Diet culture leaves us thinking that the only reason to work out is to shrink our bodies. The messaging is constantly about losing weight, dropping dress sizes, and it is affecting your health more than you may realize. Fueling your body, no matter how much of an athlete you are, is incredibly important.
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In this episode, I’m talking to Steph Gaudreau, NTP, a nutritional therapy, intuitive eating, and strength training expert helping women who lift weights fuel themselves better so they get stronger, increase their energy, and perform better in the gym.
We discuss:
How strength training changed her relationship with fitness.
The many reasons active women don’t eat enough.
Outdated fitness philosophies that just need to go.
The various ways that under-eating is affecting your health.
How weight lifting expands your life outside of the gym.
… and more!
Connect with our guest:
Website: stephgaudreau.com
Listen to Your Body Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/listen-to-your-body-podcast/id999471212
Get the FREE Off The Couch Starter Pack here: https://robinlegat.com/byecouch
Here are some highlights.
Under fueling can happen at any activity level
“Why is there so much struggle with even the concept of eating enough food to fuel our training? Where does that come from? It comes from a dieting background, and a dieting mentality. So how do we use evidence-based practices to break through some of that stuff? Maybe even understand it on a more logical level that you have to eat enough. And if you think that this is something that only people at elite levels of sport deal with, or you think ‘I'm not a competitor, it doesn't really matter,’ Me, I don't compete, I'm just a casual exerciser or recreational exercise, or there was a 2016 study that came out of New Zealand, and they surveyed recreational women athletes or recreational women exercises, I should say, and almost half of them were at risk for low energy availability, which means essentially not eating enough food for the amount of activity that you're doing. and that potentially has some serious results... Some serious consequences to it. So it can happen at any level.”
Anyone can be susceptible to relative energy deficiency in sport
“Anyone can be susceptible to this and in particular, what we're looking at are things like unfavorable changes in metabolism. So in a colloquial sense, it would be like your metabolism is “slowing down”, muscle loss, strength and power loss, bone density issues, you name it, there are many consequences, mood and energy changes, increased mental health issues. So if you're somebody who's more vulnerable or susceptible to mental health challenges, seeing that those actually can be is exacerbated by that, issues with reproductive hormones and so on and so forth, so this stuff has wide-ranging implications on your physiology and on your body.”
How strength training changed her relationship with fitness
“I went from somebody who was hyper-focused on being a specific weight, a specific leanness, shrinking my body to a specific size. I was so focused on that, even though I wanted to be better at racing, I really believed that the way to get better at racing was to achieve that kind of a body. And when I started lifting weights, I truly started focusing on what my body could do regardless of my weight and my size.”
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