Intuitive Eating for Athletes

 

Many diet plans follow a restrictive eating model with specific 'good' vs. 'bad' foods. This type of restrained eating demands rigid control.

Food is an essential requirement for survival. When you diet and feel hunger, this isn't a lack of willpower, it's a biological drive to protect you. Interestingly, there is no drive for eating too much but rather, if the body senses extreme weight loss, it will kick in physiological mechanisms to slow down your metabolism (and energy) or the brain will send signals to get you to eat as soon as possible. Stomach growing, irritability, inability to focus, lightheadedness, headache, fatigue, and sugar cravings are all signs that your body is asking for food. 

Although stress, trauma history, certain medications, extreme exercise (especially in the heat) and life chaos can supress your appetite, dieting makes it difficult to understand your hunger cues. Diets require that you ignore your hunger cues as most diets require you to limit or control the foods that you eat, often sticking to a strict schedule of eating. 

Intuitive eating goes back to the basics. Learning to eat when hungry and stopping when full. It focuses on body cues like hunger and fullness and also recognizing cues caused by emotions or external triggers. Diet culture sees hunger as a symptom that you should learn how to overcome through willpower and discipline. But hunger is your body's way of communicating a basic survival need. Eating is necessary to live. 

Keeping your body biologically fed with adequate nutrients and energy is the best way to reduce the primal drive to overeat but it's also imperative for athletes to keep the body (and brain) fueled and nourished to support intentional training stress and sport demands. 

Although intuitive eating is a great approach for most people, it can be very difficult for athletes to meet their body's increased energy needs simply by respecting physical hunger. 

As examples: 

• Eating too close to a workout may increase the risk for GI distress during the workout and may negatively impact how your body uses fuels during exercise. 
• You may not have acess to food before, during and after workouts. 
• Learning to supress hunger cues during workouts in order to not overeat/fuel.
• You may crave certain foods after workouts but sport nutrition guidelines may advise different foods to optimize recovery
• You may not have an appetite after an intense or high volume workout. 
• Heat stress may impact your ability to eat.
• Busy schedules may remove the drive to eat. 

Eating enough to support your training and timing food appropriately with workouts is how you will perform at your best. This means you will often need to eat even if you don't feel hunger signals at that moment. 

Simply put, if you are an athlete and you are only eating when you feel hungry, you are likely undereating. Therefore, the intuitive eating principle of "honor your hunger" doesn't fully apply to athletes. However, you can use the principle of "gentle nutrition" to remind yourself that "even though I'm not hungry, I need to support my body with proper nutrition before or after my workout." 

Athletes have specific sport nutrition recommendations, guidelines and strategies that are designed to protect health, optimize performance and increase race readiness. Intuitive eating provides a useful set of tools for athletes as it can help you remove the diet mentality and improve your relationship with food and the body. 

I was interviewed for an article on Intuitive Eating by Angie Dye with Today's Dietitian.
Here's the article if you'd like to check it out. 

Should you become an intuitive eater?

Mindful eating. Intuitive eating. Both approaches are used by Anti-Diet and Health at Every Size dietitians. While these two eating approaches complement each other, there are some important differences.

Intuitive eating is a framework created by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch based on their work with eating disorder recovery. They are most known for the 10 principles of intuitive eating, which center around making peace with food, rejecting the diet mentality and to learn how to develop a healthier relationship with food. Intuitive eating goes beyond the eating experience to encourage people to change their relationship with food and the body.

Mindful eating is awareness that arises from paying attention, eating with purpose, eating non-judgmentally and being in the present moment. Mindful eating encourages you to use your senses in choosing to eat food that is satisfying and nourishing to you and your body. It means you acknowledge your likes, dislikes and neutral responses to food - without judgement. Mindful eating requires you to be aware of your hunger and satiety cues to help guide your food and eating related decisions.

Regardless which approach appeals to you the most, it's important to recognize that these are not diet plans. There are no rules but instead, principles to help you develop a healthier relationship with food and your body. 

In our appearance-body focused culture, it's easy to slip into unhealthy or disordered eating practices, often as a way to manipulate the look of your body or to feel a sense of control. Intuitive and mindful eating challenge rigid "diet" principles and all-or-nothing thinking. 

Learning to eat more intuitively - or mindfully - can help you honor your body and mind, tune in to your body, identify hunger/satisfaction cues and free up brain space that is wastefully spending too much time overthinking calories and bad food. In turn, positive benefits include greater life satisfaction and eating/exercising with gratitude instead of guilt.

Although you may find a diet plan or off-limit food list helpful to take away the guessing, the best style of eating for you is one that you can maintain for the entirety of your life. It takes time, compassion and patience to learn how to listen, honor and respect your body with food - but it will be worth it with a healthy life well-lived. If you have been following food rules for a very long time, mindful/intuitive eating can be viewed as a path of self-discovery, helping you learn  how to eat for pleasure and enjoyment while also meeting the needs of your body and mind. 

A note for athletes....
A major component of mindful and intuitive eating is learning how to honor your hunger and fullness. While this sounds simple, if you have struggled with your relationship with food for some time, you may not know what hunger and satisfaction feel like. Additionally, hunger cues may be blunted after intense, hot or high volume training. Your appetite may be nonexistent when you are nervous. Only eating when you feel hungry and stopping eating when you feel full may cause you to undereat and fall short of your total energy needs. As athletes, there are instances when you need to eat even when you don't feel hungry and times when you shouldn't eat what you want to eat, when you feel hungry. For example, honoring your food cravings when you are cycling or running may lead to GI issues. 

For endurance athletes, there are many times when we need to override what our body is telling us and then there are times when we need to listen. Logically, there are going to be times when you need to mechanically eat, even when your body doesn't "feel" hungry. 
Fueling your body, eating foods you enjoy and nourishing your body are all acts of self-care. 

Learning to eat more intuitively and mindfully can help you improve your relationship with food, your body....and athletic performance. To help you get started, here are a few tips....

• Stop dieting and treating food as the enemy. No more feeling deprived, "earning" your calories or terming foods good or bad. 
• Create a flexible balance between foods you enjoy, a nutrient-dense diet and foods that fuel your training. Use rational, not rigid thinking to help with food planning. 
• Be present. Plan your meals in advance. Make time to eat. Slow down when you eat. Truly enjoy the food choices that you make. 

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Mindful eating part II: Food is Fuel

How did you do with your homework today from my last blog post?

Did you find yourself with positive or negative thoughts when you ate?

Did your thoughts turn negative when you ate foods that you term "off-limit"?

What foods made you feel the best and what foods gave you the most anxiety?

Continue to work on this so that you learn how to quiet the voices in your head so that eating is a peaceful, joyful and positive experience.

I promise - it is possible and it will make a huge impact on how you fuel for your athletic endeavors.

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So why do I continue to talk and talk and talk about mindful eating as it relates to athletes?
As a Board Certified Sport Dietitian, shouldn't I be spending most of my time talking about supplements and sport nutrition products?

Well, every athlete has to eat.
And in my field of work, far too many athletes struggle with their relationship with food and their body.

Since many athletes don't consider mastering mindful eating before they start training for an athletic event, I can't stress how important it is to develop a great relationship with food and the body in order to boost athletic performance and overall health. 

If you continue to train for events (especially long distance events) with an unhealthy relationship with food, there is a great risk of developing an unhealthy relationship with body image later on.
An unhealthy body image drives unhealthy eating habits.
Eventually, performance and health decline.

If you feel uncomfortable eating before workouts, using sport nutrition during workouts or have yet to learn how to eat for health and plan your diet throughout the day, you may find it extremely difficult to experience success in athletic development without a health-related setback.

You can be extremely disciplined with training but if you do not fuel smart your body will not perform well.

Being mindful with your eating allows you to see food differently.
Mindful eating allows you to train better.

I feel that the topic of mindful eating (specific to the sport of triathlons and running) is often ignored when it comes to providing dietary advice from the masses. There are very few Board Certified Sport Dietitians like me who even discuss the topic of mindful eating.

Because there are many individuals who hav struggle with prior years of dieting, struggling with body image issues or exercising with different intentions, it is important to master mindful eating.

If your mind is yelling at you to not eat what you are about to eat/drink, it's time for a break-up as your relationship with food is unhealthy.

BUT - it can be fixed! 

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Once you sign up for an event, you are an athlete.

When you are an athlete, you must have a great passion for healthy eating as well as for fueling and hydrating your body properly to support your daily training stress.

These days, our society has a great disconnect with food. Busy lifestyles and an obsession with diets, food trends and body image may increase the tendency for athletes to become disengaged when it comes to understanding biological hunger, snacking with a purpose and fueling for upcoming workouts.

In honor of the recent NBC Broadcast of the 2015 Ironman World Championship this past weekend, I had a celebration party at my house. I invited a few close friends and we watched the recorded broadcast while enjoying appetizers and pizza (I love any excuse to eat pizza). 

I remembered the cake that I put in the freezer several weeks ago, all for the "right" time to eat it.

I could not think of a better time to enjoy this KONA cake than with our close friends, while watching IM KONA.

Even though I ate pizza and appetizers, I still ate cake. Just a few bites as that was all I needed to feel satisfied and happy in my tummy.
No guilty feelings. No need to exercise more the next day. No anxiety when I went to bed about what I ate. 

Mindful eating is the art of attaching feelings of satisfaction, pleasure and hunger with food. Mindful eating is detaching feelings of guilt, anxiety, numbers and negative food words when it comes to food.
Kale, bread, grapes, milk, cookies or cake - mindful eating is freedom from food rules as you are in control of what foods make you feel the best without thoughts in your head telling you otherwise. 

I will say it over and over but an overlooked area in athletics is the topic of mindful eating. There is no doubt that there is a heightened awareness of body image in aesthetic and weight-bearing sports and for a fitness enthusiast turned athlete, it is very hard for some athletes to turn off the mindset of working out to burn calories and instead, training for performance gains. 

Whereas a fitness enthusiasts can get away with exercises as a way to burn calories, athletes must see food for fuel. 

In Part III, I will discuss some tips to help you master the art of mindful eating. . 

Mindful eating part 1 - Eat cake!

A few days after returning home from Kona in mid October, Karel and I went to an Ironman celebration party in Greenville. We spent the evening talking with several Ironman finishers who live in the Greenville area.

To finish the evening, we enjoyed cake from a local baker. 

And to top it off (literally), the dot of the cake had our names on it. So sweet (literally, again) !

After cutting into the M part of the cake for everyone in the party, the dot remained uneaten.

The host of the party insisted that Karel and I take home our personalized section of the cake.

After returning home from the party with a beautiful round cake, I wrapped up the cake and put it in the freezer. I figured there would be a good time to eat the cake but the right time wasn't anytime soon. 

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As a sport dietitian, when I think about athletes and their relationship with food, I often see/hear two different types of athletes.

There are high-performance athletes that see food for fuel. The diet is designed to fuel workouts but also to keep the body in great health to ensure consistency in training.

They also know how to enjoy food with the occasional indulge enjoyed without any guilt or anxiety. 

These athletes are focused on using food for nourishment but also see food to provide energy for upcoming workouts and to help the body recover. There is a heavy focus on calories, carbohydrates, fluids and electrolytes in regard to the nutrition consumed before, during and after workouts. 

These athletes understand how to time food with training and they know how to use sport nutrition properly to take fitness to the next level (and to keep the body in good health). 

I'd like to think that this is the way that all athletes think about food but it is easier said than done in our food and diet obsessed society. 

As it relates to the later, the individual who has been active in some capacity, but has never used the word "athlete" to describe his/her past/current active lifestyle, may not feel comfortable eating like a high-performing athlete. 

These newbie athletes are still getting comfortable using the "athlete" title. 

When I think of the sport of triathlon and endurance sports in general, and how they are growing year after year, we are seeing many more individuals going from fitness enthusiast to marathon runner or sprint triathlete to Ironman. Some of these individuals come from a sport background whereas others are up for a new fitness challenge. 

Many times, new athletes are at greater risk for GI issues, bonking and injury simply because these fitness enthusiasts have yet to understand how to eat for fuel and for health. They have not considered reaching out to a sport RD but feel very overwhelmed with all of the nutrition-related advice from forums, articles, training partners, nutrition experts and professional athletes. 

Certainly, there is a learning curve when it comes just showing up to a workout with a water bottle to planning sport nutrition before most workouts and then following through with the consumption of "energy and electrolytes" from manufactured products (powders, gels, blocks and pills).

As it relates to newbie athletes, there is a transition period for a fitness enthusiast to get comfortable following a structured training plan that yields performance gains instead of simply working out, just to exercise.

And as it relates to high-performing athletes, if a healthy relationship with food was never once achieved, there may be an increased risk for body image and eating issues which ultimately will affect performance improvements and overall health in a focused, hard-working, goal-oriented athlete. 

Now you may be asking why I am talking about this when I started this blog talking about eating cake? 

In my next blog, I am going to talk a bit more about mindful eating so that athletes of all levels can begin to feel more comfortable around food.

But I must give you a little homework first.

Tomorrow, I want you to practice eating more mindfully. 

No rules, no calorie counting, no food logging. 

If eating is not a positive, joyful, pleasurable, feel-good, nourishing experience for you, then

I want you to consider the internal dialogue in your mind when you are around food.

What are the thoughts that encourage you to eat certain foods or discourage you to eat certain foods?

What do the voices in your head say when you are planning your meals and snacks?
Any food thoughts when you are about to workout, while you are working out or after you workout?

How about while you are eating - what's your relationship with food like while you are chewing and digesting food?

How about when you are finished eating? 

How do you feel when your meal is complete and what does your mind tell you about the food that you just ate? 

As you go about your day tomorrow, I want you to think about what's driving your food choices and how the thoughts in your head affect what you eat. 

There are no right or wrong answers but if you find yourself experiencing a lot of anxiety, fears and guilt surrounding food, specifically food that is you or someone else termed bad or off-limit, I want you to be sure to read my next blog on mindful eating so that I can help you improve your relationship with food, all in an effort to improve your athletic performance and quality of life.