Training diets – they’re a minefield

What’s in your food?!

When I tell people I’m a veggie (or pescatarian to be precise, which I only found out recently was actually a thing!), they always seem surprised. I’m 6’6 and about 14.5 stone and they just don’t believe it. On a flight to Canada recently when my veggie meal came round, they asked who I’d swapped seats with to give them their meal. They didn’t believe me.

What typically follows is all sorts of advice on why I shouldn’t just be eating veg or why you need to eat meat. Suddenly everyone becomes a nutritionist. Where does our energy come from. Where do you get your protein etc. My answer is normally something along the lines of where do you get yours? Unless you’re a honed athlete or nutritionist, you probably don’t know right?

Do you make your own food? Or do you take pre made meals/ supplements / shakes?
Do you know what’s in them? Not what they’re meant for or to do, but what’s actually in them?

You trust the packaging because it tells you what you want to hear. But as my three year old would say,”what’s insiiide?”

As a newcomer to the sport of triathlons, I could be fooled into thinking that everyone seems to only get their goodness from shakes & meat (and kale 😉 and then race day / training is all about energy gel bars / packets etc. I mean every magazine has a smoothie recipe of some description each month which is normally delicious… But otherwise I seem to read a lot about meat based recipes or see people all over Instagram nailing some sort of processed shake post workout. 

Same goes for gel energy boosters. Surely there’s something good we could make oursleves instead (I discovered there is if you look hard enough!)? 

So where does all our good stuff come from?

I’m not preaching all high and mighty as if I know exactly what I get out of my food, I just try to eat as healthily as possible and give my body what it’s asking for. With triathlon training in mind however I needed to do some research and cut out the snacks!

How convenient then that for Christmas I was given the Thrive cookbook, which is a plant based nutritional cookbook. Not a boring text book style theory book you might have had in college, but a book full of inspiration and recipes to get you through a day. 

This is not a plug, I just think it’s genius. 

Brendan, the author, talks about the similarity of not eating properly, or filling your day with coffees and quick fixes to having a credit card debt. Each time you have a quick fix, you’ve not yet paid it off (exercised for example) before you NEED your next fix and therefor build up a debt of wasted energy. Whereas if you eat properly with natural nutrients, you’ll carry on all day long, eating only what you need to get by. It’s a really simple analogy, but makes so much sense.

So my plan? To test all of these delicious recipes for sure, but also to try to understand more what I’m getting out of my food in 2016 and what I need to keep me going throughout the day without all the rubbish snacking thatbinpreviouskynconsumed! 

Eating well should be the rule, not the exception.

Well, that’s the plan anyway 😉

Happy 2016