6 Steps to High Performance Healthy Eating for Athletes Ep 29

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. I'm your host, Chris Newport, founder, head coach, sports nutritionist, and exercise physiologist at the Endurance Edge. Our mission is to empower people to reach and sustain peak performance and health. So get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. We hope to give you detailed information and inspiring stories to help you be your best. Let's do it. Welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast. I am your host, Chris Newport. And today we are talking all about high-performance healthy eating. So this is kind of our way of getting back to the basics when it comes to nutrition and introducing you to our system that we call the Fueling Edge. So this 6-step simple system will help give you a fueling edge, not only during your athletics, but just as a high-performing human. It's a way of beating hunger, staying energized and staying on top of your health as much as you can so that we have not only longevity in life, but longevity in sport. So let's jump in. Number 1 is what we call pick powerful proteins. So that should always be on the forefront of your mind anytime that you're choosing a meal or a snack, no matter what style of eating you choose, whether it be vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, or eating sort of a little bit of everything, make sure that you have protein at every meal and snack. Protein is so critical for helping repair and build your body's tissues, in particular, your lean body mass or your muscles. It helps with different metabolic reactions to take place. It helps with maintaining the appropriate pH in your body. It helps with immunity and helping with transporting and storing various nutrients. So Be sure you get your protein at every meal and snack. Some examples, it could be fish like salmon or cod. It could be, um, other poultry items like turkey and chicken or beef and pork, eggs, egg whites, soy, um, types of products like edamame or tempeh or tofu. The more you can go whole foods based, that's great. But if you also need a convenient source, like a protein powder, anytime that you have a, vegan protein powder, just make sure there are combinations. For example, having pea protein in addition to chia protein or pumpkin protein or rice protein, rather than just getting a singular source versus if you're getting something that has all the essential amino acids like a whey protein or an egg white protein, those can work as well. So what is our next step? So step 2 is what we call choose your color fuel. Again, this is the Fueling Edge. This is the 6-step system for your Fueling Edge. So we kind of get a little playful with it. And again, we call it Choose Your Colorful, Color Fuel. What does that mean? That means that we really need to eat our fruits and vegetables. So it's kind of like eating a rainbow and certainly what I tell my kids, and it's no different for adults. Fruits and vegetables really are nature's most potent multivitamin. They protect our health in multiple ways. They can help improve your athletic performance. They contain some carbohydrates, small amounts of protein as well. We try to encourage everybody to get at least 5 servings every day and a combination of different colors. In particular, if you can get one of these 3 on a daily basis, just like you would a multi, you're ahead of the game. So number 1 is leafy greens, things like spinach, spring mix, arugula, collards, kale, bok choy. Another group is what we call Brassicas. So that's a super fun one where you get very potent amounts of what we call sulforaphane, which is in particularly helpful in the recovery process as athletes, but broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale comes in there too. So does bok choy. And then the last group that we really like to encourage people to do on a daily basis is something from the red or orange category, like red bell peppers or orange bell peppers, carrots. Or tomatoes. All right. So moving on to step 3, we like to call it focus on healthy fats. So fat is really important to get frequently throughout the day, uh, to help with maintaining mental focus throughout the day. It also aids in recovery on a cellular label— on a cellular level, also helps to absorb certain vitamins like A, E, D, and K, and in particular regulates your blood sugar. So even though you may not be a type 1 or a type 2 diabetic, we still try to treat every athlete as if they were, and keeping those balance of hormones of insulin and blood sugar, uh, steady throughout the day, which helps again with that mental focus, with delivering energy throughout the body nice and slowly and nice and carefully. All right. So different examples of good quality, healthy fats, avocados, which could be something like in guacamole too. A good quality dark chocolate, like 70% cacao or higher. Olives or extra virgin olive oil, using that in your cooking or in your salad dressings. Nuts and nut butters like peanut butter or almond butter, cashew butter, or walnuts. Various types of seeds like pumpkin seeds or chia seeds or sunflower seeds. So those are our good quality fats. Our fourth step in our six-step system is what we like to call adding extra fuel. So here's where those your sort of typical sources of carbohydrates are going to come in. As athletes in particular, if you're doing a lot of swimming, biking, or running, or other sports that involve just a large quantity of exercise, we want to make sure we're getting in additional carbohydrates to fuel yourself. So that additional fuel can come from things like sweet potatoes or quinoa, um, maybe even some buckwheat or oatmeal or oat bran, or perhaps even some brown or wild rice. This is an easy place where a lot of us can get more processed foods, but if we can try to get back to sort of more of the whole grain nature of foods, that's a really great way to help our body along in the process and not have to burden it with additional processing. Step 5 is what we like to call boosting your fuel. So have a little bit of fun with your fuel. This is, or with your food, I should say. So Things like different herbs and spices, they really boost flavor and they're so fun to sort of make it different, especially if you're eating the same things on a regular basis. Try some different spices in there. Things like turmeric, which has been researched for its active ingredient, which is curcumin, which is huge as it relates to anti-inflammatory. Uh, and then adding in a little bit of black pepper to that, for example, the active ingredient there is bioprene, which makes turmeric or curcumin 2,000 times more absorbed. So those are great synergistic herbs and spices to use. Sprinkle them on your eggs perhaps in the morning or add them to a little bit of tofu or to curries. Cocoa is another really fun one, certainly one of my favorites. That's a great one to add some flavor. Garlic, oregano, basil, cayenne pepper, all kinds of different ways that you can play with your, with your food, uh, and adding in different spice profiles and just having some fun. Last but certainly not least on the list, number 6 is pretty simple: hydrate. So water is massive. It performs so many different functions in the water. The body is 50 to 60% water. So it's huge in delivering Oxygen in helping your body cool and lubricating your joints. So hydration needs vary largely based on how large you are, your gender, um, whether you're sick or not, your stage of life, what type of environment you live in, you live in. But generally speaking, most men need about 3 liters per day, which is about 100 ounces, depending on how you look at it. And females need generally about 2 liters per day. Which is about 64 ounces per day. So that can be in water, it can be other things like making sure you're getting plenty of your fruits and vegetables, which you'll get some water from there, but also maybe a little bit of seltzer or some herbal teas and just not too much coffee. And certainly trying to stay away from things like sugary sodas and things like that that can actually dehydrate us. So urine color is a really great and easy way to monitor your hydration status We also have an awesome urine color chart that's on a couple of different places on our website. It's on our guide to high-performance healthy eating, which you can find at theenduranceedge.com, uh, as well as our, uh, hydration guide, which same thing you can find on theenduranceedge.com under resources. So let's recap with our 6 different steps, and then I'm going to give you guys some examples of how to put this all together. So again, our Fueling Edge 6-Step System is number 1, pick your powerful proteins. So making sure you're getting those essential amino acids, whether it be from soy-based foods or protein powders, fish, chicken, meats, that kind of thing. Choosing your color fuel is number 2. So in other words, eat your rainbow, eat your fruits and vegetables, however you wanna think of it. Make sure that that is at the forefront of your mind. It's of the utmost importance when you're choosing your healthy meals and snacks. And then number 3 is focusing on healthy fats. So there might be some overlap in some of the protein and fat, but making sure that we do have good quality fats so that we regulate our blood sugar, we help our brains. Number 4 is what we like to call add extra fuel, where this is your opportunity to get additional carbohydrates if you need them. Number 5 is boost your fuel. In other words, have a little fun with it, spice up your food. And number 6 again is hydrate. So some different examples of putting this all together, because yeah, sure, we can put these steps together, but what does that mean? Give me some examples. So one of our examples is our anti-inflammatory golden protein shake, which includes, uh, protein powder for the protein. And then for that Color Fuel, we've got a little bit of banana in there. And for a good quality, healthy fat, we have some coconut butter, which you may not have heard of, but you can also add a little bit of almond butter if you prefer that. And then adding additional fuel, maybe you can add a little bit of extra banana. A good way also to add some extra carbohydrates if you need to in a shake is adding something like beans or like chickpeas. Um, white beans are really great to add. Um, I also like adding oatmeal if that's necessary and then boosting it. Since it is that anti-inflammatory golden protein shake, add just a little bit of turmeric, just a tiny bit of black pepper, and then you can add in some additional ginger, maybe some cinnamon. That's one of my favorites. And all of those ingredients, in addition to some of the milk that you'll use, will help hydrate you too. So that's a really great example. That's in one of our healthy cookbooks, as well as our turmeric cookbook that you can find on our website as well. Another good example is from our kid-friendly cookbook. It's an English muffin breakfast pizza. So English muffin, which is that extra fuel, but the main protein there are eggs and actually adding in a little bit of fruits and veggie vegetables in there with a little bit of salsa. You can certainly add a little bit of sautéed spinach or kale to your eggs. And then, um, the egg already has a little bit of healthy fat already built in. And then that extra fuel again is your English muffin. You could use a bagel if you'd like, you could use a slice of whole wheat toast or gluten-free bread or a good quality wrap if you prefer that. And then boosting your fuel, adding the onions and cilantro and things like that from your salsa, maybe a little bit of, uh, pepper or a little bit of cayenne. I'm a hot sauce fan myself. And then maybe to hydrate alongside that, you've got maybe a cup of coffee or you've got a little bit of water. Some other examples is, um, let's see, a turkey powerhouse sandwich. That's a fun one from our Runner's Cookbook, which is turkey and either alfalfa or broccoli sprouts, which is a good quality color fuel of those sulforaphanes from our brassica family that I talked about earlier. We've got a good quality whole grain bread and some sliced turkey, maybe a little bit of cheese if you'd like that. for a little bit of additional fat and maybe some slices of tomatoes to sort of put all those pieces together. We've got a recipe from our high protein plant-based meal plan, which is a chickpea edamame salad with lemon and dill. It's so good. So our protein there is our edamame. Our color fuel is, it's a salad and it's got additional greens in it. And then some healthy fats. Edamame already has some healthy fats built into it, but then you've also got some extra virgin olive oil in there. As your salad, some extra fuel or additional carbohydrates come from the chickpeas, and then boosting it, you've got that lemon and dill really making it super flavorful. And then hydrate, maybe have a glass of water alongside that. And let's see, another favorite one of mine is our easy salmon poke bowl. Which is from our Healthy Eating Cookbook. And that one is a pretty easy one. Bowls are a great way to follow this system. So picking the powerful protein, in this case, it's salmon. Color Fuel can be something like, uh, you can add in lettuce, you can add in peppers, you can add in carrots, really make it your own. We just give you the recipe as some guidelines. Additional healthy fat, I love sliced avocado with my poke bowl. Extra Fuel, big fan. I'm personally a big fan of adding in some extra like quinoa or brown rice. And then for extra fuel, or excuse me, for boosting your fuel, adding that spice. I, again, I'm a hot sauce fan, but maybe it's sriracha in this case, or maybe it's some, some sesame seeds to kind of add a little bit of color and add a little bit of crunch. Maybe it's some wasabi. That's a really fun one, which is that horseradish that's spicy. And then maybe to go alongside that, you've got a little kombucha to hydrate or a little bit of water. So those are just examples of how to put together our good, healthy, nutritious meals that fuel you not only as an athlete, but also as a human who's doing awesome things. So again, just to reiterate, you can find this guide. It's our guide to high-performance healthy eating on our website. You can also find our hydration guide and other good stuff at our website, theenduranceedge.com. This is Christina Fiumara Newport. and thanks so much for listening. Thanks for listening to the Find Your Edge podcast. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. And if you're interested in learning more about our endurance coaching, sports and wellness nutrition, metabolic and sweat testing, triathlon training team, or our triathlon training library, be sure to check us out at theenduranceedge.com. And don't forget to follow us on social media at the Endurance Edge. Thanks again, and we'll catch you next time.