EAT MORE TO RUN MORE - ARE YOU FUELLING YOUR BODY ENOUGH?
We’ve invited Georgie Buckely to write about the importance of food and running, especially for beginners.
Georgie has been a runner since little athletics days and is now an Accredited Practising Dietitian & PhD Candidate exploring athlete’s relationship with food and body image. Over to you Georgie…
Becoming a runner is an exciting time. We start to build up our training, set ambitious goals, buy the right shoes and watch our kilometre pace get gradually quicker and quicker. Yet, as we are training our bodies to become faster and stronger, we often forget about one of the most important things…
Let’s put it this way. I want you to imagine your body is a car and in this instance you’re able to travel from Melbourne to Geelong quite comfortably. You are building up each week to be able to tackle further distances and with more efficiency. Your ultimate goal is to be able to drive from Melbourne to Sydney. As you increase the amount of mileage you do, you need to keep fuelling the car with more and more petrol, right? See where I’m going with this?
When we start running, the initial excitement fuels a great sense of motivation; we tick off each session and start to feel ourselves get stronger and more comfortable in our running bodies. We initially come to running for a variety of reasons. Perhaps to want to get fitter for footy pre-season, lose some weight, change our body composition or clear our minds from the stresses of daily living. Yet, somewhere along the way we start to appreciate how running makes us feel independent of these initial aspirations.
It is for this very reason, we no longer want to just hit that 5km goal and go back to normal life. We instead want to develop a lifelong relationship with running and more importantly, the way running makes us feel good about our bodies. In fostering this long term relationship with running, we want to nurture our bodies and give them the fuel and nutrition they need.
Often when the word ‘nutrition’ is bandied around we think; vitamin C, probiotics, vegetables, antioxidants, anti-inflammatory foods and protein powder. Whilst some of these things might have an incredibly important function, arguably the most important thing about nutrition is the energy we consume that sustains our heart, lungs, brain, muscles and all our physiological functions. I.e. our fuel (or our petrol). Did you know that our brain alone needs the carbohydrate equivalent of 3 x cups of pasta each day?
You would be forgiven for being confused in this diet culture world that we live in. Low calorie snacks are often conflated as health products. When really, a low calorie snack is just that… lower in carbohydrates, protein and fats – neither good nor bad, just lower in energy. A lower calorie snack might not be helpful when we need to fuel our bodies. Think back to our analogy; buying petrol lower in petrol isn’t going to help us get from Melbourne to Sydney more efficiently.
The key to fuelling and knowing how much energy you need is by tuning in to your body’s cues. Sure, there are apps that can estimate our energy intake each day but often they can be miles off. And there’s nothing fun or pleasant about underestimating how much we need to eat in a day (hellooo hangry!).
The best tool we have is the wisdom inside our own bodies. Have you ever thought about how helpful your hunger and fullness cues are? Our bodies are pretty incredible - we get a sensation in our bodies when we need to eat, i.e. when our bodies are telling us we need more energy, and we get a sensation in our bodies when we have had enough. The better we get at tuning in with what our body’s need, the better we are able to provide our body’s with the energy and nourishment they are signalling for. Note: don’t underestimate how much of a skill this is and how disconnected we can be from it.
Sounds pretty great, right? However sometimes it’s not that simple. When we ignore what our body is telling us (sometimes for years at a time) we forget how good we are at listening to what our body has to say. We often see this with eating disorders, disordered eating or people who have been on diets. All of these things train us to disconnect from our own hunger and fullness cues. Think about restrictive diets where you can only have a certain allocation of calories each day. What happens when you get hungry, yet your calories have been used up for the day? That’s right, you’re forced to ignore your hunger cues and push past it. Over time, your body gets good at ignoring your hunger cues and it gets more and more confusing to know when you need to eat and when you’re full. Your physiological functions also start to become compromised; injuries happen more frequently, you become tired or sick more easily and don’t recover as well.
Running makes it a little more complex too. When we train, our body is really clever at redistributing its resources (energy, blood and oxygen) to our muscles, lungs and heart to enable them to function the best they can. Then when we stop training, our body continues to allocate its resources to our muscles so that we can recover. As a consequence our stomach becomes less of a priority. Because our body is putting most of its attention to repairing the body, it often means we don’t feel hunger straight after exercise, despite needing the extra energy to assist the repairing process.
This is similar to when we are sick or stressed out. Our body produces a spike in a hormone called cortisol which means we can’t check in with our hunger and fullness cues as well as we would like. In these instances, fuelling is more important than ever because our body is working overtime to care for itself. Checking in with ourselves when we are sick, stressed or recovering from a training session and knowing we still need to eat is a tool we can use to properly nourish our bodies.
A hunger and fullness scale (see bottom of page) is another tool we can use to check in with how hungry or how full we are at any given time. As an experiment use the scale below across a day. Check in with yourself each hour to see where you move up and down the scale. You might find you have big swings (from a 1 to a 7) or little swings (from a 3 to a 5). All of these are ok, normal and welcomed when you’re learning to tune back in to what your body needs. How we perceive hunger is incredibly personal.
Hot tip: when we get ravenous (number 1 on the scale), our body experiences this as food scarcity or food insecurity. When we don’t eat until we are ravenous, we often binge or swing to the exact opposite side of the scale to be absolutely stuffed (number 7 on the scale). There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but there are ways we can reduce the intensity that we experience hunger by starting to notice the nuances of gentle hunger earlier. Don’t underestimate that thinking about food or that noticing food in your environment is a subtle way of our body letting us know that we are hungry.
When we increase our movement, especially in the case of running, we need more fuel to sustain the movement and to nourish our hard working bodies in the long term. Our body is capable of letting us know how much we need through both subtle and overt hunger. Hunger is our body letting us know our petrol light is on and it’s time to fuel up. This might mean we need to adjust how much we are eating across a day. We might have more snacks, increase the size of our main meals or eat more frequently. Whatever you do, your body’s needs will be different to what anyone else’s needs are (i.e. an app or a fancy watch will never do this as accurately as your body will).
One easy way to stay on top of fuelling and nourishing our bodies is to have a snack within 90 min after training. Because our appetite is often suppressed immediately after training it might not feel necessary. When our body is ready to share the attention from our muscles to our stomach, our hunger can then hit us in a really big way. You might have experienced this 90-120 min after a run and all of a sudden a huge surge of hunger comes out of nowhere. This is totally normal, it essentially means our stomach is getting the attention back from our recovering muscles and it’s a good indication that your body needs more fuel.
Having a recovery snack that includes carbohydrate and protein after a run ensures our bodies are being fuelled optimally to restore and repair despite our suppressed hunger. Protein assists in repairing and regenerating new muscles to build strength and fitness. Whist the carbohydrate fuels this process and tops up the muscles energy stores. This snack helps so that you don’t get big pangs of hanger later on or that you don’t end up running on empty (pun intended) in the future.
Whether you’re new to running and building up slowly, or you’re an experienced runner who is aiming for their 5th marathon; every single body needs lots of fuel. Fuelling our bodies adequately is one of the most underrated ways we can build strength, recover well and most importantly be out there doing what we enjoy long term.
If you’re looking to explore your relationship with food in more detail:
Find a Sports Dietitian in your area here
Or an Eating Disorder Dietitian here
Hear more from Georgie on insta
@georgiebuckley_dietitian
