The fourth discipline: Nutrition

I studied about nutrition in this period, as I promised I would. While searching
for quality reading materials, I found a lot of articles and books that were too basic or too complicated. Finally, I found “Endurance Sports Nutrition” by Suzanne Girard Eberle. As a good nerd-friend, my intention was to share my notes with you, but I decided not to do it because I found this book simple and fast for reading, full of concrete advices, facts and examples and I advise you to read it. You can find it on this link.

It’s written in American Best Seller Style that I don’t like (that’s my problem), but I assure you it’s worth reading. The writer is a former elite runner, graduated from Georgetown University in Washington. She got her Master degree in Nutrition from Boston University. The book is written in 2000, while the third edition is published in 2014.

The fact that Suzanne is “one of us” allows her to understand the athletes, their problems and everyday battle with food. She’s been there (and she still is) and she knows both how do I feel when I’m eating my ice cream and how do you feel when go out running on empty stomach. She knows us and our crazy and stupid ideas and experiments with sport and nutrition. Moreover, she talked with people, read stories, tested and experienced on her skin what she talks about. Her degree in the field gives her answers to our numerous questions. “Endurance Sports Nutrition” is intended for endurance sports athletes who care about their nutrition, its effect on their performance, athletes with a problem to resolve or the one who simply want to understand the importance of well-balanced nutrition. If you are not an athlete, if you do sports occasionally (or you would like to), if you are a couch potato bored with your life to the point that you are reading these lines, you can still read the book and find interesting information.

Suzanne knows not all of us studied Nutrition (ehm, just a few of you/them), so she tries to explain everything in a simply way. I like her approach and I admire her because she managed to give us all necessary details without excluding the basics and using the simple, not technical language all of us can understand. Although most probably she will never read this post, I would still like to thank her for helping us understand our bodies and for providing us with great and useful concrete advices. Since I would really want you to read this book (at least parts that concern you), I will give you a short summary of what I found interesting.

Starting with basics

Suzanne wants us to visualize our plate and fill it with: fruits, vegetables, grains, protein and dairy. So, at the very beginning you can find a list of healthy choices of groceries you can use when making your shop-list. Fun food (fast and junk one) isn’t excluded. The illustration in the book leads us to the page of US Department of Agriculture, ChooseMyPlate.gov. Take a look! :)

Analysis

Try to find out your calorie needs by analyzing your trainings and studying your current eating habits. Listen to your body, interpret the signals it gives you. Find out your weaknesses and where you can improve. Key words are balance, variety and moderation.

My Garmin advices upload my trainings to Garmin Connect that is linked to My Fitness Pall. If you ever thought of writing a food diary and track your calorie intake, you may find this application useful. I do. Suzanne says “If you bite it, write it! A food journal serves the same purpose as a training log. Writing it all down has been shown repeatedly to help people remain committed to a long-term goal. It’s the writing down or recording, not precisely what you ate, that matters. Self-monitoring forces us to be accountable for our daily actions”.

Tips

Include as much as possible “power foods” in your diet:

1. High in vitamin A: apricots, cantaloupe, carrots, kale, collards, lettuce, spinach, sweet potatoes, pumpkin;

2. High in vitamin C: broccoli, cabbage, bell peppers, cantaloupe, grapefruit, kiwi, oranges, sinach, strawberries, tomatoes;

3. High in fiber: apples, bananas, berries, carrots, cherries, dates, figs, pears, spinach, sweet potatoes.

I am anemic. Like a lot anemic. I’ve been struggling with iron for years now, so I find more than useful the list of groceries high in iron: 1.Animal sources: beef, pork, lamb, liver, and other organ meats; poultry (especially dark meat); fish and shellfish; 2.Plant sources: dark leafy greens (spinach, beet, collard and turnip greens, chard), tomato and prune juice, dried fruit (apricots, raisins), legumes (chickpeas, black, kidney, lima, navy and pinto beans), lentils, soy foods, whole-grain and enriched breads and cereals, wheat germ.

Further on, Suzanne talks about anemia and other frequent problems that athletes suffer from, giving concrete advice on how to solve them! She talks about muscle cramps, runner’s colitis, iron-deficiency anemia, food allergies, intolerances and sensitivities, female athlete triad, eating disorders. Moreover, she explains what are hypo- and hyperthermia, hyponatremia, hypoglycemia etc. and how to avoid them.

Endurance sports athletes live mostly on carbohydrates. Suzanne gives some tips on how to go lean with protein: choose lean cuts of meat, use low-fat cooking methods (baking, broiling, grilling), eat more fish, eat more beans, don’t shy away from eggs, toss tofu into soups, stews and lasagna, mash it with cottage cheese, smear your bread with peanut butter.

Weight matters

Surprisingly, Suzanne doesn’t even mention a magic pill that makes you slim and happy in no time. She states (and I hope we all agree about it) that “losing weight is about expending calories that you consume. The total amount of calories burned during the day is what counts-not whether you burn fat or carbohydrate”. The logic is simple, if you want to maintain your weight you have to consume the same amount of calories you expend; in order to gain weight, you need to consume more, while in order to lose weight, you must expend more calories than you take in.

Simple tips: skip the sports food (use energy drinks, bars and gels only on prolonged exercise at a moderate-to-vigorous pace), keep moving (at least 10000 steps a day-8km), weight yourself weekly (on the same scale, at the same time of day and under the same conditions), wat a fruit or vegetable at every meal and snack, eat your calories (don’t drink them!).

Focus on real food and instead of just counting calories, make your calories count!

What to eat, when to eat, how and what to eat while training/racing

These are frequent questions to which you have the answer in the book. These and a whole lot more. Read it and let me know what you think about it! If you have some reading to recommend, I would like to have a look!