Since I was…well only a little smaller than I am now…but for a very long time…I’ve known the importance of diet to training and performance as an athlete. My dad was a bodybuilder – and a good ‘un at that! And he always told me that the thing that makes people fall down, that stops people getting to the top, isn’t the training and building the muscle, it’s the diet. The restriction and discipline required to get down to the level of body fat required to win, is torture. And not everyone is capable of that.
So it’s no surprise that when I started getting okay at triathlon, I started immediately researching all the nutrition advice I could to work out how best to fuel my endeavours.
But it made life sad. It made socialising challenging. And it fed into a total preoccupation with how I looked and that I didn’t “look like an athlete”. I was thinking about macros and numbers, calorie tracking. It wasn’t an obsession, but I lived with an underlying sense of failure for a very long time because I just couldn’t hit the numbers the outside world had said would bring me success. I would use long training rides as an excuse not to eat in the hope I would burn some body fat and lose weight. I would avoid carbohydrates except around intense sessions and I would reward myself after races with massive binges of junk food until I couldn’t move.
This is the problem. As amateur athletes, we are always looking out for the best advice. When it comes to nutrition, it’s easy to find yourself caught up in the details: the number of calories consumed, the macronutrient breakdown, the strict schedules. As athletes, we often view our bodies as machines, focusing solely on optimising performance. But even if we manage to follow these rigorous advice pieces, the result is often a distorted relationship between ourselves, our food and our training.
But, what if there’s a different path to not just maintaining peak performance, but also fostering a positive relationship with food and our bodies? Intuitive eating, a mindful, self-health eating framework, may be the answer for busy, amateur athletes.
Intuitive Eating and Its Applicability to Triathletes
Intuitive eating is a philosophy that advocates for tuning into your body’s unique needs and hunger cues, rather than adhering to strict dietary rules or restrictions. While structured training and nutrition plans play a critical role in a triathlete’s performance, the beauty of intuitive eating lies in its potential to complement these plans, and foster a healthy body image and an enjoyable, sustainable relationship with food. It also helps us to see the separate and individual joy from all the training we do, rather than falling into the trap of using exercise as a “punishment” for over-consuming or “earning” a particular food or meal later on.
As an athlete, your energy needs will vary significantly depending on the intensity and length of your training sessions. Intuitive eating encourages you to listen to these fluctuations. Rather than adhering to a rigid calorie intake, you learn to fuel your body appropriately for your workouts and to aid recovery. It teaches you to focus on what your body is asking you for and to listen to that, which could be the best way for you to ensure you are meeting your own nutritional needs.
Managing a Busy Lifestyle
The training demands of an athlete are intensive, and the time commitment can often overshadow other essential elements of life. Intuitive eating can help manage this. It shifts the focus from adhering to rigid meal times and specific food groups, to a more flexible approach, enabling you to make food choices that align with your schedule, energy levels, and personal preferences.
For instance, if you’re juggling early morning training sessions with a busy workday, intuitive eating might lead you to opt for a hearty, protein-packed breakfast that satisfies your hunger and provides sustained energy, instead of merely adhering to a low-carb diet because it’s prescribed in a general training plan. Equally, it could be that you fear eating junk food, but find out that an instant carb breakfast of white bread and jam is exactly what you need in the mornings before a tough early swim session.
Boosting Body Confidence and Addressing Body Image Issues
In a sport often associated with lean and muscular bodies, it’s not uncommon for athletes to grapple with body confidence and body image issues. Intuitive eating is empowering as it cultivates a relationship with your body that prioritises health and how you feel over how you look. It enables you to appreciate your body for its strength, endurance, and capabilities, rather than its adherence to a particular aesthetic standard. Intuitive eating isn’t just a focus on food, it’s separating the issue of looking at food as a means to achieve some sort of unattainable perceived aesthetic excellence.
As you learn to trust your body and its signals, you’ll start viewing food as fuel, not a foe. You’ll find a sense of liberation in eating what your body needs, and this can help reduce anxiety around food and body image. After all, one of the biggest enemies to recovery, performance and healthspan is chronic stress – something often brought on by social food situations and difficulties when trying to fit a busy age grouper lifestyle into a rigid structured diet plan.
Catering to Nutritional Needs in Intensive Training
Despite its flexible nature, intuitive eating is not about abandoning nutritional needs, especially when considering the intensive training plans of a triathlete. It’s about learning to recognise what your body needs nutritionally.
For example, if you’re feeling unusually fatigued after a series of intensive training sessions, instead of pushing through or increasing your caffeine intake, intuitive eating might involve acknowledging your body’s need for more carbs or perhaps rest. It’s about striking the right balance between structure and flexibility, between your body’s unique needs and your athletic goals.
Importantly, this is not just about “am I hungry?”, this is about taking the time to learn and listen way more to your body as a whole. Taking into account what it needs as an individual, rather than what a coach, magazine or peer has told you will help you. Advice is there to be mulled over and manipulated to suit your own situation and intuitive eating allows you to take on board suggestions but also acknowledge that your own physiology is totally unique and the best way to work with it is by listening to it, not trying to force it to bend to the whim of others.
How do I start?
Intuitive eating is a really hot topic and there are tonnes of resources out there on the internet to help you. However, as an age group athlete, remember that your situation is unique and in order to get the best from this method, I would thoroughly recommend hiring someone to help guide you through how this could work for you, to avoid yet another useless method for nutrition being employed and forgotten. And of course, that someone I will always recommend is me, because I’m ace. So if you want to talk about how intuitive eating could work for you as an age-grouper, get in touch for your FREE 30min intro call to chat about your challenges and what I can help you with.