Trimarni Coaching and Nutrition

One of the most common New Year resolution is weight loss (or changing body composition). If you are feeling dissatisfied with your body, wanting to improve your health or feeling tempted to lose weight fast, you may be thinking that a diet, calorie restriction or extreme exercise is the solution. A desire to lose weight coupled with body dissatisfaction can easily turn unhealthy and dangerous. It's easy to take a diet too far. It's not uncommon for people to make extreme changes - like not eating grains, dairy, sugars and processed foods - severely restricting calories and nutrients all in the name of weight loss. A "diet" may offer quick fixes and a black and white method of dictating what you can and can not eat, but the truth is that these methods are extreme and impossible to maintain in the long term. Plus, they teach you nothing about changing your lifestyle habits which is how long lasting weight loss is achieved. You can take a pill, injection, supplement, pu...

  When it comes to eating, it's not uncommon to have developed a few unhealthy habits over the years. For example, relying too much on caffeine to survive work, using alcohol as a reward after a stressful day or frequent eating out because you forgot to meal prep. When it comes to the New Year, it's not uncommon to want to make a dietary change, especially if there is a desire to change body composition or to lose weight. However, it's not uncommon for athletes and fitness enthusiasts to make radical dietary changes. While short term weight loss may result, fad diets and extreme dietary methods are not linked to long term weight loss or health benefits. Rather, following a fad diet increases the risk of disordered eating which increases the risk of developing an eating disorder. And eating disorders are mental illnesses that have serious physical consequences. If you seek a dietary change for health, performance and/or weight loss, it's important to take a mindful appro...

  Coaches are influential role models for athletes and can impact how athletes perceive and feel in and about their bodies. Unfortunately, as was recently courageously shared by  @skyemoench , it's not uncommon for coaches to focus on appearance over body functionality. Body weight is a sensitive and personal issue yet far too many coaches share a belief that a lower body weight will improve performance. If you are a coach, you have a responsibility to take care of your athlete - physically, emotionally and mentally. Every athlete has his/her own optimal body composition where the body functions the best and this body is achieved through consistent training, nutritious eating and proper fueling and hydration. Acknowledge an athlete’s strengths beyond a look, for an athlete is a human - not an object. Making remarks about body composition and performance (even if well-intentioned) can trigger or exacerbate disordered eating thoughts and behaviors. Having a diverse representatio...

When someone expresses dietary struggles to me, I often hear responses like "I need to be more disciplined" or "I feel so out of control, I need to get back on track." While it's advised to adapt a nutritious diet for health reasons, eating healthier should never become rigid and extreme. And unless you adapt your eating in a way that honors your hunger, makes you feel satiated and aligns with your personal health and activity goals, you may find yourself with a lot of food-related guilt, shame, deprivation, and a feeling of failure from an unstainable style of eating. Signs that your eating style may be too strict include: watching the clock for permission to eat having an off-limit food list only eating conditionally (ex. reward food) developing a fear of "bad" foods avoiding social situations involving food feeling constant hunger difficulty focusing, headaches or lightheadedness avoiding foods that you enjoy eliminating food groups or certain food...

Yesterday was a great day. Karel, me and our friends Carley and Alvi went for a 64 mile gravel ride in Walhalla. The ride included gravel, road, single track and a lot of climbing. The route took us a little over 5 hours and we covered around 7300 feet of elevation. Carley encouraged me to go for one of the QOM climbs - a 9-ish mile gravel climb that took me 48 minutes. It was super tough to stay on Karel's wheel but I was relieved when it was complete (and I secured the queen status - at least for now). As I was riding, I couldn't help but think about how my body was able to perform. I was so tired and sore from the previous week/weekend of training yet my body was continuing to impress me. This got me thinking about how athletes view and treat their bodies, especially as it relates to food.  One of the most common New Year resolutions is losing weight or changing body composition. This is very likely due to diet culture. If you are tempted to lose weight fast, it's easy t...

The holiday season is here and it's filled with family, friends and.....food.  Without a doubt, food is a significant component of every holiday. For anyone who suffers from an eating disorder or an unhealthy relationship with food and the body, this can be a challenging time of the year.  You may not realize it but the holidays bring several triggers that could lead to disordered eating and exercising behaviors. Often times, stress, overwhelm, people pleasing, travel, toxic relationships/family members, uncomfortable conversations and finances can bring on uncomfortable feelings. In order to lessen those emotions, it's easy to resort to food restriction (or dieting). And with restriction often comes binge eating. Overeating from time to time does not mean that you have a binge eating disorder. Fundamentally, binge eating is different from overeating.  Signs and symptoms of binge eating include:  Eating a large amount of food in a short period of time (ex. over 2 ho...

  With so many ways to enhance performance and to optimize health, two of the most popular sought-after strategies include diet and body composition changes. When done correctly, performance may improve. However, it’s not uncommon for athletes to engage in unhealthy weight control methods, resulting in great emotional and physical consequences. Whether for aesthetics, competitive leanness, body dissatisfaction or in pursuit of an ideal “race weight,” athletes often place unrealistic expectations on performance and their bodies. What may start as an innocent attempt to lean-up or to lose a few pounds, can easily spiral out of control, undermining health, training, recovery, performance and mental well-being. If you are a coach, you have a responsibility to take care of your athlete - physically, emotionally and mentally.  When your athlete feels pressure to achieve a leaner body composition, an increased fascination with nutrition, body fat, weight and calories can develop into...

  Have you recently taken healthy eating to the extreme? Have you rid your diet of all processed or non organic food? Has your fear of sugar reached a new level of obsession? Do you put carrots, bananas and raisins in the same "off limit" food list as candy, ice cream and cookies?  Food restriction is a common disordered eating symptom. This avoidance behavior involves setting rigid rules that tell you which foods are "allowed" in your diet and what foods are "off limit."  While calorically-dense foods are the most commonly avoided, fear foods vary from person to person and they may even vary depending on the day. Fear foods are foods that you may feel anxious or uncomfortable eating - thus the reason why they are feared. The fear may come from thoughts of how this food may affect your weight or body composition, how this food may affect how you feel about your body or any past negative experiences from a food. With no underlying medical, ethical or religi...

In the midst of a global health crisis, now is a perfect time to make health and nutrition a priority. But in our body-image obsessed culture - supported by a multibillion-dollar industry that profits from body dissatisfaction, the idealized body image, dieting and fear of fat, this can be incredibly difficult as there's nothing healthy about our diet culture. Sadly, weight loss and body image are still a priority for many in a global health crisis. The diet culture is constantly reminding you that you are not good enough at your current weight and being a bit thinner or more toned will improve your health and happiness. If self-isolation and stay-at-home orders are becoming a real challenge in managing your mental health as it relates to your body image, consider that no amount of dieting or extreme exercise will make this pandemic less scary or will improve your mental well-being. Restriction, purging, bingeing, obsession, rigidity or "clean eating" only provide...

→You recently watched a documentary and you are convinced vegan is the right diet for you.  →You've been following the recent health and fitness trends on social media and you are convinced that carbs are evil and keto is the way to go.  →You are ready, more than ever before, to get your diet under control and to get yourself back into good health. Starting tomorrow, you will eliminate all dairy, gluten, sugar, sodium and processed food.  If you are considering a change in your diet, you are not alone. Whether it's for weight loss, body composition changes, health, self-confidence or mental well-being, you may feel that a significant change in your diet is exactly what you need right now in your life. Unfortunantly, a healthy and well-balanced diet is not something that can be rushed. For long term success, quick fix diets are not the answer. In such a food and body obsessed society, dietary extremism seems like the norm. Radical, overnight changes often stem fro...

Unhealthy weight control/loss practices are a serious and ongoing problem in sport, especially in aesthetic and weight-bearing sports, like running and triathlon. Too often, athletes are pressured by media, coaches and competitors to change body composition in order to boost performance. There's the mentality that you have to be thin to wind. But if losing weight was a guarantee to performance improvements, why don't more athletes excel at sport after they experience some type of weight loss? Many athletes are told (or assume) that they would be more successful in a sport if they lost weight or changed body composition. Regardless of the performance outcome, athletes who are asked or told to lose weight.change body composition are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors such as fasted workouts, skipping meals, replacing higher calorie foods for calorie-free/diet foods, fasting/cleansing/detoxing, using weight loss supplements, diuretics or laxatives and/or overexe...

How many times have you fallen victim to the dieting trap? -Restrict food to try to lose weight or to gain control over food choices. -Feel deprived. -Crave foods you are restricting. -Feel miserable, isolated or confused. -Give into temptation and eat off-limit food. -Mentally beat yourself up for eating something you shouldn't be eating and think "What the heck. I failed again so I may as well eat it all." -Feel guilty, uncomfortable and anxious. Become overly critical of your body. Feel like a failure. Get angry. Blame yourself for not having willpower. -Binge eat or give up on the diet and go back to your old ways of eating. -Begin the cycle again. If you are one of the 45 million Americans who go on a diet each year, please keep these important reminders in mind when you consider a new/popular diet as a new way of eating. Dieting affects your self-esteem. You don't fail at dieting, the diet fails you. Diets severly restrict your food choices, making you feel ...

In many sports, it is considered beneficial to achieve a leaner body composition for locomotive efficiency — in other words, the less you weigh, the easier it is to move your body. Within the sport of triathlon, triathletes are not immune to this mindset and will often manipulate the diet in order to achieve a lower body fat percentage. Although there are safe and healthy ways to change body composition, triathletes can be very rigid and inflexible with their thoughts and actions. When a driven, perfectionistic, competitive, achievement-oriented triathlete is constantly exposed to diet discussions, advertisements, articles, endorsements and images on social media, a general interest in weight loss may manifest into an unhealthy obsession. With so many ways to enhance performance and to optimize health, two of the most popular sought-after strategies by athletes include diet and body composition changes. When done correctly, performance may improve. However, it’s not uncommon for a...

You are not alone. Everyone has that day when your stomach feels blah and you just want to feel better in your own skin. It's important to acknowledge that your body will change shape throughout the day. Sadly, there's no instant fix that will immediately change the way that your body looks or feels. In other words - don't restrict food and overexercise in order to try to escape this uncontrollable feeling. When you eat, the shape of your digestive tract changes. Your stomach may protrude and as your body breaks down food, you will retain water, develop gas and produce stool. This can all contribute to feeling bloated, "big" or heavy. Your physical weight (not body fat) can also increase due to constipation, sodium, water, hormones, exercise and medications. To optimize digestion, we want to be in a relaxed state - rest and digest. For athletes, this can be rather difficult as our body becomes rather stressed during (or in the hours after) a workout - fi...

The other day I received an email from a former Trimarni athlete who asked my thoughts about a product called Tofu Shirataki Spaghetti.  This athlete has been working on losing weight and regaining a healthy lifestyle and is looking for a gluten-free pasta alternative. At first glance, this looks like a delicious protein-rich noodle option. But when reviewing the ingredients, you'll quickly realize that there's not much to this product.  Water, soybeans, yam flour, calcium hydroxide, glucono delta lactone, calcium sulfate.   While the intention was good, with only 10 calories per serving (and less than 1g protein), I told the athlete that I don't feel this is the best "pasta" alternative. First of all, I can't see how this product would be satisfying. Secondly, I don't see much nutritional value in this factory-made concoction.  The athlete then mentioned if spiralized noodles would be a good option in place of pasta. While offering a good dose...

It's getting closer to that time of the year. New Year diet fads.  The start of the year (after the holiday season) is typically the time when people begin to "finally" get serious about the diet, in hopes of improving health, changing body composition, losing weight or getting rid of unhealthy lifestyle habits. While there's nothing wrong with a New Year Resolution, there's the tendency to take the wrong approach to changing your eating habits. Your old diet gets demolished instead of making a small renovation. You may be wondering why I am bringing up this topic right now in early November. Well, relationships with food are complex, especially for athletes. Whether the focus is on health, appearance or performance (or a combination of all three), focusing too much on your diet and/or body image can become harmful to your health. There's never a wrong time to talk about your current relationship with food and the body. I love my diet. It's easy...

Since my first Ironman in 2006, I've developed a strong connection to my body. Rather than seeing it for what it looks like, I constantly thank my body for what it allows me to do. While it's not easy in a body-image obsessed society, Karel and I spend no time discussing body image in our house. We don't weigh ourselves so we couldn't tell you what our "race weight" was at any of our past races.  There's no dieting, restrictive eating, watching what we eat or cheat meals. I'd say that our house is a very good place if you'd like to eat where there are no food rules, off-limit foods or controversial food discussions. While our dedication to sport, love for an active lifestyle and enjoyment for wholesome eating greatly influences the way we look, we have never fallen victim to the idea of "competitive leanness"  - that the leaner we are, the more competitive (or faster) we will be in sport. We've never tried to change the way that ...