending on your needs up to 12g/ kg of BW/ day, plus supplementation during activity. Then, protein - the recommendation is something like 1.5-2g/kg of BW/day, and there's some evidence to suggest consuming a small amount of supplementation before and after activity can improve recovery and sustained energy release. Lastly, you fill in the rest of your calories with fat.
The literature does not support the claim that low calorie/high fat diets benefit athletes.
Anyway this is in context of the upper bounds of human performance. Would I recommend doing what the pros do to the average club player? Probably not - most do not need this level of optimization, since it's not 100% certain the top athletes do either. More importantly, it's not that sustainable without considerable resources.
And then there's hydration - for something like table tennis you would want sweat replacement drinks with glucose in it - something like Liquid IV - during activity. Outside of it you need to make up an excess of the deficit. I'm running out of steam so we can table it for another day.
And all this is before we get into the effects of sleep on performance. Sleep and nutrition is 1A/1B type stuff. Can't put one in front of the other.
Citations:
None cuz I'm not getting paid.
Any errors are the fault of my editor - which is my toilet.
