Through this approach, your body composition will change because you are able to perform well and maintain a realistic and sustainable style of eating.
Are you an athlete looking to change body composition and improve your performance as you train for an upcoming event?
Consider this:
Manipulating your eating before, during and after workouts in an effort to enhance the adaptive response to training will only provide a marginal performance and body composition improvement if your daily diet is not well-balanced, well-timed and consistent.
It's remarkable how the body performs and changes when emphasis is placed on the daily diet as a vehicle of nourishment and when workouts are supported with food as a vehicle of energy.
Far too many athletes choose sport nutrition restriction over daily diet manipulation whereas the later can significantly help to change your body composition without compromising energy when you ask your body to perform and adapt to intentional training stress.
Meeting your daily nutrient and energy needs in the daily diet ensures maximal adaptation to your training because you have met your foundation nutritional needs which will help allow you to perform (and recover from) a variety of workouts - from easy to moderate to intense and from short to longer to very long.
Once you place emphasis on your daily eating (which it will change throughout your season), you'll find that your body systems, hormones and metabolism work better. Your body ultimately works for you as an athlete, not against you. Thus, rather than trying to outperform a poorly planned diet by restricting nutrition around and during workouts (this statement in itself makes absolutely no sense but athletes continue to believe that this is the "best" approach to improving performance and to assist in weight loss) you'll find it much easier to optimize, adjust and personalize your fueling regime before, during and after workouts to meet your performance goals after you have taken the time to establish a healthy foundational diet.
If you know (or think) that your daily diet needs some tweaking, consider the straight-forward approach of creating a well-balanced, well-timed and consistent eating plan rather than simply not eating around and during your workouts with the hope that food elimination or restriction will make you a stronger, healthier and fitter high-intensity or endurance athlete.
Ultimately, if performance and body composition changes are the ultimate goals of your nutritional changes, you'll find that when you create a foundation diet to support your current training load, your workouts become easier to accomplish, you can go longer or harder with better focus, form and motivation and you can maintain a great sense of enjoyment when you train (which leads toward more training consistency and longevity in your sport).
And ironically, with this approach, there's a better chance of unintentionally changing your body composition without intentionally trying, while maintaining a great healthy relationship with food and the body AND feeling fulfilled and happy in your sport of choice.