Five Essential Nutrition Tips for Optimal Health Ep 79

Every endurance athlete remembers the moment when things finally click. Your swim feels smoother, your pacing makes sense, your fueling works, and suddenly the sport feels not only easier, but more fun. And for many athletes, that moment happens at training camp. That's exactly why we created the Endurance Edge Triathlon Training Camp happening April 22nd through 26th at Lake Jocassee in South Carolina. For 4 incredible days, you'll train in a small group with expert coaches, sports nutrition support, and sports psychology guidance, all designed to help you train smarter, race stronger, and finally connect the dots in your performance. We swim in crystal clear mountain water, ride beautiful and challenging roads, run scenic trails, and spend the rest of the time recovering, learning, laughing, and eating some seriously amazing chef-prepared food. Mm-hmm. Camp is intentionally small, just 20 athletes, so you get real coaching, true connection, and amazing breakthroughs. So if you want an experience that can transform your entire season, we invite you to join us. Head to theenduranceedge.com and click training camp and reserve your spot with just a $100 deposit. Come train hard, learn a ton, and leave stronger than you ever imagined. I'll see you there. Hey y'all, and welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast. I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. Today is all about 5 things as we head into the new year that we can do for our nutrition to best treat ourselves. So before I jump into that, there's a couple of things that I wanted to share first. Number 1 is our digestive system. So our digestive system is basically one big tube from your mouth down to your anus, right? We've got all of the things that are going on in order for your body to assimilate the nutrients that you actually take in and eat. And the reason why this is important is because when you chew your food or swallow it— let's say you had a smoothie or something, it's already been chewed— goes to our stomach. And in our stomach, that's where we have this additional level of acid that's really important for digestion, especially for breaking down proteins and for assimilating certain nutrients, in particular vitamin B12 and iron. And then all of that is sent to your small intestines, and that's where a good majority of our nutrient absorption occurs. And after we've done that and it's gone through that whole process, then we send it to our large intestines, and that's where we start to create stool and where we have what's called a Bristol stool scale. The quality of your stool indicates the quality of your digestion and what's going on with your body. And the reason why I say this is that nutrition is not in a silo in itself. Nutrition is a part of the whole person. And I'm gonna introduce you guys to this really interesting acronym that I learned about from Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar. He's a Harvard professor, actually the most popular professor there and the author of Happier. But before we get into that, knowing that your digestive system is affected by a lot of things and also it's on the lowest rung of your body's necessities. So your body, and this ties into your resting metabolic rate, or your RMR. Your resting metabolic rate is the metabolism or the amount of energy that your body needs in order to keep certain things functioning. Highest on the list, your brain, obviously. Your heart, your lungs, your liver. Man, that liver is an energy suck. It's like 20 to 30% of your energy needs. Same with your brain. And then we also have to have our kidneys. And then as we go lower down the rung, now we have things like skeletal muscle or that lean body mass that helps you pick up that heavy weight or ride or run or whatever it is, pick up your grandkids. So we've got that. And then we also have our digestive system. That's really lowest on the priority list. The higher things, again, brain, heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. Those are the necessities that we have to stay alive. And the reason why you are— I wanted to bring this up is because you have nervous systems that are operating in a certain way to be able to best optimize your survival. So if we're in a constant stressed place, or if we're chronically stressed out, the body thinks that it's running from a tiger. But it also obviously doesn't know that we have evolved— we really haven't evolved, I should say. But now instead of running from a tiger, we're on a deadline for that specific project, or our kids are upset, or we're trying figure out finances, any number of things that can get us stressed out. But your body doesn't know the difference. And when it is tapped into that sympathetic nervous system, that's where your body is really trying to do the fight, flight, or freeze. So it has to attack something. So it's gotta have that heart going, it's gotta have that blood sugar up, it's gotta keep your brain going, right? But when we tap into our parasympathetic nervous system, and here's kind of a fun way that I like to think of this. You might know the sympathetic nervous system is the fight, flight, or freeze, and the parasympathetic is what a lot of people like to say, rest and digest. In my third grade brain, I like to think of it, parasympathetic is my poop system. And that also makes everybody sort of relax and sigh a little bit when I talk about those things. And they're like, oh, okay, it's okay. This is an approachable topic. We're all doing it. It's okay. But if we are constantly on alert, or if we're shoving food in our face while we're in our car, or we're barely even pausing to have a meal, your body is still stressed out when you're trying to digest. It's not going to digest as optimally as possible and therefore serve your brain health, serve your mental health, serve your physical health because of all the stress that we're under because we're not able to truly tap into that parasympathetic nervous system when we eat in order to appropriately recover, rest, digest, and poop. Like I always tell my clients and I tell my kids, we gotta have brown bananas and brown bananas every single day. So just as a little reward for you guys, I will, uh, attach the Bristol stool scale so that you can actually see what should my poop look like, because that really is an indicator of the health of your digestive system and in turn the health of so many other things. The health of your skin. If you're somebody who has psoriasis or somebody who has chronic acne, this matters. If you're somebody who has brain fog a lot or your hormones are often— it's tied into your ability to digest and digest quality foods. All right, so I wanted to make sure that understanding the process of digestion and then that ties into what you actually need to do strategically and tactically for getting proper nutrition every day. All right, so these are some of the things that I would love if you guys made these into sticky habits. We talk all about that in our 21-Day Nutrition Reset Challenge, so check it out. It's only $57. We start officially on the 1st, but if you don't jump in until the 5th, no problem. We've got live calls, accountability calls, recipes, meal plans. This is all about resetting your gut and teaching you how to digest properly with good quality habits. All right, so theenduranceedge.com/challenge. All right, so number 1 on our nutrition list, and this is something that is so heavily neglected, but we're always leaning into other things like, oh, can I take a pill? Can I take a supplement to fix that? You cannot fix hydration. You have to do it every single day. I'm sorry that it's not more automated or something that we can't just not think about. But we got them. All right, so hydration is really crucial. So if you're sipping on your cup of coffee right now, I want you to pause, put that down, go grab a drink of water and have some of that. Your kidneys are the most efficient and effective at doing what they're doing, which is clearing out the toxins from your blood, sending them to the kidneys, and then down into the bladder and obviously out. It is the most efficient in the first 10 hours of the day. That's the really critical time, and that's probably when you might also be working or working out and kind of busier Therefore, we sort of get in, we perhaps get into that flow state, or we have perhaps get a little distracted doing other things, and then we don't think about our hydration. So I get that. That's more of a behavioral challenge and how can we optimize that opportunity to get your hydration. Ideally, this is from water, but I cannot tell you the number of people who have told me that they don't like water. So I would encourage you to try to find a water you like. That might sound ridiculous, but it is truly a thing. Our palates are sensitive to the way things taste, obviously, and some of us are supertasters. Google that one. It's a really fun one to go down that rabbit hole. If you're somebody who doesn't like a lot of vegetables or you're very sensitive to bitter, you're probably a supertaster. But getting our water in a way that tastes good to us is really key. And this shouldn't be in soda. I really hesitate for some of those little like drink packets or things like that. If you can go more pure, that's just what your body is intended to do. Try different filtered waters, try different kinds of seltzers even. There's a lot of different options, but one way or the other, we gotta get that in you and hopefully within the first 10 hours of your waking time. That's when your brain is so optimally functioning, not only for your work or your workouts or your family or whatever it is that you are doing where you need that brain health. This is where hydration comes in, and it's one of the easiest and quickest things that you can do for your health. All right, so that's number one. Number two, and I've seen this time and time again, generally speaking, We don't get enough protein. And when I say protein, that can mean there can be a lot of things that come up for people. So I was just having a conversation with one of my athletes this morning about, oh yeah, you know, I weigh X amount and I'm getting Y amount of grams of protein. Isn't that right? But you know, I'm not losing weight. Is that because I'm eating too much of the other things? And the answer is probably yes, but one way or the other, we're not focusing on all of these other things for the moment. One way or the other, I wanna make sure that you're getting enough good quality, full profile of amino acids, essential amino acids, protein sources. So you can get a whole list of both plant-based and animal-based protein sources that goes through all of these things that I'm talking about today over at our website. It's our High Performance Healthy Eating Nutrition Guide. You can download it for free. It will also be included in the challenge so you can get that there. It's like a cheat sheet showing you what foods have what amounts of protein and what are the quality sources that I wanna be going after. Generally speaking, when it comes to protein, I like to see you, those folks out there who are either endurance athletes or who are exercising and working on their fitness for a lifetime of wellness. And if that's not your goal, maybe we're not the right channel for you, and that's okay too. But what I'm thinking is I want you to be healthy and strong for a lifetime of activity. So I want you to be that 71-year-old person who's in my strength training classes right now, picking up a barbell and kettlebells and doing all those amazing, amazing things. Yes, you can. You can totally do that. I wanna see you being the person who knows how to get up off the toilet, and we literally do this in our strength training classes. Sitting on a bench and practicing how do we get up properly? How do we make sure we've got appropriate mobility and strength in our soleus muscles, our gastrocnemius, our quadriceps, et cetera, in order to function not only now, which you might be middle-aged, you might not be, I don't know, but thinking long-term. And that's generally what we as humans are not really that great at. And that's okay. That's really what we weren't bred for. We're really bred to think about what's happening in the here and now and how can I protect myself and how can I survive. But thinking long term, I wanna make sure from a protein perspective, and I know a lot of peo— a lot of people don't think in grams, so hang with me here if you don't think this way. I like to see that generally speaking, we're getting anywhere between 1.5 and 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Now take your, if you think in pounds, take your body weight in pounds, divide it by 2.2, that is how many kilograms you are. And then you multiply that by 1.5 or even upwards of 2. Usually, especially for my ladies, generally speaking, usually when I tell them these numbers, they are extremely overwhelmed. There's no way that I could get that much. You would be surprised, you guys. You can do really amazing things. And if you are going to make a change, you have to make a change. So that's one place to start. And maybe you start on the lower end and you work your way up and kind of find a happy place for you. But that is key if you're looking to build lean mass, if you're looking to lose body fat, if you're looking to perform optimally, this is where we want to be from a protein perspective. So that's number 2 on the list. Number 3 on the list, and these are general nutrition things that you can do to function optimally from now until the end of your life and be as active as possible. That's what I'm thinking of here, nutrition for longevity. That one thing, and this isn't like fancy supplements or, oh my gosh, there's so many different rabbit holes to go down in nutrition. Let's just zoom out a little bit. We gotta get our fiber. Ideally, can we get it from whole unprocessed foods? What's an easy place to start? Fruit and vegetables. Okay. Whole fruits and whole vegetables if possible. And you can throw 'em in a smoothie. They're still whole. They've just been pre-chewed in a way. Other things that can give you good quality fiber, in particular really focusing on some of those prebiotic fibers. Those are some of the fibers that you can't necessarily digest until it gets to your large intestines. And then we are requiring or asking our microbiome to have certain bacterias proliferate in order to digest and break down some of these foods. So things like onions, garlic, artichokes, asparagus. There's a whole nother list. You'll get them if you join the challenge. Again, that's sandraansedge.com/challenge. It's only $57. There's so much information, you guys, in there. I like— I'm so stoked about this program. It's going to be awesome. So we know with fiber, especially our crucifers, there's another one that I'm going to hand out to you. Those are your cauliflowers, your broccolis, your kale, collards, the things that basically if you overcook them, it's probably gonna stink up the entire house. Like, no lie, right? 'Cause all of that sulfur compound is coming out. You want that in. So all that glucuronidase, all that sulforaphane, that is superpower foods. Seriously, it is so amazing, especially as we have gotten into working with genetic testing and seeing certain individuals who have a harder time with their detoxification category, which is tied to quite a few SNPs, or genetic SNPs. So some of these folks really need to focus on this, but those are getting your crucifers on a daily basis, just like you would get a vitamin. Okay? You can have it in a salad, you can have them microwaved, steamed, raw, and you're gonna get a ton of recipes as part of that challenge if you join us. But there are quite a few other ways that you can get fiber. One of my favorite ways is beans. I'm a daily bean a day kind of gal. There's other ways that you can get fiber, but you have to poop every single day. That is your body's— one of your body's natural detoxification methods. That is where we remove toxins from your body, and that's one of your liver's main jobs, and your kidneys too. But your liver, man, that sucker is amazing. But again, it uses 20 to 30% of your resting metabolic rate in order to do its job. It is on overload, and There's so many different toxins that we're exposed to on a regular basis, and most of it is out of our control. A lot of it is out of our control. So why not help yourself out as much as possible? Drink that water, which is gonna help you poop, and also get enough fiber. Remember y'all, brown bananas. I know you're gonna be telling all your friends, Chris said that I have to have brown bananas in the toilet. Yes, please. All right, so enough about fiber. Another one that we wanna focus on, and it kind of alluded to, I kind of alluded to this a little bit in our protein, um, one. Portions. So this is one that kind of ties into our bonus tip, which is self-awareness. There's so many different things that we do from a nutrition perspective that we don't even realize. So self-awareness is massive. Portions are also key. It's ideal if you consume your food off of the same plate on a regular basis. That gives your eyes something to have some sort of relational comparison when you're eating your food. Your— we call them performance plates. So that's how we want your plate to look in terms of how much protein do you have, how much fruit or vegetables, how much, you know, additional carbohydrates or other things do you have on your plate, and what should that look like based on if you have a heavy training day, if you have a rest and recovery day, if you're trying to lose weight. So you'll, again, you'll get access to that in our challenge, 21-Day Nutrition Reset Challenge, enduranceedge.com/challenge. Only $57. I will beat a dead horse because, you guys, it is— this is like, I'm so excited about this challenge because I am trying to help you make nutrition simpler. And it totally can be because, listen, you deserve boundless energy. And that's one of the things that nutrition can do for you. It can improve your skin health, it can improve your brain health, it can improve your mental health. It can improve your digestive health. It can improve your physical health because, duh, we want to be amazing athletes or fitness people so that we can live as long as we possibly can having an active life. If that's something that you value, come join our challenge. So with portions, we want to make sure it doesn't necessarily matter in terms of like percentage of carbs or percentage of fat unless we're getting a little bit more nitty-gritty into menopause or PCOS or folks who are having a hard time losing weight, then I'm gonna look a little bit more maybe into the nitty-gritty of what's going on with your blood sugar because higher blood sugar can lead to higher levels of inflammation. How do we need to arrange your portions? But one way or the other, if somewhere around 30 to 50% of your plate is full of protein and a good maybe half or so of your plate is full of vegetables and then you have a small amount of additional carbohydrates, assuming that you're not doing training for ultra runs right now or training for Ironman, cuz that is where you're gonna need some additional carbohydrates. But generally speaking, that's what we wanna shoot for as it relates to portions. We never wanna be eating until we're stuffed and never wanna be eating until we're overfull. But I will say this is probably the more complicated part of nutrition. Because again, I'm tying that into self-awareness, but also into genetics. And that's some of the things that we see in genetic testing is the propensity for a larger appetite. And I can totally commiserate with all of you who have that because I have it too. It's one of those things that I'm like, where is my next meal? I'm always thinking about what, you know, it's like, hey, you want to go out for this? Oh, absolutely. I could eat pretty much any time. Unless I have really worked on consuming my protein and consuming my fiber and getting plenty of water in order to blunt that stimulus that says to my brain, you need to eat. So there is a hormonal cycle between leptin, ghrelin, and your brain that happens that is stimulated by your fat cells and by your stomach that says, hey, we're good, or hey, I need some more food. So some of that we see genetically, and then other things, as it ties into self-awareness, is there are so many different things like habits. Like when you walk into your office and there's a candy dish, you might just habitually walk by it and grab a piece. You may not even want it, or you might, I don't know, but it's like, okay, it's a habit. Or what about your degree of hunger? Like, how hungry are we? We kind of want to stay in this sort of middle ground of our hunger scale, if you will. But then there's sitting down for a Thanksgiving meal. Your habit might be to fill up this massive plate. Your habit might be to have 2 pieces of pie. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just a habit, right? Eventually it might become a bad thing if we're gaining too much weight or if our blood sugar is out of whack. Then we might need to do some additional addressing there. but also thinking about, do you eat when you're bored? Do you eat when you're sad? We like to call it here eating your feelings. It is especially crucial, or something that I should say that we see more in the boomer and the Gen X and a little bit into the millennial generations, is the clean plate club. Eating until your food is empty, or your, excuse me, your plate is empty. That was just One of the habits that we were trained to— we were also not really trained to have great emotional awareness. You know, say for example, if our parents put us into timeout when we're being bad or acting poorly, we were asked to deal with our emotions, to deal with our feelings instead of explaining them or understanding what's going on with us. We were asked to sit in a corner and deal with our feelings that way. So we have been trained, and I'm not saying that was you necessarily, I'm just giving you an example, but we have been trained to not deal with our emotions. So I'm going to introduce you to this acronym here shortly where you're going to see how this ties in. We are not necessarily trained to sit in our emotions, but interestingly, the people who sit in their emotions more tend to be happier. But when we're sitting into uncomfortable emotions, we want that quick dopamine rush, and typically something sugary, fatty, or salty is gonna get us there, at least in the short term. So things like potato chips, things like ice cream, things like chocolate, or just generally having a meal because we're lonely or we're sad. So these are some of the things that we wanna dive into, and I think that's the perfect segue to get into this acronym. Again, it was created by Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar. He's the author of Happier. He's the most popular professor at Harvard, which is really amazing, and he has this model of wellness as a whole. So his acronym is SPIRE, S-P-I-R-E, and this really resonated with me in terms of how I could bring it to you from a nutritional perspective, is that again, nutrition is not just in its own little silo. So starting off with the first, the S is for spiritual, the P is for physical, the I is for intellectual, the R is for relational, and the E is for emotional. So how many of us have some sort of spiritual connection? And I don't necessarily mean, are you religious? It doesn't have to have anything to do with it, although you can be spiritually connected via religion. But is this— are you truly living your purpose? Are you here and doing what you are intended to do? Are you acting thoroughly through your core values? The physical, of course, is the things that we're talking about today. Are you getting enough? Are you getting good quality nutrition? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you getting your exercise? Intellectual, are you stimulating your brain in a way that is helping you learn new things? Relational is how are you connected to others around you, including yourself? How well are you relating to yourself? How well are you treating yourself? How well are you talking to yourself? Is that self-talk productive, or is it breaking you down? Because the thoughts that you have, and certainly the words that come out of your mouth that are self-deprecating, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's going to come back to you. But if we can flip that coin and relate to ourselves better, we are going to ask and invite in good things to happen to us. And this is also relating to our community, relating to our family, relating to our kids, relating to The folks at the gym. This is even relating to the stranger on the street. Can you offer a smile? Uh, when you're at races, for example, the things that were coming up for me, can you give a high five? Can you say good job? Can you say go or go get 'em to just that random person out there who might need you at the right time? And the last thing is emotional. That's that last letter in the acronym. How are you connecting to your emotions? and you might be shoving them away. We're just bringing some awareness to that. But like I said, the people who sit in their emotions, even when they are uncomfortable, tend to be happier. It's amazing. So tapping into those things, for example, if you're having a harder emotion and because of it you're eating, so not necessarily beating yourself up in the moment, but just self-awareness is the first step. So again, knowing that if we're truly addressing our emotions and the spiritual and physical emotional, relational, intellectual, all of these pieces at a whole, we're gonna not only nurture our bodies and our nervous systems, which if we're addressing our nervous system and giving ourselves that parasympathetic poop system, right? Our opportunity to rest and digest, you are better going to be able to take in that good quality nutrition and translate it to doing amazing things, to feeling better, to having clearer skin, and tying that into those nutrition pieces that I told you about already. Hydrating appropriately, getting enough protein. And when I say getting enough protein, I mean getting it in at least 2 meals across the day, not just one, cuz you're gonna be incredibly hard-pressed to get enough protein and then also to not be overfull, right? We don't wanna train our bodies to, to think that way, but getting enough fiber, making sure that we have appropriate portions, and then tuning into ourselves, having that self-awareness and thinking of nutrition as as part of a whole body wellness solution where we're taking care of ourselves so that we can operate and really do amazing things. Because listen, you are a stellar and phenomenal human being who is stronger than you think you are. I really and truly believe in you to do amazing things. So if you want to join me and my team on this 21-day nutrition reset challenge in order to get meal plans recipes, resetting your gut. It's really not a fad. This is all about reducing overall inflammation, resetting your neurotransmitters, your dopamine, and all of those good neurotransmitters that contribute to good mental health. We're even going to tie this into your values and your goals so that you can have a healthier 2025. Also have a better relationship with eating and with food. And again, tying it into that whole person model. All right, so hopefully you got a lot out of this. I would love to see you in the challenge. It's, again, it's only $57, 21-day nutrition reset challenge. Check it out, theenduranceedge.com/challenge, and save your spot there. I cannot wait to meet you. I cannot wait to guide you on our accountability calls. We've got a kitchen detox call, we've got a goal setting call with our sports psychologist. It's gonna be so good, y'all. I cannot wait to see you there. Thank you again for listening. You are amazing, and I look forward to catching you next year. 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.