Fueling Your Body!

““When you focus less on trying to constantly lose weight... and you focus more on being strong, athletic, and feel your best... the faster you’ll lose weight, build muscle, get stronger, and actually love your body.”- @syattfitness

As you all know, I love training and working hard. I love challenging myself and pushing myself to the edge.

This year, I am feeling super strong and working towards building my confidence. I’ve been working on getting better in all areas of my training, not just the physical components. I continue to work on my mental and emotional game too- listening to & reading books that promote a strong mindset, meditating more and visualizing myself competing in races. These areas have been coming together nicely.

But, the one area of training that I’ve struggled with most over the years has been my nutrition. And I’m not talking about race day nutrition, because with a lot of trial and error and talking to my coach, I have started to understand what foods make me feel good and which don’t during a race. What I find challenging is figuring out my diet on a daily basis. As some of you may know, I struggle with an eating disorder. I have spent a significant part of my life hating my body and either restricting calories or purging them.

I’m happy to say that I am really working hard to love my body the way it is and am in a good head space with food. I am trying to learn and understand more about nutrition- what to eat and when to eat. I’m at the point where I’m working so damn hard that I really want to optimize my performance and not work against myself. For so long, I’ve been so afraid of gaining weight that I ate only what I thought was adequate. What I didn’t realize was that since my training has increased so significantly, that what I was eating, while healthy and well balanced, certainly was not nearly enough. I was so consumed with having a lower body mass that I thought the only way to do it was to be calorie deficient. What I didn’t realize, was that by doing so, my body started breaking down muscle and instead of losing weight, I started to gain it.

We live in a world where so much information is available at our fingertips that we can’t help but compare ourselves to other athletes- what they’re eating and drinking, how much they weigh, or how much they exercise. Our society has made us believe that for athletes to be ideal specimens they must be as lean as possible with no regard to their genetic make up. We live in a numbers driven world that’s made athletes, like myself, believe if we don’t fall within a certain weight or desired body composition, we aren’t good enough and our performance will suffer. Well that’s just not the case.

Athletes are prone to perfectionism and perfectionism has gotten out of control on social media making us believe there’s a perfect way to look, perform, and even eat. Look on IG and you’ll see images of meals elegantly displayed and beautiful posed bodies everywhere. These images can make us feel inadequate like we aren’t doing enough or aren’t good enough. As a result, we feel that we must strive for excellence in all aspects of our sport. When we don’t meet that expectation or idea we have in our head, we start to lack confidence and have self doubt. These unnecessary demands and ideas take their toll on the brain and the body, making it difficult for us to compete well as well as live a healthy, joy filled life.

I recognized the need for change. To better understand my nutritional needs I started to learn more about RED-S (Relative Energy Deficient in Sport) and am working with my coach and nutritionist to ensure that my diet supports my goals and not hurt them.

It’s a journey for sure, but one I am excited to take. Trying to always be learning, growing and striving to be the best I can be. You define you, not some number or weight on the scale.