If you have been in the triathlon game very long you have undoubtedly heard about the importance of eating well. This has not always been the case. There are stories about athletes following up a tough swim or bike session with a big pile of french fries, or a couple of hamburgers and a big glass of beer. No serious athlete today would admit eating such stuff, and most will manage to avoid it altogether. Side note: a thoughtfully prepared hamburger and fries is not all that bad for you.
Whatever your sport, there is a very good chance that your eating habits have been skewed by fad diets. The high fat diet. The high protein diet. Never eat sugar. Never eat red meat. Never eat grains. Young, sedentary people can get away with that kind of unbalanced diet, but the more active we are and the older we are, the more important it is to eat a complete, well balanced diet.
Another kind of diet fad has to do with timing. Well, there are two distinct versions of unbalanced meal timing. First, there is fasted training. Let’s say you have scheduled a one hour run first thing in the morning. The diet recommendations I follow say to precede that run with a snack. A few carbs, a touch of protein and fat, consumed one to two hours before the run in order to get the food out of your stomach and into your blood. A low dose fasted training approach would skip that snack. A high dose approach would eat a very light dinner the night before, so that you start the day with low blood sugar reserves. Why? The theory is that exercising with low blood sugar teaches the body to shift away from carbohydrate as a fuel source and rely more on fat. My trusted sources say this may work for healthy young males, but it is a terrible idea for women and senior athletes. The other form of timing restriction requires that you eat all of your food for the day within a set time window. I don’t know about you, but I never wake up at midnight craving a ginormous sandwich.
What I am learning, and still have much to learn, is that the older I get, the more I have to pay attention to what I eat. What, and just as important, when. I started this process by just logging what I eat. I found MyFitnessPal a great help in this endeavor. It works on my Android phone, my iPad, and there is a good old fashioned web site.
To be consistent at logging what you eat, you have to make it a habit. I tried to log as the day went along, but I always spent a few minutes every evening finishing up the day's food log. Skipping a day would result in a lot of staring at the ceiling trying to remember what I ate.
Recently, I found something even better. An app called FuelIn. It too is a food logger, but it does a lot more. The app scans your TrainingPeaks training diary for a week’s worth of workouts and develops a fuel plan for every meal and snack. It even gives advice on how much to consume during exercise. No, it does not tell you to eat two eggs and a slice of whole wheat bread. The recommendations are in the form of protein, fat, carbs, and calories. It does, however, offer suggestions to hit those numbers. For example, for one of my afternoon snacks it recommended 40g protein, 5g fat, 30g carbs and 325 calories and offered recipes for Perform Shake, Pumpkin Pie Shake, Choccy Mousse, Banana Milkshake, and many more.
Speaking of meal timing, one thing I have learned is that there are nuances to consider when comparing our dietary needs to younger (20 - 50) athletes. One has to do with carbohydrate timing. It is better to consume carbs early in the day and taper off dramatically for dinner. Another is calcium intake. Younger folks can make up for an occasional deficiency in calcium intake by dissolving some bone. It happens all the time. The same trick is used by older bodies, it’s just that we can’t afford to lose much bone because our bones are less flexible. Also we are less efficient at using the calcium we do intake. And then there is protein. Without diving down that rabbit hole I will just say that as we age our bodies become less efficient at using the protein we intake. I hope to get in touch with the folks at FuelIn and ask if their recommendations compensate for age.
There is a dark side to all this surveillance. It can become an obsession. We athletes already put ourselves under massive amounts of stress simply playing our sport. We don’t need to pile on more by imposing a strict regime of food logging. At what point food logging becomes a burden, or even worse, an obsession, is entirely up to you. A simple diary is all you need to get started. MyFitnessPal and FuelIn are handy tools that make the process more efficient and enjoyable. Now excuse me while I go and log what I had for dinner.