Eating for Performance While Still Enjoying Food

Let’s have a conversation about eating for performance. Keeping a clean diet filled with the proper nutrients needed to fuel the body for optimal function is no stranger to professional athletes, but what about the everyday people? Why would someone like you or me need to eat for performance if not competing in a sport? Wouldn’t that just be a miserable lifestyle having to eat for gains?This is not the case my fellow foodie friends. You can eat clean and still enjoy food!

Over the past three months I have participated in three nutrition challenges all geared towards better performance in the gym. Yes, I even participated during the holiday season! Crazy right? Actually, I fully welcomed these challenges in between Halloween, Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas and New Years; seriously that’s a ton of festivities crammed into a very small amount of time. Each challenge I was able to find small progress in my performance whether it be a heavier lift, faster 400 meter run, or just in my overall stamina. It was enough to keep me motivated to participate all three times. The last challenge in January I went strict Paleo and made amazing progress in both losing body fat and in lifting PR’s and even managed to still enjoy what I was eating in the process. It is possible I promise.

I believe the key to my success can be attributed to the belief that healthy food can be really tasty and eaten without regimine. Where I find most of my clients having issues with changing their nutrition is the discipline to eat certain foods at dictated times; that is not fun for anyone. Not only is it a terrible way to schedule your day, it’s also a terrible way to have a relationship with food. There are so many people who want to get healthy and end up falling into a disordered eating trap because regimine takes over and becomes obsessive. I have first hand experience in this; what started as a teen wanting to lose some baby fat turned into two decades of battling anorexia and bulimia. My relationship with food was volatile at best. It took years of reprogramming to learn how to have a better emotional relationship with food as well as how to eat properly. There is a freedom to be able to eat whatever foods you’d like at any point in time- especially when actually hungry. I’ve had so many clients attempt to hit their macros and just feel terrible at the end of the day because they ate unwillingly. That is no way to live and no way to have a sustainable relationship with food either.

The Paleo challenge in January that I participated in really flipped my perspective on eating for performance not just temporarily, but for more permanent nutrition. Not only was I eating basically anytime that I felt hungry, I also started to get much better sleep, woke up feeling energized and still cut body fat. As I mentioned before, my lifts improved and my endurance increased. It was a win win for me! I didn’t feel any deprivation from eating any of the foods I really love either. While cutting out cheese was a little challenging at first, I really don’t miss having it daily. Even wine. While I’ve had wine since socially it’s only been one glass and it has taken me hours to drink! For a self proclaimed sommelier, this is troubling. My point being, I still enjoyed the foods I really enjoy eating and still made progress without feeling miserable.

Eating a nutrient dense meal these days can be incredibly tasty. The days of steamed broccoli, baked chicken and fish are over with the amount of innovative recipes out there. Case in point the meals I make. Most are five to seven ingredients and take very little time to cook. Using a variety of fun species, nut flour and milks, the everyday chicken breast can be transformed into something exotic and surprising on your palate. We even have the magic of air fryers that turn ordinary food into healthy unfried substitutes! As long as you have a little bit of knowledge and skill in the kitchen, you can have perfectly nutritious and delicious meals too.