As I work through the edits of the book, Power Up, that I’m cowriting with registered dietitian Stevie Lyn Smith, I’ve been thinking a lot about fueling. (Pssst… Preorders for Power Up are open now!) Specifically, as we dig into fueling for young women and urging them to make sure that every training session and workout is fueled appropriately, I’ve been thinking about my own relationship with fueling. I’ve been thinking about diet culture from growing up in the 90s and early 00s, and how it still is a battle to make sure I fuel enough. And that’s despite having nutrition certifications, cowriting two books about nutrition, writing countless articles about making sure we eat enough while training, and coaching camps where eating enough was something we really focused on.
So, yeah. Fueling enough isn’t easy—especially for women who grew up with such toxic messages about food. It’s not easy even when you know all of the information. You’re trying to fight against decades of messages about how to lose that last five pounds, how to have that bikini body… and it can be a struggle even for athletes who don’t fall into the category of having an eating disorder or struggling with disordered eating.
To quickly sum up my food story, I grew up on a pretty standard American diet, didn’t do sport as a kid but was a teen during the Paris Hilton/Mary Kate and Ashley era of thinness, and while I’ve never struggled with weight in one direction or another, I’ve gotten bad advice that I followed over the years, like my first coach telling me to aim for 1500 calories on a big fueling day and 800 on a light day. Hard yikes for someone training 20+ hrs/week for Ironman! I did the vegan thing, dabbled in the raw vegan thing, and generally was not eating like a healthy vegan at any point during that time. Luckily, I managed to avoid any REDs-type issues, but I have to admit that my lack of problems with under-fueling was likely due to some genetic luck and due to the fact that I wasn’t athletic or weight-focused as a kid, and because of that, hit puberty and all the healthy developmental markers without any issues, so when I was messing up my fueling in my 20s, it wasn’t as problematic as it could have been.
Over the years, my diet evolved. I eat everything, and a lot of it, because I train a lot, and because thankfully, so does Peter, so it’s easy. (Our grocery trips look like we have a family of six 😂)
And yet.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I look back at my recent 100-miler and two moments with fueling stand out. The first moment came at around mile 97 or so—almost to the finish. Obviously, your appetite is pretty curtailed during a race like this, after 16+ hours on your feet. Your gut isn’t working perfectly by that point. I didn’t stop fueling at mile 97, but I do remember wanting to because I was ‘almost done.’ I had to have the stern talk with myself to keep fueling to the finish, reminding myself that recovery would be better and I’d finish stronger if I just kept sipping. To be fighting to fuel and telling myself that those calories were critical after 97 miles of running, in hindsight, is absolutely wild.
But the real kicker came the next morning. We went out to breakfast and I ordered the big breakfast platter at Stacked. It was a lot of food, but not a crazy amount. And yet… I caught myself thinking, as the food came out and looked and smelled amazing, that I had burned somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 calories running the day before and was about to have a week off, and did I really want to eat those “extra” calories?
As with the night before and continuing to fuel, I did eat plenty that morning. But the fact that my brain defaulted to those old diet cliches—earning one’s food, not wanting to ‘waste’ a workout, wanting to empty the tank at the end of the race, et cetera—was a harsh reminder that these harmful diet cliches and throwaway comments we hear can really mess with us.
I know that I’m not alone here: Most of us know we should be fueling more and staying on top of our fueling throughout our workouts in order to excel in our sport. But it’s not always easy or simple, or even comfortable. Consider this your reminder to check in on how your fueling has been going lately, and maybe to check in on your thoughts around fueling your workouts. Are there unhelpful thoughts creeping in? Can you reframe them, or are you getting stuck?
Remember—just knowing that you need to fuel isn’t enough. You have to actually do the thing!
