Nutrition Tips

Hi all,

We had a great nutrition talk with Kathy Castrejon, from Nourishment Works. Kathy gave our athletes time to write down what they knew about nutrition and they didn’t disappoint! That being said, there were a few myths to bust and throughout the talk it became clearer that many of our athletes are not eating enough!

Kathy is my current nutritionist and has helped me with my relationship with food tremendously. I, like most others, put morality on food, labeling them “good”, “bad”, “junk”, “healthy”, etc. which lead to restrictive eating, binging and lots of food guilt.

Kathy specializes in this area and encouraged our athletes to drop this behavior while listening to their body and what it needs. We discussed how to round out meals with protein, carbohydrates and fruits/veggies. Focusing on adding in foods that make us feel good and nourish our body instead of foods we should take away. Here is a document that discusses building a balanced plate that Kathy shared with us. For any of our vegetarian athletes, this document can help!

A lot of our discussion centered around properly fueling for the amount of activity that our athletes undergo. Here is a document that explains what is necessary for our athletes to be successful in the weight room, pool and during school. The biggest takeaway from our talk was that our girls are not eating enough. Many of them are struggling to get in meals after practice in the morning and do not bring enough to eat in between breakfast and lunch and lunch and swimming in the afternoon.

Brendan and I encourage our athletes to pack a full breakfast for after practice, a full lunch and two snacks that include some protein and carbs to have in between breakfast and lunch and lunch and afternoon practice. Even if they do not swim in the afternoon, they should bring a snack to have at the end of the school day. This may seem like a lot of food, but our athletes are constantly burning calories and often showing up in the afternoon hungry, tired, or not feeling well, all of which can be linked to under-eating.

We will have a follow up session with Kathy for all groups that I am really looking forward to! We’ll have an opportunity to check in about what we learned from this first session and go over other topics like body image and body neutrality.