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How to Perform at Your Best, with Dr. Dana Lis

By Ethan Boldt

September 22, 2025

It’s rare to get an opportunity to sit down and discuss all things nutrition, including the best and easiest ways to lose weight, with one of the most renowned nutrition experts in the world: Dr. Dana Lis. She’s helped many be their best in their respective sports, and now she’s here to help you.

A new member of the Ancient Nutrition Wellness Roundtable (and a paid partner), we discussed many topics, including the elite athlete’s diet and the similarities and differences with the everyday, active person.

Dr. Lis is a globally recognized leader in the field of performance nutrition. As one of the few Registered Dietitians decorated with the renowned IOC Diploma in Sport Nutrition and a PhD, she seeks to align the three key elements that shape the field of performance nutrition: practice, research, and industry. In fact, her expertise in these pillars has led to significant advancements in the field.

Currently, Dana heads into her seventh season as the Performance Nutrition Consultant for the Golden State Warriors. With nearly 20 years of experience, Dana has worked with Olympic and professional sports across various continents and a spectrum of disciplines.

Dana continues to drive the nutrition field forward through mentorship, shaping best practices and challenging the status quo. This includes Performance Nutrition Professionals, which she launched with Jennifer Gibson, MS, RD, and which trains sport dietitians in the U.S. It includes the latest research, case studies and considerations for practice, and hopes to set new standards for performance nutrition operations in elite sports.

Ancient Nutrition (AN): With your extensive work with elite athletes, how have you helped them get better in their respective sports? And how does that relate to the average exerciser?

Dr. Dana Lis: We encourage their involvement and their critical thinking, as the results will be better for them individually as well as for the team. Plus it’s just more fun.

While their age is one thing, their physiological age is another. It’s not uncommon to have athletes in their 30s who are physiologically in better shape than some in their 20s. We look at performance testing data, then consider how we think that changing a player's body comp [composition] might help certain aspects of their performance on the court or their development as an athlete.

The same goes for the gym goer, pickleball player, evening walker, etc. Where can you make improvements? How do you get there?

Be a critical thinker with your nutrition

AN: You encourage your athletes to be critical thinkers. How would that apply to the everyday active person?

Dr. Lis: It’s very important to take an active role in your nutrition and align them with your goals. With any supplement or nutrition strategy, it’s important to ask, what is your reason for eating this way or taking that supplement? If you can't answer why you want to eat in such a way or why you want to buy this supplement, then you’re not likely to stick with it, let alone benefit from it.

Sometimes it can be helpful to hold up a model of sorts for you. For example, when I can figure out who a player respects or who they look up to, I use them as an example. Hey, this is what this player does. They were doing this before, then changed this and this better result occurred. I see a sort of similar pattern with you. They often respond really well to it.

In sport and in your life, it’s a good idea to try to measure the impact. So if you’re trying to correct a vitamin D level, you can measure that.

For example, we periodize carbohydrate intake with the players. Using game day data, we may find that by adding more carbohydrate in the first quarter for a player, we're able to get a sense of if their fourth quarter top speeds are maintained, or if they go up or down.

What are you looking to get out of that supplement? How are you going to know if it's working or not? You’ve got to measure it in some way. Maybe it’s the scale, body measurements, journaling about your energy levels, how you’re sleeping, etc.

Periodize your supplements

AN: When a person is looking to develop a supplement routine, what’s key?

Dr. Lis: You need to prioritize. If I took all the supplements I wanted to — for perimenopause, sleep, muscle, energy and so on — I’d have a whole kitchen full of supplements.

So I really encourage, and this is what we do with the players, is to periodize your supplements. Perhaps you’re not sleeping well right now and that becomes your priority. Or you need more energy in the morning. Or you’re looking to strengthen your body and become more resilient.

Ask what are all the things that I need to do? Prioritize. In sport, we have a yearly training plan. We have macrocycles, mesocycles and microcycles. And nutrition will underpin all of those priorities.

What's important right now? What training adaptations are we looking for? What nutrition strategies and supplements are important to maximize that priority? Once you've got that, that’s your fitness goal. It may even be a blood marker.

Two easier ways to lose weight

AN: While it may not be a common goal among your athletes, weight loss and more lean body mass remains a popular goal among many people. What do you advise?

Dr. Lis: When it comes to body composition changes, some of the general strategies I find helpful include reducing your feeding window. That's not necessarily intermittent fasting, but just taking a look at your day. If you're eating from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., that’s way longer than historically the human body has been regularly fed and had blood glucose elevated that many times in a 24-hour period.

Research out of John Hawley's lab at Australian Catholic University looked at the effect of just shortening restricted feeding windows. Just going down to 8 or 10 hours of your feeding window. Outside of that window, when your blood glucose is not elevated, that's when your body is more likely to also use fatty acids for fuel rather than glucose or glycogen. It simply encourages your body to burn more fat.

Another key thing may be front-loading your day. When we're trying to lose weight, we tend to eat this little small breakfast or skip it. For lunch, we'll have a salad and some chicken, but slowly we're getting pretty hungry. By the afternoon, we're starting to crash, so we might, like, grab a bar. At dinner, we're starving and often overeat and ‘blow it.’

Instead, front-load your day. Make your breakfast and your lunch your bigger meals, which, for some reason, we just don't do in North America. Our dinners are the biggest. It doesn't have to be a massive breakfast, but maybe you have breakfast and a snack in the morning instead of just this tiny little yogurt and fruit.

Carbs and protein: You need both

AN: What about carbs?

Dr. Lis: It’s important to eat real, starchy carbs. I’m not talking about a load of French fries but something like baked yam fries, wheat berry bread, quinoa. All the time, I see people cut out the carbs, and then they start getting low energy. Instead of cutting out starchy carbs, just eat the portion that you need.

AN: How about protein?

Dr. Lis: Definitely making sure you're getting at the very least 0.5 grams of protein per kilogram body weight of protein each day. Even better, try to get around 1.7 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Eating protein has a little bit of a signaling effect, in terms of signaling your body to make muscle protein.

A new way to think about weight loss and staying fit: energy density

AN: What's an easier way of approaching weight loss and getting into great shape?

Dr. Lis: You can also think about this in terms of energy density rather than just the volume of food. Think about your food intake in energy blocks, of which there are normally three or four: breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner. Ideally you create a lower energy density evening by just focusing on vegetables and protein and getting most of your starchy carbs earlier in the day.

So rather than having a low energy density snack like carrot sticks and hummus, have some real starchy carbs that you can use at your 5 p.m. or so workout. Plus you won’t go into dinner craving a huge amount of pasta or rice because you didn’t eat enough real carbs during the day.

You find what works with your lifestyle to shift the energy density. Instead of just Greek yogurt and fruit for breakfast, maybe you have oatmeal. Rather than a low-carb salad for lunch, you have a sandwich with no-flour wheat berry bread. Then when you get to dinner, instead of having a big pasta meal, you have a little bit of pasta but with tons of vegetables and some protein.

Not only does preparing a veggie-heavy dinner lower the energy density, it boosts your nutrient density and helps satiate you. Out for dinner? Order two appetizers that are veggie dominated rather than an appetizer and entree that are carb-dominated.

Just know that you don't have to be perfect. There's going to be nights when you're going to an event or a restaurant, and eat a big dinner. Simply do some fasting the next morning and use those stored calories in your next workout, too.

Sugar isn’t always the enemy

AN: What do you say about sugar?

Dr. Lis: Well, when I look at what our brain runs on, it really likes glucose, which is sugar. When I look at what is efficient for high-end exercise, and going fast, running fast, being explosive at playing a sport, it's glycogen, aka stored carbohydrates … stored sugar in your muscles.

So our body does need a base level of essentially sugar or carbohydrate, but where we get that carbohydrate from is where the difference is. I have a sweet tooth and love chocolate, for example. So I will indulge in that occasionally. But where we need to be careful is all the added sugar in our diet, such as in processed foods. Breads, yogurts, crackers, etc. This is where many of us struggle.

If you’re going to have the occasional processed sugar foods, like cookies and bars, save that for around training, for that’s why the body will use it. It can even improve performance. There's sensors, carbohydrate receptors in your mouth, that talk to your brain, and it sort of tells the pleasure center of your brain, hey, I got carbohydrate on board, I'm doing good, let's go.

It's still going to need to be at least 20 minutes before, so that really simple sugar is in circulation.

The surprising supplements

AN: Many people understand the value of supplements like whey protein, probiotics, collagen, multivitamins, etc. but where is there some learning curve?

Dr. Lis: Yeah, fantastic question. Creatine. So many everyday people do not take creatine. But just looking at how it improves cognitive function, it’s a great supplement. It also helps you use your creatine phosphate system effectively for intense exercise. There’s a role it plays with signaling muscle protein synthesis, plus helps with recovery.

Any gender, any phase of your life (except for adolescents) can benefit. That includes grandma. There are evidence-based reasons to take a low dose of creatine most days. So creatine would be one for sure.

Protein is No. 2. If you can hit your protein requirements from food, great, but a lot of people struggle to meet their protein requirements. For them, a whey protein powder or plant-based protein powder makes sense.

Collagen, too. Research indicates that females with exercise-related knee discomfort, for example, can benefit from collagen supplementation. We recommend it for our athletes.

Personalized nutrition … in a smoothie

AN: Do smoothies make particular sense for people who are very busy?

Dr. Lis: Yes, absolutely. Having a daily smoothie, for example, can cover a lot of nutrition bases for people. You can put in protein, collagen, creatine, green powder, even omega 3s. For example, for our players, we’ll use personalized nutrition strategies directly in a smoothie.

That smoothie shouldn’t just be macronutrients [carbs, fat, protein] but micronutrients, too. That’s why I mention green powder and omegas. The phytonutrients and bioactives in a greens powder can really boost the nutrient density. Also prebiotic fibers like flaxseed powder.

In general, I recommend these powders much more, as you’re literally mixing with real food, rather than the processed bars that can add up over time.

Don’t forget about gut health

AN: How important is gut health?

Dr. Lis: Very. Your gut is your biggest immune system organ. A lot of the health problems we have, from weight loss to mood, are fully or partially regulated by your gut microbiome.

So if you're eating a lot of packaged, processed foods, and relying on supplements to get your nutrition, your gut microbiome is not gonna like that. You need real food, particularly if you’re trying to lose weight.