Happy 2021! My Heartfelt Message To Athletes.....

Dear athlete, 

On the first day of the New Yearm you are likely reflecting on the past twelve months. The New Year brings with it excitement for new beginnings and hope for a better future. As you look ahead to the upcoming year, you may be planning your New Year goals, resolutions or intentions as a way to officially begin anew. 

Although goal-setting is an important component in the journey of self-improvement, I ask that you carefully think through your New Year, New You thoughts, actions and behaviors. 

The New Year symbolizes a time when most people resolve to make changes in health. I'm assuming that one of your New Year goals involves your diet, training, body composition or health. Even if you have great intentions with your New Year goals, I am concerned. Because the month of January is so deeply rooted in making changes in body size, shape or weight - supported by the toxic diet culture - I am extremely worried about how your current thoughts about your body size or health will influence your new nutrition strategies and training regime. 

I see and hear about it year after year.........

A seemingly simple resolve to become a faster, stronger, healthier or better athlete takes a downward spiral due to extreme measures. Although being driven, disciplined and highly motivated are great qualities to help you achieve athletic excellence, these same qualities can put you at higher risk for mental and physical health issues, an exercise addiction or an eating disorder. Because of the normalization of disordered eating and obsessive exercising among the athletic population, it can be incredibly difficult for you to recognize the difference between your self-care and self-sabotaging behaviors. 

As a Board Certified Sport Dietitian, many athletes come to me for help with daily and sport nutrition. Not surprisingly, far too many athletes try to optimize performance at the cost of mental and physical health. Sometimes this is unintentional, but many times it is from an intentional desire to achieve the idealized body in the name of sport. 

Because of an ongoing obsession with weight and performance, alongside the cultural norms of disordered eating and exercise behaviors falsely labeled as a "lifestyle change," I had to do something.

I will no longer sit by as a concerned outsider, watching you damage your physical health, destroy your mental well-being and sabotage your athletic capabilities. 

This is why I create The Whole Athlete.

There's nothing wrong with being motivated and dedicated. But when your extreme drive and perfectionistic qualities show up in your eating habits and exercise regime, your intentions can do more harm than good. Add in the pressure of wanting to be lean due to sport expectations and a societal obsession with health, I hope you can now understand how your good intentions can lead to unhealthy outcomes.

Taking health risks for a perceived competitive edge will make you lose in the long run. No matter your athletic goals or fitness level, you should not have to prioritize your athletic development over your well-being.

If this speaks to you, I create a program to help you get more out of your training without compromising your mental and physical health. Through The Whole Athlete 6-lesson course, you will learn how diet culture, a societal obsession with health and the chase for an ideal race weight could be negatively impacting your training, mental well-being and physical health. Once you understand why you think how you think about food, health and your body, you can fix the distorted views that you've developed. You can try out an intro course for free. The 6-lesson course will officially open on January 3rd. 

I care about your health. I also want you to succeed in sport. To help you truly optimize your health and performance, I want to remind you that overall wellness involves taking care of your mind, not just your physical self. 

As you look ahead to the upcoming year, please think about how you want to live your life and not what you want to look like. Remember, your thoughts drive your actions. 

Don't forget to thank your body. Give it credit for all it has allowed you to do and be grateful for what it continues to let you do in life. 

-Marni

Can you be too driven to succeed?

Drive is often the fuel that keeps you motivated to achieve a goal. But a powerful need to succeed can be driven by a fear of failure or constantly comparing yourself to others (or a past version of yourself). The more successful you become in each step of your athletic journey, the more afraid of failure you can become. As a result, you may find yourself compromising your values - and your mental and physical health. The state of being driven can become addictive. 

Being intrinsically motivated is required in any successful individual. To work hard and relentlessly pursue a goal with determination is a great quality. 

Although drive can be a great thing (when you use it in the right ways), it can also lead to a single-focused mindset. When you are too driven, it can be difficult to switch "off" which can make it difficult to respect your health and well-being. 

As an athlete, the competitive nature and strong discipline that can make you a great athlete may also place you at risk for obsessive exercise and disordered eating. 

Athletes tend to exhibit unique traits that help them succeed in sport. For example, self-discipline, obsession, driven to succeed and motivation are admirable characteristics that keep you working hard for a goal. However, individuals with these personality features may also be predisposed to being perfectionistic and self-critical. Athletes with these features may compare appearance and current fitness status against unrealistic standards. Although many athletes are self-critical and want to live up to their own ideals, expectations and goals, it's not uncommon for athletes to be heavily concerned about what other people (athletes, coaches, friends, family) think of them.

Being too driven can increase the risk rigid eating and over-exercising. Your drive to succeed can become an obstacle that stands in the way of your success.

It's not uncommon for driven athletes to become hyper-focused or obsessed with food and with the idea of controlling eating to reach a performance, health or body composition goal. Inflexible thinking increases the tendency of making decisions with an all or nothing, black or white mentality. As a result, any deviation from self-imposed rules becomes an unacceptable failure. With a strict set of standards that you strive to meet, your constant drive to improve can lead to a dissatisfaction when you fail to meet your high expectations and goals. As a result, this adds fuel to the fire and perpetuates a stronger drive toward perfection and control. It can be difficult for the highly driven athlete to accept suggestions or advice from well-meaning professionals - keeping you in a cycle of self-sabotage. 

There's nothing wrong with being motivated, driven and dedicated. But when a level of perfectionism shows up in your eating habits and exercise regime, being too driven can do more harm than good. Add in the pressure of wanting to be lean due to sport and societies obsession with thinness and you can understand how your good intentions can lead to unhealthy outcomes. 

Taking health risks for a perceived competitive edge will make you lose in the long run. No matter your athletic goals or fitness level, you should not have to prioritize your athletic development over your well-being. 

If this speaks to you, I create a program to help you get more out of your training without compromising your mental and physical health. Through The Whole Athlete 6-lesson course, you will learn how diet culture, a societal obsession with health and the chase for an ideal race weight are negatively impacting your training, mental well-being and physical health. Once you understand why you think how you think about food, health and your body, you can fix the distorted views that you've developed with food and your body. 

Learn more HERE. 

Change your thoughts to change behaviors

What behavior (or habit) has the strongest negative impact on reaching an athletic goal?

What behavior has lead you into a vicious cycle of self-sabotage?

What habits have you struggled with the most?

What behavior, if changed, would give you the most leverage toward improving the odds of achieving your athletic goals?

Changing a behavior to reach a goal sounds simple but it actually requires a process of changing the way that you think. The idea that if you change your thoughts, you can change your behaviors sounds straightforward but many athletes go straight to behavior change and neglect working on the thoughts that influence actions. 

This is why I created The Whole Athlete. 

As you enter the New Year, the motivation may be high to change behaviors in order to move closer to your athletic goals. While you may have good intentions behind your behavior changes, it's not uncommon for good intentions to lead to bad outcomes. 

I want to remind you that your thoughts are controlled by your beliefs, which are usually ingrained in your subconscious mind. Interestingly, many beliefs are inherited from the beliefs of others - before you are able to form your own beliefs. This is why behavior change can be so hard. 

Many thoughts and beliefs are so deep-rooted that it can be extremely difficult to reprogram your mind. For example, being repeatedly told that carbohydrates are bad for you or that carbs make you gain weight can make it incredibly hard for you to meet your daily carbohydrate needs as an athlete. You may feel extreme guilt, shame or anxiety when consuming bread, rice or raisins - all because of the deep-rooted belief that carbs are bad. Perhaps it's something as small as not eating before a workout or not running with a hydration belt because you feel you don't need to - that you are just fine without. Sometimes you have to change your opinion to experience better results. 

These are only two examples (of many) to show how powerful thoughts can be as it relates to behavior changes. 

Hopefully you can now see how just one small shift in a belief can have an enormous impact on your life. 

Due to the cultural norms of "clean eating" and over-exercising, this sends a message to athletes that it's ok to eat and exercise in a certain way in order to look, feel and perform at your best. Unhealthy behaviors like restrictive eating, excessive exercise and intentional underfueling have become so normalized that behaviors that would qualify as disordered are often considered perfectly appropriate - reinforced by a culture that is obsessively fixated on food, eating and weight. A few of this normalized behaviors include: 

• Denial of hunger and use of tricks to avoid eating (such as drinking large amounts of water, detox drinks or coffee). 
• Refusal to eat certain foods (ex. bread), progressing to restrictions against whole categories of foods (ex. carbohydrates). 
• Anxiety about gaining weight or being "fat."
• Development of food rituals (ex. I can only eat this if I have exercised x-amount of duration or intensity). 
• Rigid exercise routines to burn off calories or to compensate for eating. 
• Withdrawal from friends and activities in favor of new social groups that share similar food and exercise rituals and rules. 
• Regular use of compensatory behaviors such as fasting to burn off calories. 
• Extreme concern with body weight and shape. 

If you have been victim to these beliefs, it's because you have become conditioned to perceive them as normal by professional athletes, the media, fitness influencers and diets. Because extreme eating and exercising strategies are normalized and reinforce behaviors and thought processes that aren't healthy, they can have very serious consequences on your mental and physical health.

You can't change your behaviors without changing your thoughts. Once you accept that your inaccurate beliefs are driving your actions, you can start the work of unlearning and changing self-sabotaging behaviors with more productive behaviors to enhance your performance, optimize your health and protect your well-being. 

Are you ready to change your thoughts to change your behaviors? 

Check out the FREE introduction of the The Whole Athlete course. 
If you found the content helpful and you want to learn more, you can pre-enroll now or register for the 6-lesson course when it opens on January 3rd, 20201. 

Introducing: The Whole Athlete 6-lesson course

 

Over the past few years, I've worked with over 250 athletes from all over the world on nutrition. From daily to sport nutrition and everything in between, I've learned that many athletes struggle with food and body image. Often at the root of having a poor body image and unhealthy relationship with food is the belief that "the lighter or leaner I am, the better I'll perform." 

Many athletes come to me with good intentions when wanting to change the way that they eat or look. As a Board Certified Sport Dietitian, I can confidently tell you that there are healthy ways to improve eating habits to optimize sport performance by changing body composition. But the methods for changing body composition - especially for a performance boost -  should never require dieting, restrictive eating, underfueling and excessive exercise. Sadly, this isn't the case. Far too many athletes are not eating enough to fuel their body for sport performance. Influencing factors for intentional underfueling and overexercising include diet culture, a societal obsession with health and pressure to achieve an "idealized" body composition for sport. Underfueling to try to achieve a competitive advantage in sport or to meet appearance standards for sport or society is not a healthy or sustainable way to achieve success in sport. And when there is a strong desire to "eat clean" to improve health, this can turn into food restriction and rigid dieting, often increasing the risk for binging, disordered eating or a full blown eating disorder. 

Interestingly, body image issues don't always have to do with body fat. Sometimes they have to do with "I'm not good enough" or wanting to gain control. It's not uncommon for people to start a diet after a period of stress, struggling to deal with emotions or feeling out of control. Using food and exercise as a way to avoid uncomfortable feelings of imperfection, instability or inadequacy can lead to devastating consequences as it relates to mental well-being and physical health. 

While the performance pressures that athletes experience will likely never go away, athletes now have another stressor in our life.....the constant stress of living during a pandemic. As if you aren't experiencing enough mental and physical stress from the lack of control you feel in the face of COVID-19, adding extreme exercise and restrictive eating to your life will only make matters worse for your physical health and mental well-being The fact that we live in a culture that is constantly pushing restrictive practices of dieting and exercising to improve "health" may drive you toward "normalized" disordered eating behaviors and destructive exercise routines in order to gain control during such an unpredictable time. This is even more concerning for athletes who already have a long-standing history with disordered eating or an eating disorder. Moments of stress like this time in our life require effective coping skills - not dieting and punishing the body through exercise. 

The New Year is always the time when athletes feel compelled to get serious about training and healthy eating. For the high-achieving perfectionist, there's an added risk of concern. 

Whereas I've spent the last decade trying to spread messages to the athletic population about the importance of developing a healthy relationship with food and the body, I am now even more concerned about the mental and physical health effects that will occur from dieting, restrictive eating and extreme exercise in the New Year. Widespread worry about weight gain and distress of losing fitness during this pandemic will be exacerbated by diet culture - a system that equates thinness to health and moral virtue and reduces food to "good" or "bad" food. 

I see it year after year after year - with motivation high, an athlete will resort to restrictive eating and dieting to retain control of the bodies and the situation. Athletes will often boast how great they feel on social media (often with before and after pictures) but results are typically short-lived. A period of food restriction almost always leads to overeating - making you feel out of control with food. This can make you impose more restrictions to regain control due to blame, shame and frustration. Exercise may become punishment or compensation. This vicious cycle of restriction and binging is damaging to physical and mental well-being. For the athletes who obsess over leanness, restrictive eating practices may further result in relative energy deficiency - a condition that affects physical health and performance, further increasing the risk of mental health symptoms and disorders. 

As an athlete, you put your body through enough stress and hardship through training. You need a better approach with food and exercise to foster better outcomes for your physical health, mental well-being and training. 

Realizing that something needed to be done to protect the whole athlete (not just the athletic being), I took action. After a lot of research, time and work, I created the first ever 6-lesson educational course to help athletes of all fitness levels (in all sports) develop a healthier relationship with food and the body. 

Although it will require some effort on your part, you can unlearn food rules. You can learn to improve your body image. You can bring back the joy in training. You can learn how to eat without shame, guilt or judgement. You can achieve a performance ready body without dieting. And most of all, you can discover your true capabilities as an athlete. 

The better you care about your body, the better you can take care of your body. 

Through The Whole Athlete 6-lesson course, you will unlearn toxic dieting behaviors and the distorted views that you've developed with food and your body. And most importantly, you will replace negative beliefs with practical ways of thinking so you can elevate your performance, optimize your health and protect your mental well-being. 

To learn more about the course and to try out the free introductory course, click HERE.

The 6-lesson course will officially open on January 3rd, 2021.
However, if you want to be one of the first to access the program, you can pre-enroll now. 

(If you are unable to pay the full price for the course, you can split the total payment into 3 payments when the course opens to the public on the 3rd).