If you're a competitive athlete or coach at any level, then you're well aware of the hype surrounding sport-performance food and supplements on the market. With so many options available, how do you evaluate performance-enhancing products, choose them wisely, and build them into a program that supports your conditioning and competitive goals?

Diets Designed for Athletes helps you cut through the hype with straightforward guidance on choosing supplement products so that you can avoid wasting money and—worse yet—jeopardizing your health and conditioning. This book is comprehensive, covering the pros and cons of sport-performance products available in stores and in their natural forms. It tells you what to eat, when to eat it, and why. It gives you the information you need about supplements that will work best for you and your sport.

No other book covers all the performance-enhancing foods and supplements currently available. Diets Designed for Athletes addresses products for training and competing, explaining why and how to incorporate them into your diet. It specifies the advantages and disadvantages of products in different forms, and it describes what to use in hot and cold environments. You'll learn what supplements to use to meet your specific needs:

- Training
- Competing
- Gaining energy
- Aiding recovery
- Losing weight
- Building strength
- Adding endurance
- Facing extreme environments

You'll also learn how to tailor your diet to maximize your metabolism and get the most out of your physiological makeup. You'll learn how to combine nutrients so that they enhance rather than block one another's effects.

Customize your own diet by incorporating the nutrition information in this book. You'll find product formula comparisons and explanations of misleading or confusing terms that you may find on product labels and in ads. You'll learn what terms are legitimate and what kinds of performance promises are reasonable. Most important, you'll learn how to differentiate between desirable and undesirable products in light of your personal needs and goals.

Diets Designed for Athletes is more than a book about supplements. It's an objective guide to what actually works, based on real-life experiences of top athletes as well as scientific evidence. Author Maryann Karinch is widely published and an extreme athlete herself. With her personal insights and an array of stories and tips from other nutritionists, athletes, and coaches, this book is as entertaining as it is practical.

Don't rely on word-of-mouth advice. Use the accessible, research-based advice in Diets Designed for Athletes to make wiser food investments and to understand when and why dietary supplements make sense. When you integrate the products that make sense for you into a diet that supports your athletic goals, you'll feel the difference fast and see the results in your performance.