‘You get used to eating packets of butter’: Racewalker Dunfee on high-fat diet
TORONTO — On the days Evan Dunfee hasn’t ingested enough fat, he’ll melt butter in the microwave and then toss it back like tequila.
You’d think fat and Olympic-level performance would be mutually exclusive.
But the 26-year-old Dunfee, who became one of the feel-good stories of the Rio Olympics when he gracefully declined an opportunity to appeal his fourth-place finish in the 50-kilometre race walk, is part of a groundbreaking study at the Australian Institute of Sport on the effects of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet on endurance events.
“You just get used to eating packets of butter,” Dunfee said of the diet. “It kind of becomes part of what we do to keep our fat intake up. During 40K long (training) walks, we will eat cheese and peanut butter cookies. So it’s radically different to anything any of us are used to. I don’t think anyone would ever recommend eating cheese when you’re three hours into a training session.”