Nutrition After Nationals

It was the night after Thanksgiving.

“I’m going to athlete hell,” I said to Sam as I raised a spoonful of ice cream to my lips. Somewhere in North Carolina my nutritionist, Dr. Kristin Lander of Fiercely Fueled Nutrition, was suddenly overtaken by a cold shiver and inexplicable sense of dread. Worse, the ice cream was a chaser to a piece of bread with Nutella — a substance of such utter ecstasy that I never purchase it because I would sit in front of it with a spoon until I had eaten the entire jar, pausing only to snarl at my husband if he came too close. It was only knowing that my mother-in-law was upstairs that had committed me to the more civilized use of bread as a Nutella conveyance.

Cutting is really hard for me. Actually, that’s not true. Cutting — holding myself to a caloric deficit — is challenging, but if I’m committed to it and a lifestyle that supports it, I’m fine. What I discovered after Nationals is that I find not cutting extremely difficult. On the Empowered by Iron podcast, Drs. Kristin Lander and Mary Murphy have frequently discussed “eating for performance” and its benefits on body composition and strength development. Eating for performance is essentially eating the right amount of macronutrients to maintain body weight and fuel activity so that you can power through your training. I’m all in on this. I love the concept and was really excited about it, except for one thing: Even while maintaining my weight I needed to count my macros carefully. It wasn’t a free-for-all. Clearly, I had some cognitive dissonance about this to a non-cutting phase.

Just before Nationals, I had started a new job in private industry after years in federal civil service — a career that was deeply imbedded in my identity because I believed, and still believe, in making government as good as it possibly can be to serve all of us — the people for whom government exists. Just after Nationals, Sam and I sold our condo and moved promptly to Pittsburgh, where my new office was located, where I grew up, and where my parents still live. We had packed up and handed our things off to movers and flown across the country to compete. None of this phased me. I cooked and calculated calories carefully through the entire process. It wasn’t a problem.

Once Nationals was over, I chilled out. I took a break from all things measured. No macros, no scale, no Fitbit. It was nice; a pleasant change to pause the regime.

We got to Pittsburgh and stayed with my parents for a few nights while our bed was delivered to the new apartment. My mom, the former caterer and disciple of Julia Child, enjoyed feeding us: Great dinners, lots of wine, and homemade cookies with salted caramel ice cream. I enjoyed and guiltily side-stepped the scale. Once we moved into our apartment, we started slowly to try to get back into a schedule. Getting to the gym came first. Figuring out where to get groceries came next. In between was the delight of living in a downtown where we could walk just a few blocks and go to a restaurant, which we did with utter glee. Everything in D.C. had to be planned because it was such a hassle to get anywhere. Driving or taking the metro was always time consuming, so a night out had to be scheduled. Living somewhere that we could experience this thing called “spontaneity” gave us almost childlike giddiness.

A couple weeks later, I still hadn’t quite settled into a new rhythm. I’d count macros one day, but the next would end with dinner at my parent’s house, and I’d give up counting after my planned meals. Or I’d have lunch with a colleague and would struggle to estimate its macros. I’d try to be sensible the rest of the day, but would feel anxious because I wasn’t sure how much “damage” I had already done.

Cutting is easy. When you are being single-minded about a goal — making weight for a competition — it’s easy to shut certain things out of your life. I generally avoided going to restaurants or happy hours when I was getting ready for Nationals because I had a goal and a certain amount of time to achieve it.

This not-cutting part is tough. Finding a way to incorporate some normality into my life — and by ‘normality’ I mean going out to dinner and eating with my parents — is difficult, and I’m not sure how to do it. It’s possible that I need to start accepting being “weird” about eating (going out infrequently, counting and measuring regularly, bringing my lunch when my colleagues want to eat together) as normal. I’m not quite there yet because it is such a departure from how I’ve lived life for years.

The truth is, though, as I’ve gotten older, “being normal about food” is not entirely healthful. Rather, it’s been helping my weight to creep up each year, allowing my latent Italian genes to manifest in their effort to turn me into a pudgy little nonna. Being “normal” about food isn’t going to help keep me healthy in the long run. Most Americans have a steady weight gain each year, and it contributes to heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions that we might avoid or at least delay the onset of as we age.

Food has been a huge part of my family forever. My mom’s catering business sustained my family’s income and exploring new restaurants is a thing for us. It was our work and hobby. I don’t want to give all of this up, but right now I’m still figuring out how to balance it out. It’s causing me stress, and body image issues, and dumb binging behavior (e.g., Nutella followed by ice cream when in a permissive environment). It’s possible that this will just take some time to sort out. As I spend more time in regimented eating behaviors, my body weight may settle back into a new normal and some better self-regulation when I’m having a meal that is hard to count may kick in. I’ve also noticed when I’ve been lax about my diet that I don’t feel as good. It’s subtle but there — my stomach is a little less settled, and my skin is more temperamental. So there is some feedback that would encourage better diet. But this is new territory for me.

My goal right now is to count macros as consistently as possible. I’ll have a few meals then that will be impossible. And then my next competition will close in and I’ll be back to my all-in mentality. But finding balance in the off season . . . this will be an ongoing learning process for me. And that’s ok. There are always opportunities to learn but as we get older, we have to be more actively engaged with that process if we want to grow.