Girls gotta eat...food is your fuel

First off, I am not a nutritionist nor do I have a degree in nutritional biology or nutritional science but I do know that in order to lead a healthy lifestyle, food it necessary. From a very early age,  I began put weight and I became the chubby kid which eventually had a psychological effect on me. Despite my parents’ best efforts of keeping me and my siblings fed with nutrient rich foods, I still overate.  The one thing that helped keep me from gaining excessive amounts of weight was that I loved sports and the more active the sport, the more I loved it. This certainly helped me actually begin to burn calories and keep a mostly athletic build as I entered my teenage years.

As a growing female athlete, I had to eat to support my sport without becoming too overweight. Despite my efforts of eating clean and in the right amounts, I began to fixate on controlling my food consumption. As entered high school and college my love of working out also grew such that I began to train five to six days per week, had lost 25 pounds my freshman year of college but I had also developed dysfunctional eating.  I was not having a healthy relationship with food in the process.  I ate late at night, ate very little then ate too much food in one sitting. I was often concerned about eating in front of others thus I would often eat in secret. It was when I tried to start vomiting, had reached 119 lbs., and had entered into amenorrhea that I finally realized that I had a problem. How did I get out of it?  It took time as well as getting help from medical providers and being put on medication at that time to help induce a menstrual cycle. I also had to educate myself, stay active appropriately, and learn that you don’t just get morbidly obese after one meal.

Nutrition seems to be a difficult topic to tackle. For starters, all humans need to eat. We all have different food preferences, different appetites, belief systems regarding what is classified as food and different times we feel the need to eat relative to our schedules. The one other thing nutrition is; is a form of discipline. It takes self or parental discipline to eat or not eat sound nutrients to help the body grow and stay healthy, which in my belief system should be a focused goal. Food should be there to help keep us healthy so we can navigate our lives. It should not be the thing that makes us sick, harms us, or leads us away from an active life. But food should also be enjoyable, fun, and a form of what brings us as humans together. Some people eat as a social element, some people eat for performance but we all need to eat to sustain life. When taken to extremes of too much we can become over-nutritioned, overweight, or obese which can take a toll on our body and have significant health concerns and consequences. However, taken to extremes of too little it can affect the functioning of our organs, cut our muscle mass and affect many systems of the body that can risk our very life. Therefore, we need to be somewhere in the middle. We need to strike a balance.

Over the years, there have been many books written about nutrition from plant-based eating, to meat eating, elimination diets, liquid diets, keto diets, and fasting based diets. Although I have tried many diet types, in my experience, the only diet that seems to have worked for me has been one that allows for the mix of plant based and animal-based proteins, low sugar fruits, variety of vegetables and one that has low glycemic complex carbohydrates, fiber, healthy fats and foods the offer vitamins and minerals.

One thing that has helped me and my fitness has always been eating a well-rounded diet and considering food as the fuel that drives my physical engine. I admit feeling like I have always struggled with keeping weight off despite food choices and staying active. I have worked out, continued to walk but with the progress I have made professionally, it has required more time at a desk and time restrictions for working out. It wasn’t until late 2023 that I hired a nutrition coach to help me work off some excess body weight for my own concerns of visceral fat and overall health as I too proceed into each passing year. As a result, it has helped me drop 20 pounds, feel better, look leaner, feel more confident, I have had less gut pain as well as less orthopedic pain.

There is many good low sugar, low fat condiments that allow for meals that are tasty and satisfying.

Some of my favorite flavor additives include:

Nutritional yeast, Tajin,  Sauerkraut, Banana Peppers, Various types of mustards and hot sauces, low fat/low sugar buffalo sauces such as Primal Brand, Bar -B- Q Sauces such as G Hughes or , Taste Flavor Co sauces which includes Hot Honey Sriracha, Cherry Smoked Bar-B-Q(my favorite) and Spicy Garlic Parmesan.