I mentioned earlier that I had decided 2012 was the year I’d take derby to the next level. In my mind, that required a two-pronged approach: trainining better, and eating better. You can read my article about training better here. Because it’s a complex issue, this one will be in two parts; eating better, and giving up sugar. Again, I’m not a professional – this is just based on personal experience and some pretty extensive research.

Training better, while incredibly challenging, wasn’t that hard a lifestyle change to make; it just meant forming a new habit. Fixing my diet, however, was a huge overhaul – not only was I trying to form new, positive eating habits, but I was simultaneously trying to break 24 years of terrible ones. It was a daunting task, to say the least.

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The first change I needed to make was to eat more. If you’re anything like me (that is, you grew up smack bang in the middle of popular media surrounded by “women’s interest” – don’t get me started on what a fallacy that concept it – magazines) you probably have a fairly skewed idea of how much food you need to eat. For instance, thanks to the guidance of Cosmo, I’ve always believed I need to eat around 1200 calories a day.

Now, I’m a 5’8″ woman weighing around 155lbs, which means my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is around 1500 calories. Your BMR is the number of calories your body requires to carry out its basic functions at rest – if you literally did nothing whatsoever all day, that’s how many calories you need to maintain the same body weight. If I lived a very sedantary life, I’d need to eat 1.2 times that amount, about 1800 calories. However, since I’m exercising at a high intensity for 1-3 hours most days of the week, I need more like 2200-2500 calories a day. That’s almost twice what I was eating before!

As you probably know, to burn fat requires a caloric deficit. However, my main goal is to gain strength, which actually requires a caloric surplus. Therefore I’m eating around 1800-2000 calories a day, depending on my activity, which should, in theory, allow me to gain muscle and burn fat slowly at the same time. Since I’ve started eating more, I find I have more energy, I don’t fatigue as easily at training, and I’m still burning fat. Magic!

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Although it might seem like a conflicting idea, the next thing to take control of is learning to only eat when you’re actually hungry. For so many women, eating has such an emotional undercurrent, and for a lot of people (like me) it often comes down to just boredom or habit. Now, this is where your self-discipline comes in. When you’re going to grab something snacky, think about whether you’re actually hungry. If you really are, then dig in! But I often found myself browsing the pantry out of sheer boredom, or just because it was what I had always done.

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So once you’ve got that concept down, the next step is to eat better. While I was never one of those vegetable-hating kids, I never really went out of my way to eat them once I moved out of home, and I certainly never ate fruit. Yep, this is where shit got real – I started eating fresh fruit & veggies, upped my protein intake, and stopped eating processed food and sugar. I experimented with paleo for a couple of months, but for me, cutting out sugar and processed stuff felt good. Aim to eat food that’s been messed with as little as possible. That means, oats that say “Ingredients: oats” and peanut butter that says “Ingredients: Peanuts”.

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On that note: don’t fear fat. Fat gets a bad wrap, which is really unwarranted. Weight gain is not caused by eating fat; weight gain is caused by eating excessive calories. It’s true that fat does contain more calories than some other nutrients, but it also helps you feel satisfied and, most importantly, it makes food taste good! Have you ever noticed how non-fat milk looks and tastes like crap?

Look at the ingredients in a “low-fat” food item next time you buy groceries. Chances are, they has a lot more salt and sugar and isopropolbentylate and flavour (431) than their full-fat counterparts, and may not even be that much lower in calories. I’m proof of this: I have been eating fat since the start of the year, and my body fat percentage is lower now than it was then. Kablammo.

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Now, this is, I think, the key to overhauling your diet. Focus on adding good stuff to your diet, rather than removing the bad stuff. This is how you overcome that deprivation mentality, by a simple change in thinking. I think of myself as a pretty strong-willed person, but as soon as I tell myself I can’t have something, I immediately go, “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my real mom!” and eat twenty times more of it than I normally would.

It’s a gradual process. If you try to change everything at first, you will probably fail. Give yourself a month on this adding phase. You can have the cake/chocolate/ice cream, as long as you eat all the veggies, protein and other good stuff first. Chances are, you’ll be too full, or too smugly proud of yourself to want cake afterwards anyway. And if you do eat the cake, well hey, you just ate a whole ton of veggies and stuff that was really good for you – it’s not the end of the world. The important thing is not to be too hard on yourself; every little bit of improvement is a step in the right direction. And that is all you can ask of yourself – to improve at your own pace, just the way you improve your skating! You didn’t show up your first day of training and expect to do everything right, so why would you expect that when you’re trying to eat better?

This is what a standard day of eating looks like for me:

Breakfast:

Smoothie, which normally contains any combination of the following: 1 cup almond/coconut milk, protein powder, LSA mix or chia seeds, a banana, maybe a handful of frozen berries, oats, peanut butter, Greek yoghurt. Then I fill the blender to the top with spinach. It turns out bright green which terrifies everybody, but I promise you can’t taste the spinach at all!

or

Oatmeal: 1/2-3/4 cup oats, unsweetened Greek-style yoghurt, LSA mix or a handful of nuts, banana, and cinnamon.

Lunch:

Half a bag of spinach, 150g grilled chicken, couple of tablespoons of chopped up bacon, craisins with ranch dressing.

Dinner:

Grilled chicken, rice, half a plate of spinach with spanish onion, apple and something (usually ranch because it’s freaking delicious) on top.

Snacks:

Twice a day, I’ll eat something like: apple slices with peanut butter; nuts and an orange; Greek yoghurt with banana; cheese and grapes; a boiled egg and some other fruity item.

Once I find something that works for me, I tend to eat it ALL. THE. TIME. As a result there are a few things I use like they’re going out of fashion:

Bags of spinach – I seriously eat so much spinach it’s ridiculous

Peanut butter

Bananas

Greek yoghurt

I’m not saying I eat perfectly all of the time. But I make a concerted effort to eat really well most of the time, so that when I go out and drink beer and eat pizza, it’s not the end of the world. And that’s okay! Remember that what you do most of the time is so much more important that what you do some of the time.

I’m going to write another post in the coming days about kicking the sugar habit because for me (and, so I’ve heard, for a lot of other people too) this is a huge undertaking.

Super greens and sufficient protein,

Blockie