The Athlete's Diet

Every athlete has unique nutritional requirements dependent on the training program, body composition goals, genetics and fitness level. Therefore, there is no one best diet to follow. More so, your nutritional requirements, food choices and strategies will change throughout the year, depending on training volume and intensity.

But even during peak training when energy requirements are increased, your food choices should remain nutritious and health-promoting. Leaving your diet to chance or training to "earn" your food may result in nutrient poor food choices, lacking key nutrients. And a diet of restriction, sacrifice and obsession will lead to less-than-optimal energy availability.

Being well-nourished puts your body into a state of optimal functioning, helping you become a better athlete. The foundation of building a healthy sports diet is to consume a variety of nutrient-dense foods from all food groups. Your diet should not include an off-limit food list unless you suffer from a food allergy/intolerance or need to avoid certain foods for ethical, religious or health reasons.

One of the biggest nutritional challenges for athletes is figuring out how much energy is needed to support your training. On top of that, eating the right foods, timed appropriately with your workout, can help you get more out of your training session.

Although your daily training diet will help you adapt to training stress, the diverse nature of your structured training plan will likely validate the importance of consuming well-formulated sport nutrition products during certain workouts. Ideally, sport drinks, gels and energy blocks/chews are portable, convenient and easy-to-consume during swimming, biking and running, providing a specific amount of fluids, carbohydrates and sodium which can be easily digested and absorbed. Sport bars are typically reserved for long-duration, lower intensity training sessions.

Because many athletes complain of GI (gastrointestinal) issues as a primary limiter on race day, training your gut to tolerate nutrition while exercising can help you avoid unpleasant symptoms such as cramping, bloating, dizziness, nausea, extreme fatigue and a sloshing stomach.

If you would like to learn more about this topic, you'll enjoy my new book Athlete to Triathlete. You can pre-order your copy here: Athlete to Triathlete. 

Now is not the time to diet

Nearing the 2-3 months out from a key race, many athletes start paying close attention to any limiters that could potentially sabotage race day performance. Weight is typically one of those "potential" limiters that comes to the front of the mind for my athletes.

Although weight can play a positive or negative role in performance, it's not the only way to improve or destroy performance. Sadly, when athletes start looking at performance and how to get faster, stronger or go longer, weight becomes the only focus.

It's not uncommon for the athlete who wants to achieve a specific body composition to look for strategies and behaviors that are extreme in order to make for quick changes. Because most people won't keep up with new habits if they don't result in quick changes or feedback, many of the strategies that athletes take to change body composition adversely affect health. Fasted training, restricting fluids and calories during prolonged sessions, not focusing on good recovery, eliminating food groups, drastically cutting out calories and not having an all around good relationship with food can cause a host of issues, such as : hormonal disturbances, slow tissue growth/repair, slow energy metabolism, declining energy and excessive fatigue, bone issues, endocrine issues, altered pyschological and physiological functioning and a decline in performance. The athlete who feels the need to make extreme changes in the diet is typically the athlete who will experience the greatest risk to health and performance down the road, if not immediately. In other words, a strong desire to get leaner for performance actually destroys performance, instead of helping it.  

Keeping in mind that even short periods of intentional or unintentional food restriction, food group elimination or poor sport nutrition fueling can negatively affect how you train, compete and recover. Poor exercise performance and an increase in injuries and burnout is common in the underfueled and undernourished athlete. 

Let a change in body composition be a direct and non-forced result of good nutrition habits and behaviors. By doing a great job of meeting your daily energy needs, focusing on nutrient timing, using sport nutrition properly and not neglecting your health, you'll find yourself with a body composition that you can be proud of because it's the body that is fueled, fit, strong and healthy and ready to perform. 

A healthy body performs amazingly well. Instead of making strict changes in the diet in order to change your body image, focus on fueling and nourishing your amazing body.

I never said you can't lose weight or change body composition to boost your performance. But now is not the time to diet (nor is it ever OK to make an extreme change to your diet that isn't sustainable). If your strategies for weight loss or body composition change are counterproductive to your initial goals of being faster, more resilient, healthier, stronger and more powerful or you are unable to meet the athletic demands of your sport with your new lean and toned body, your dietary approaches are not productive. 

Ahhh, I need to lose weight!!

As an athlete, you probably feel that you work very hard to develop the necessary skills, resilience, stamina, power, speed and endurance to help you prepare for your upcoming athletic events. Developing the fitness to participate in a running or triathlon event requires a lot of training and it takes commitment and requires patience, so it's assumed that skipping workouts, being "all in" all the time, not caring, deviating from your training plan to do what other athletes are doing, or haphazardly guessing your way through training are not effective ways to reach your race day goals. You simply become inconsistent with training, you lose confidence in what you are doing and you may compromise your health.

Is nutrition an important component of your training?

If you don't work at healthy eating, you miss out on one of the best opportunities to improve your performance and to keep your body in good health. To perform at your best, your body needs to function at it's best and the best fuel comes from a healthy, balanced and well-planned and timed diet.

So what's an athlete to do if weight loss is a goal, alongside performance/fitness improvements? And for the purpose of this article, I'm speaking about weight loss that brings you to a healthy weight and not weight loss for aesthetics, to show off your abs or to tone up your butt or to lose a few vanity pounds.

I can't say it enough but eating a healthy diet as an athlete is not easy. When your time is limited, you are exhausted from training, energy expenditure is high, you get up early to workout and your appetite is ever-so unpredictable, energy comes and goes and you are tired and sore, developing the SKILLS to maintain a healthy diet as an athlete takes a lot of work.

Most athletes would rather put the time into training than to work on improving dietary habits but this strategy does not work. You see, if you don't work on developing healthy eating habits in your early season, how do you expect to carry healthy habits with you as your training volume and intensity increase as the season progresses?

Healthy eating and performance fueling requires education, trial and error, a lot of planning, commitment, organization and an open-mind. Most athletes need help to learn how to eat healthy as an athlete. Because of this, there are many credible professionals that specialize in helping athletes learn how to eat a healthy diet and how to eat for performance, so that you can develop healthy daily habits and smart fueling and hydration strategies in order to make the best food choices possible throughout the day and before, during and after workouts, in order to reach athletic excellence.

With so much nutritional advice available at your fingertips and a lot of overly confident nutrition experts, it's important that in your attempt to lose weight, you understand and accept that there are significant physical, psychological, emotional and social changes associated with dieting. Asking an athlete to restrict calories, starve the body of nutrients or avoid/restrict carbohydrates, when energy expenditure is high, can cause great emotional, cognitive and behavioral symptoms that are performance and health limiting....NOT ENHANCING. Intentional or not, when athletes do not "eat enough", the body systems become compromised and you feel horrible.

Dieting, or restrictive eating, may cause food obsessions, social isolation, fatigue, weakness, hormonal issues, bone loss, irritability, body temperature changes, anxiety, depression, low blood sugar, sleep disturbances and the desire or motivation that you once had to do what you love to do with your body is no longer a driving force to keep you present in your sport. Instead, your mind is obsessed with your body and not on performance or health.

Seeing that so many negative physical and psychological issues develop when exercise and nutrition are taken to the extreme, there must be a stop to all of this talk on "righteous, good vs bad, eliminate whole food groups, sugar is bad, don't use sport nutrition, fasted workout" eating. This is NOT a healthy approach to weight loss. Sadly, there are far too many misinformed athletes that do not have a good perspective on what is needed in the diet and before, during and after workouts, in order to keep the body in good health while working for fitness improvements. 

As for the athletes who ignore fad diets and work hard to organize and plan the diet in order to eat "enough" and fine-tune details like proper fueling and hydration for individual needs (often working with a sport dietitian), well, those are the athletes to look-up to on race day because not only are they having a lot of fun in training but they are fit, fast, healthy and prepared on race day. These athletes don't diet or obsess about body image, but they give themselves permission to eat, indulge and fuel for performance and well, a better overall quality of life.

If you are trying to lose weight for health and/or performance reasons, you should not have to devote every minute of your day eating or training as you try to lose weight. And never should you have to use extreme exercise and food restriction in order to achieve or to maintain your "goal" weight.

It makes me so sad to hear that there are so many athletes who feel so unhappy with their body shape, size or weight. Worrying all day about what to or not to eat, trying not to eat "too much" and grinding out workouts on empty just to look differently. When you restrict yourself from food, you don't become a better athlete. Instead, you become weak, tired and withdrawn. Extreme exercising to burn calories or to reward yourself with food is not performance enhancing and it's not health promoting. You can't perform well with this type of lifestyle. You may think that you look fitter but you may not be able to do much with your body. The mindset to be "thinner to be a winner" is not worth the price that your body has to pay when you are energy deprived and trying to train consistently.

Seeing that there is a safe way and an unhealthy way to lose weight, ask yourself the following YES or NO questions to see if you are taking a smart approach to weight loss?

-You have drastically cut out a significant amount of calories?
-You are avoiding specific food groups?
-You are frustrated that you are not losing weight fast enough?
-You are intentionally avoiding taking in calories before and during workouts?
-You have your weight on your mind when you are working out?
-You are finding yourself overeating on the weekends because you "deserve it"?
-You feel irritable and moody, often low in energy and hungry?
-You feel confident that you can maintain this type of diet for the rest of your life, and be happy?

A smart eating approach maintains energy levels as you change your body composition. A smart eating approach does not negatively affect your health.
A smart eating approach does not limit you from food groups.
A smart eating approach keeps you training consistently. 
A smart eating approach helps you get fit, fast and strong.
A smart eating approach is sustainable and sets you up for a lifestyle of healthy eating habits. 

If you have recently found yourself saying "Ahhh, I need to lose weight!!" remind yourself that it won't come from a diet, weight will not rapidly fall off, there's no quick fix and you can't maintain good health and optimize your performance with a rigid and restrictive style of eating.  

Not sure if you can safely and confidently lose weight on your own, without affecting your health and/or performance?

Don't use forums and the internet for advice.

Reach out to a Board Certified Sport Dietitian for help. 

Should athletes follow a Paleo diet?

The Paleo diet is marketed as a "lifestyle" as it it is described to be "the healthiest way you can eat because it is the only nutritional approach that works with your genetics to help you stay lean, strong and energetic because our modern diet is at the root of degenerative diseases such as obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, depression and infertility." It's a way of eating based on the supposed habits of prehistoric hunger-gatherers or caveman. 

I absolutely agree that the Western diet is too full of refined foods, added sugar, unhealthy fats, extremely processed food and fast, convenient food. As a dietitian, there is absolutely nothing wrong with any dietary approach that favors a reduced intake of processed food and emphasizes real food.

However, there is no basis to removing major whole food food groups, like dairy, whole grains and legumes from the diet. Foods that are wholesome and contain a variety of healthy nutrients.

Consider that the Mediterranean diet is ranked as one of the healthiest styles of eating from around the world. It is rich in fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes and olive oil and low in meat. 

The Paleo diet is not only unsustainable but it's not healthy or beneficial for our environment.

If you consider some of the healthiest individuals from around the globe (consider longevity and quality of life as markers for "healthy" and not body image), they eat a lot of plants, they eat grains and legumes and they even consume eggs, cheese and milk.

If grains were so bad, we would all have health issues and that is just not the case. When people complain of health issues, like digestive troubles and low energy, you have to consider what people aren't eating that can assist in better health. Removing food is not the answer. Behavior change is the answer. This is why diets don't work. They don't change behaviors.

When people say that they feel so much better after getting rid of sugar, processed food and grains, it's only when real food is consumed in place of unhealthy alternatives, like processed food, that people will feel better. Oatmeal and berries or a bowl of Lucky Charms? A salad or a protein bar for lunch? A sweet potato with veggies and a lean piece of meat or fast food? Of course you will feel better when you eat real food! And when you eat real food, you spend more time in the kitchen as you have to put more thought into meal prep. When eating is an afterthought and you go into a meal hungry, you are more likely to make unhealthy choices. It's no shock that people feel better when they go Paleo. But grains are not to blame. When's the last time you told yourself that you should really cut back on all the lentils and Teff and Kamut in your diet?

Based on research, caveman were trying to eat enough calories to survive and reproduce. Their diet was not based on "health" but to thrive. The way a Paleo individual today eats is very different than in prehistoric times. Now a days, people are spoiled by the Paleo section of a menu at a restaurant to make ordering easier, there are Paleo packaged bars for when you are in a hurry, there are primal food blogs and cookbooks for inspiration and there is the Paleo friendly section at the Whole Foods salad bar for when you need lunch on the go.

Six million years ago, a caveman was making food choices based on where he lived and the season. He didn't have choices.

There are a lot of holes in the Paleo diet philosophy and let's be real honest, Paleo is all about marketing and food bloggers, nutrition "experts", food companies and magazines know this. If they can catch your attention by a dietary trend/fad, they will do anything possible to get you to believe that with this diet strategy you will get amazing results.

In today's society, it's very interesting to see the cult-like response of diets. People trust information from friends and "followers" and from popular websites and blogs, more than they trust scientific information. We live in a FOMO world where people feel the need to follow a similar style of eating of someone else for fear of not being liked or accepted. Think about all the people you know who are following a no sugar, gluten free, high fat or paleo diet. While people may say this diet "works" (for now), perhaps these people feel more confident in nutrition choices because everyone else seems to be eating this way too.

The truth is that there is no quick fix for healthy eating and what works for you probably won't work for anyone else. 

So while the Paleo diet, low in processed food, sugar and carbs, may work for some time for the average individual, it's still a diet that includes food rules and an off limit food list for no reason.
And once again, obesity and health issues didn't happen from people eating too much whole grains, legumes and quality dairy.

Take a good hard look at your daily diet and ask yourself in the past year, how often you did you eat out, cook a meal, or rely on processed food out of convenience because you were too busy? Do you like real foods like vegetables, fruits, bulgur, lentils, cottage cheese, yogurt and leafy greens? Do you LOVE processed foods like pita chips, cereals, bars, etc?
I'm not saying that the later is bad to consume but it's the former (and not limited to those whole foods) that needs to make up the majority of your diet for health benefits.

As for athletes, it can be very difficult to obtain all of your carbohydrates in a Paleo diet because one can only eat so much fruit and vegetables due to all the fiber. But let's also not overlook the health benefits and nutrients that one obtains from whole grains, dairy and legumes and these foods can be consumed in a healthy diet, alongside vegetables, fruits and your choice of quality protein. 

Ideally, carbohydrates should come from real food, like fruits, vegetables, grains, starches, dairy and legumes. Yes, you should also consume healthy fats and protein. This type of balanced diet is very healthy and satisfying and it doesn't leave a lot of room for sugar and processed food. It gives you energy, it offers great gut health, it protects your immune system and it keeps you well. Yes, you need to grocery shop often, meal prep and cook but a Paleo diet doesn't do that for you. A Paleo diet only tells you what not to eat. It doesn't change your lifestyle habits or thoughts, patterns and behaviors related to food.

As an athlete, when your carbohydrate needs increase, let's say from 3-5g/kg bw per day to 6-8 or even 8-10g/kg to account for the increase in training volume, I can assure you that you can't meet those needs from only whole foods as you will feel incredibly full and it may even cause GI issues. Therefore, as an athlete, you have some wiggle room to deviate from a normally high fiber diet and choose more refined foods. You can still choose real food but low residue foods, juices and sometimes bars may be needed to help you meet your daily carbohydrate needs. This is not reward food or food that you earned but instead, it's food that serves a purpose and a function. We prioritize these more refined foods around workouts due to energy needs and a change in appetite.

If you are trying to lose weight or lean up for performance, a Paleo diet is not the fix. Furthermore, you do not have to devote every minute of your life trying to reach or stay a specific weight, because essentially, you are living like a starving person, fighting your biology.
Your diet should make you happy. With behavior and lifestyle changes, you can learn to love a healthy diet and a healthy diet doesn't have to be perfect. It can still include treats and sweets and fast food and processed food.

It is through healthy daily habits and a smart training regime that you can achieve the leanest livable weight for performance and for your health. And guess what....you can still eat carbohydrates like grains, legumes and dairy!

To be a successful athlete, you need to a healthy body.
A healthy body requires you to be extremely organized, planned and intentional with your eating choices. 

You can't outtrain a poorly planned diet.

Don't assume that any diet will improve your health if you can't maintain that style of eating for the rest of your life. 

For further reading, check out this informative article on the typical American diet and how much processed food is consumed on a daily basis. 

Whole grains didn't make our country unhealthy. 

Start putting blame at one of the major causes of health issues and obesity. 

Source

(Re)learning how to eat as an athlete

A passion of mine is helping athletes adopt a more real food diet. I don't think I need to discuss the many benefits of eating real food, grown from nature, to support your health needs as you train for your fitness/athletic goals.

For many athletes, there's a lot of confusion as to how to eat as an athlete vs. as a non-athlete. Yes, all human beings should adopt a more real food diet but for athletes, there are many times throughout the year when your lifestyle is not normal, and you need to relearn what "healthy eating" means as an athlete.

You see, as an athlete, your body processes food differently than your sedentary counterparts and you need a lot of it. You burn more calories, your body requires key nutrients, at certain times, to help assist in metabolism, protein synthesis and glycogen resynthesis and food is not simply consumed for health but it is also your fuel.

Far too many athletes think they are eating healthy but in reality, they are underconsuming calories (often 500-1500 calories less than what you should be eating), eating too much fiber before workouts (causing GI issues during the workout), not taking advantage of post workout nutrition (this is where you actually become a better athlete) and not spreading out total calories, with balanced meals, throughout the day (thus initiating overeating in the evening due to not feeling an appetite during the day or intentionally underfueling during the day). If this is you, there's a good chance that your idea of a healthy diet may actually hurt your health as you stress it with training.

Many athletes struggle with this concept because they struggle with food and weight. Despite burning an excessive amount of calories on a daily basis, you don't understand why you are training all the time but can't seem to get the scale to go down. Athletes often email me, concerned about their inability to lose weight despite working out all the time and they assume that eating less is the strategy to weight loss or that being lighter will automatically improve performance.

The best way to change your body composition is by unintentionally trying. When you put all of your energy into your daily diet as an athlete, you will not only adapt better to your workouts, but you will instantly notice more energy, a favorable change in body composition (stronger body) and sleep better, with improved mood throughout the day.

My message to athletes is that weight loss, performance gains or keeping your body in good health relies on your ability to support your workouts with your daily diet. Seeing that every workout and every day is different, you may never properly adapt to training if you don't learn how to eat as an athlete.

But, it's not as hard as you think, for there are many guidelines and recommendations that are easy to apply and follow. 

For many athletes, there can be an underlying disconnect as it relates to how much food an athlete needs to eat to support training, specifically endurance athletes. For any athlete who has spent years of dieting, restrictive eating or relearning how to eat a more real food diet, I understand how you may be very confused as to how to eat as an athlete, and still eat healthy, maintain a healthy relationship with food and perhaps, meet your body composition goals.

Due to much conflicting information, athletes need to understand that strict eating restrictions, "clean" (no processed food) eating, calorie control and improper food/nutrient timing can make it difficult to perform during workouts but also, you may be sabotaging any forward progress with body composition changes, alongside slowly damaging your health.

You see, as athletes, we have similar nutritional guidelines as the normal population but because of our training demands to intentionally change our physiology to adapt to training, there are many circumstances in the training season when a typical healthy diet will not work in our favor.

Consider the below examples:

• No appetite post workout
• Two a day workouts
• Very early morning training
• Very late evening training
• Long workout 
• Intense workout
• No time to sit down and eat a meal 

Unfortunately, many athletes are so committed to eating the standard "healthy" diet (if there such a thing) that the above examples can actually compromise your health and delay gains in fitness if you don't create a different style of eating to support your training. In other words, your training regime and the affects that training has on your body, energy needs and appetite, can make your definition of a "healthy diet" turn unhealthy.

I see it a lot as athletes will come to me with issues with the following:

• Adrenal fatigue
• Thyroid issues
• Inability to lose weight
• Low energy
• Stress fractures and other chronic injuries (tendon/bone/muscle)
• Anemia
• Menstruation and hormonal issues
• Inability to gain muscle
• Trouble sleeping
• Moodiness, low motivation
• Chronically sore muscles
• Inability to get through long or intense workouts
• Disordered style of eating
• Body image issues
• Lightheaded, dizzy, low blood sugar

By understanding an athletes thoughts about food, his/her typical diet and training regime, along with getting to know the athletes "normal" life routine, I can understand if an athlete is eating "too healthy" (often restricting food groups, counting calories, underfueling, etc.). As you can see, sometimes your good intention to eat healthy can bring out health issues which negatively affect performance.

Now consider this:
-When you have no appetite post workout, is it ok to just not eat? What about maximizing recovery after your workout?
-Did you think about how your energy is affected when you don't recover or fuel properly throughout the day on two workout days?
-If your morning workout is a key workout,  don't you want to get the most out of your body during the morning workout?
-If your workout is in the evening, you don't want to affect your digestion before bed but you still need to recover from the workout.
-When your long workout takes up many hours of your day, have you considered the big responsibility that you now have to replenish your glycogen, rehydrate and repair damaged tissues. Don't assume that you can train for many hours and neglect eating post workout and throughout the day.

For athletes, in order to support the demands of training, the daily diet will likely include foods that may not be advocated in a "healthy" diet. But, as athletes, we need eating strategies that will keep our body in good health as we place intentional stress on the body, to change physiology, and to stay consistent with training (while still functioning well in life).

So while I strongly endorse and advise a real food diet, we must consider that processed food, like cereal, sport nutrition or pretzels or learned "unhealthy" food, like juice, potatoes, pancakes with syrup, raisins or saltine crackers, has a place in an athletes diet under certain circumstances. As great as it is to eat whole foods, thriving on vegetables all day is not performance enhancing. 

 

A rewarding part of my job as a sport dietitian is helping athletes relearn "healthy eating". There's often some resistance at first because many of the foods I suggest to eat around workouts or on higher volume workout days, are viewed as "unhealthy". Therefore, it's important that throughout any session with an athlete, that I fully understand all past and current eating behaviors and thoughts around food to discover any underlying fears about changing the diet or how/why the current diet was created. 

Keep in mind that a diet doesn't have to be perfect to improve performance and to keep the body in good health. If you are holding too strong onto your defined "perfect diet", it may be working against you as you work hard for fitness gains or a change in body composition. 

Fore more info on this topic, PopSugar intervewied me on the topic. While this discussion is more in depth than what was shared in the article, I hope that the information helps you understand your current eating patterns and food choics that may be sabotaging your health, performance and body composition goals. Perhaps, just maybe, you are trying to eat "too healthy"???

When to eat processed food?

Still confused on this topic? Let's work together so that your diet enhances your health, performance and body composition and improves your overall quality of life.
Nutrition services

The dieting athlete?

It seems like every day there is a new diet telling us what not to eat and a scientific article for reference, a nutrition expert, doctor or personal trainer touting a diet plan, a book, blog or website telling us what foods are destroying out heal and a food company excited to grab the market share by introducing a new “healthy” re-engineered processed food alternative which has the opportunity to be highly profitable.  Whether it’s lack of confidence, common sense, passion or effort for healthy eating, much of our society relies on diet plans as the best way to lose weight or to improve health.

We all know why people struggle with food and body weight. It's not so much because people are eating too many vegetables, eating healthy fats and quality proteins, consuming grains like buckwheat, quinoa and wild rice and eating lentils and beans.

In defense of carbs, we know very plain and clear that added sugar, soda's, processed and fast food are to blame. 

In America, eating habits are not steady and when it comes to the mention of food, people are still confused how to eat. Without the use of labels, numbers, grams, apps, spreadsheets and journals, many people experience great anxiety, fear and stress regarding what and how much food they should put into their body. 

It’s quite the paradox but America is obsessed with eating healthy yet we are one very unhealthy nation.
We are obsessed with food yet the “off-limit” food list keeps growing every year. 

It’s quite counterproductive for athletes to diet and train for an event at the same time, but many athletes believe that weight is a metric of progress - if weight is dropping, performance is improving.  However, weight loss is not always correlated with performance and health improvements, especially when an extreme calorie reduction starves the body for available energy, slows the metabolism, does not preserve lean tissue, is restrictive of essential nutrients and suppresses the immune system. 

Unlike the normal population, you use your body differently when it comes to working out. As an athlete, you workout to experience physiological improvements so that you can prepare yourself for the demands of your race day. Therefore, your eating style will need to change throughout the season in order to supply sufficient energy and nutrients to support your variable training load, especially when intensity and volume increase. 

However, the same dietary rules apply to you - you have to have healthy lifestyle habits, you can't overeat on carbohydrates (or calories for that matter), you need to eat mindfully, you need to meal plan ahead and on top of it all, you have to learn how to meet your metabolic needs before, during and after long workouts. 

Ironically, when you put emphasis into how to train and eat in order to optimize performance, favorable body composition changes occur naturally. This has to do with making sure you eat enough calories to support metabolism but not too much that energy is stored and not used efficiently. You want to eat a variety of foods to provide your body with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants and consume adequate macronutrients to keep your body in good health and well-fueled and various phases of training and to support the immune system. Lastly, it is important to use sport nutrition properly to train your gut, stay hydrated, meet electrolyte and energy needs.

I can put many athletes into two categories - athletes who eat too much and athletes who don't eat enough. How do you know which category you fit in? 

If you have or are experiencing any one of the following, there is a good chance your eating and fueling habits are not supporting your athletic lifestyle: 

Hormonal dysfunction, poor bone health, stress fractures, decreased thyroid output, increased cortisol, impaired mood and cognitive functioning, suppressed immune function, muscle catabolism, anemia, dehydration, hypoglycemia, anxiety, chronic fatigue, interrupted sleep, inflammation, sudden loss of training motivation, preoccupation with food, eating disorder, nutrient deficiencies, unintentional weight gain or loss, hypoglycemia, chronic muscle cramps/weakness, kidney issues, adrenal fatigue, cardiovascular stress, respiratory issues, gastrointestinal disturbances, nausea, headaches, skeletal, tendon and ligament injuries, thinning hair and a decline in performance.

These issues do not happen because you are eating gluten, eating carbs or eating fat. These issues happen because you are putting too much training stress on your body and because of what you are or are not eating, your body lacks the necessary nutrients and efficient use of energy to support training demands. 

A well-fueled and nourished body is more likely to get stronger, faster and more powerful in the training process compared to a depleted and nutrient deficient body hoping to make “race weight” by a certain date.

If you don't know how to fuel and eat smart as an athlete, reach out to a sport RD to help you out in your journey. 

Upcoming speaking event: Which diet should you follow?

Are you wanting to lose 15+ lbs before your key race this season?

Are you looking to change your diet/fueling in order to maximize your short distance or long distance racing performance?

Do you struggle with your body image or relationship with food?

Do you struggle to maintain a healthy body composition while training for long distance events?

Do you experience GI issues, fatigue, headaches or low blood sugar symptoms while training/racing?

Are you confused as to how to eat and fuel to stay healthy as an athlete?

Are you overwhelmed with all of the diet, nutrition, fueling and eating advice you hear/read and want to understand what will work best for you as an athlete?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, I invite you to come to my FREE talk at Run In in Greenville, SC on Monday January 11th, 2016 at 6:15pm. 

If you are able to attend this talk, my goal is to help you better understand how to eat and fuel smarter as an athlete in order to maximize performance but also to do so in a way that will help keep your body in great health.

I will also discuss some of the common reasons as to why your dietary choices affect your training, gut, health and performance and how you can make dietary adjustments in order to move closer to your health, performance and weight goals.