If you want to excel in athletics, training is the name of the game. If you want to train harder and longer, proper nutrition is crucial. Nutrition is not a substitute for training—it never has and will never be—but it is an important adjunct to training. Without proper nutrition intake, an athlete cannot sustain a high level of training. As a rule, proper diets for athletes allow for longer and more challenging training sessions, delay fatigue, speed recovery, prevent injury or illness and help athletes attain and maintain optimal body weight and lean mass. Training and nutrition will always go hand in hand.

Women tend to focus on weight loss and not sports nutrition. Pretend for a minute that gravity doesn’t exist. Everything is weightless, yet it all manages to stay on the ground. You don’t know how much you weigh because scales have never been invented. How would you define your state of health?  What would be your benchmark? You might still not like how you look. You might be tired of being tired all the time. You might need to trim down and take care of that blood pressure. In a gravity-free world, those are all still good reasons to create healthy diet and fitness habits. Who knows, you might decide “Hey, I feel all right, I look all right, and I’m healthy. If I can just maintain the habits I have, I should be okay.”

The point is, you can decide for yourself what shape you’re in. You don’t need the scale to tell you and “Nutrition” should be your main concern, especially when conditioning for sports. Unfortunately, many times we get down on ourselves simply because something as trivial as gravity tells us we’re out of shape. Some people feel and look fantastic in every respect, but if the number on the scale doesn’t match expectations, they’re miserable. This doesn’t make sense. Gravity should not be able to wield that kind of power.

While it’s good for giving you a general idea of your health, this can be the most discouraging and frustrating part of a diet. Your weight can fluctuate all the time and reasons why are never completely known. At Integrated Health Solutions by Tanya Morrell, we are aware that time of day, temperature, the day’s activities, and water level – all can skew the numbers one way or the other. In reality, you could be getting discouraged over something that’s not really accurate.

So, our aim is to help you focus on performance nutrition, what to eat before, during and after a training session or sports event to help you maximize training intensity and enhance sports performance with an added weight loss goal or maintenance if needed. Diet principles are based on the demands of training and competition. Dietary recommendations (hydration too) vary for endurance athletes and strength athletes and for different sports within these categories. Consideration of nutrients vital to athletic performance-carbohydrate, protein, fat, vitamins, minerals and water employs an integrated approach focusing on how nutrients function together. Each nutrient supports training and how dietary intake can improve performance. Without overconsumption, all of your nutritional needs can be met, while increasing sports performance and maintaining a healthy figure too!