Guides
Training, recovery and the rest of the panel
What the evidence actually supports about eating around training — and what it says about the two things nobody puts in a macro calculator: shortfalls you cannot feel, and the reasons eating is rarely only about food.
Training
Protein, iron, bone and the supplements worth the money — with the evidence graded, because sports nutrition is a field where confident claims outnumber settled ones.
Protein per meal
You are probably eating enough protein and still wasting most of it
The daily total is the number everyone tracks and the one that matters least. Muscle is built in response to individual meals, and a day that hits its target in one sitting is not the same day as one that hits it across three.
Iron and endurance
Going flat is not always overtraining
An athlete whose sessions have quietly got harder is usually told to rest more. Sometimes that is right. Sometimes the ferritin has been sliding for four months and no amount of rest will touch it.
Bone under load
Stress fractures are usually a fuelling problem wearing a bone costume
Bone responds to training the way muscle does — it gets stronger. It only does that if there is enough energy coming in, and the commonest reason it does not is not calcium.
Cramp and electrolytes
Cramp is probably not your electrolytes
The salt-and-magnesium explanation is the most widely believed thing in amateur sport, and the evidence for it is far thinner than the confidence with which it is repeated.
Antioxidants and adaptation
High-dose antioxidants can blunt the training you just did
The oxidative stress produced by hard exercise looks like damage, and the instinct is to mop it up. It is also the signal that tells the muscle to adapt, and there is trial evidence that mopping it up costs you some of the adaptation.
Creatine
Creatine is the one that survived
Almost everything on the supplement shelf is either untested or tested and found wanting. One cheap, unglamorous compound has been studied for thirty years and keeps working, which is worth saying plainly on a site that spends most of its time telling people not to bother.
Zinc and recovery
Zinc: worth having enough of, not worth loading
The body stores almost none of it, athletes lose more of it, and it sits behind wound healing, immune function and testosterone — which is exactly the combination that produces bad supplement advice.
Collagen and tendon
Collagen for tendons: promising, early, and oversold
Tendon and ligament injuries are the ones that end seasons and there has never been much to offer nutritionally, which is exactly the vacuum a thin literature gets marketed into.
Magnesium and muscle
Magnesium does a great deal, and almost none of it is what it is sold for
It is a cofactor in several hundred enzyme reactions, roughly half of adults get less than the reference intake, and the marketing has attached it to the one outcome the trials are least kind to.
B vitamins and energy
The energy vitamins do not give you energy
They are called that because they release energy from food, which is true and is not the same as providing it. If you are already replete, the extra goes into your urine, brightly.
Amino acids beyond protein
Most amino acid supplements are protein, sold at a markup
BCAAs, glutamine, EAAs, beta-alanine — four categories with very different evidence behind them, sold in the same aisle with the same confidence. Only one of them has much.
Vitamin D and performance
Vitamin D fixes a deficiency; it does not grant a benefit
Roughly half of athletes tested are insufficient, and correcting that is worth doing. The part that does not follow is the one on the label: that more, in someone already sufficient, does anything at all.
Shortfall
You can eat more than enough and still be short. What that looks like, who it happens to, and how to find it.
Hidden hunger
Hidden hunger: eating too much and short of it anyway
The word malnutrition brings up an image of scarcity. The commonest form of it in wealthy countries looks like the opposite — plenty of food, plenty of energy, and a panel with holes in it.
Ultra-processed food
The problem with ultra-processed food is what is missing, not only what is added
Most of the argument is about sugar, salt and additives. The quieter issue is arithmetic: these foods keep their energy and lose much of what came with it, and they now supply over half the calories in some countries.
Dieting and deficit
A deficit cuts nutrients before it cuts fat
Eating less means eating less of everything, and the requirements do not scale down with the calories. Below a certain intake, meeting them stops being a matter of choosing well and starts being arithmetically difficult.
Plant-based and training
Plant-based training works, and four nutrients need a plan
The old argument was about protein, and it was mostly wrong. The real list is shorter, more specific and less discussed — and one item on it is genuinely non-negotiable.
Mind
Why eating is rarely only about food. These describe mechanisms rather than offering treatment, and they end with somewhere real to go.
The willpower frame
Willpower is a description of the outcome, not an explanation of it
When eating goes the way someone intended we call it discipline, and when it does not we call it a lack of the same thing. That is not a mechanism. It is the result, renamed, and used as its own cause.
Restriction and bingeing
The binge is not the failure. It is the second half of the restriction.
People describe it as losing control, and the sequence almost never starts there. It starts days earlier, with a rule — and the loss of control is what a body does at the end of one, reliably enough that it was demonstrated in a laboratory eighty years ago.
Emotional eating
Eating for a reason that is not hunger is not a malfunction
Food has regulated mood for as long as there have been people, and calling that a disorder by default is both wrong and unhelpful. The question worth asking is narrower: whether it is the only tool available.
Tracking without obsession
We make a tracking app, so read this part sceptically
Measuring what you eat helps some people a great deal and harms others, and which group you are in is not decided by how sensible you are. We have an obvious interest in the first answer, which is exactly why this page exists.