I feel very fortunate that my body has no food intolerances or allergies. Same for Karel. We both love trying new foods as well as enjoying a varied diet to help fuel our active lifestyle and nourish our body. We emphasize real food as much as possible but by no means are we strict with our diet or do we have an off food limit list when it comes to our occasional indulgences or treats.
Alongside several years of working as a clinical RD, I have worked with many athletes and fitness enthusiasts on nutrition and sport nutrition for there are many people who are not so lucky for they have to restrict a variety of foods for clinical and health reasons.
I believe that my love for real food has kept my body in good health over the past 1/2 of a decade. Without a sickness, cold or flu since the early summer of 2007, my immune system has stayed incredibly strong thanks to a wide variety of vitamins and minerals in my diet and an incredibly healthy relationship with food.
I love helping athletic individuals tailor their diet in order to meet individual health needs but it always requires a bit of work to ensure that no deficiencies arise in the modification of the diet in hopes for the athlete to feel healthy again (or healthier).I am happy to share the hard work with my athletes to figure out the perfect diet for their needs for when performance is suffering because of the diet or sport nutrition, there is nothing more gratifying that putting the nutritional pieces together to unlock great performances and to improve overall health.
When it comes to performance gains, I believe that the more varied of a diet, the more opportunities an athlete has to improve fitness potential for great performances are not built on just dialing in sport nutrition during training and training hard but ensuring that the body is healthy and well to tolerate intentional training stress.
Certainly there are many other variable that make a positive difference in consistent training like sleep, stretching, strength training and stress management but that's a whole separate blog post.
Most of my life has been spent as a plant strong athlete.
22 years of fueling my active lifestyle and nourishing my body with food grown from Mother Earth.
Yes, there are some products I consume made in a factory but my vegetarian diet has a foundation built on food grown from plants (in some way or another).
While in Czech I had the most incredible time visiting Karel's mom's garden. We walked to the garden from Karel's flat and along the way, I found myself walking into plant strong heaven.
Words can not describe these pictures and the happiness I felt as I grabbed apricots from the trees, munched on red currents in a bush and picked potatoes and green beans from the ground to be used in soup for lunch the next day.
Thank you Mother Earth for the many delicious foods that you provide us all to help fuel and nourish our bodies!
