For most athletes, weight control is all about pretty restrictive diets. Basically, everything they put in their mouth has to be monitored and thought about. We usually use a phased diet approach. Six to eight weeks out, we change from the initial diet to one with more careful considerations. They can choose to go on strict plans with portions meted out, or they can just get serving guidelines and build their own meals.
SOME ATHLETES NEED TO MAKE A FEW BEHAVIORAL CHANGES:
if they’re evening snackers, that’s something we phase out, for example.
ONCE WE GET TO THE RESTRICTIVE DIET, IT’S AN EXTREME SITUATION:
it’s not just about fitting into a dress. These guys have to be on the scale number or they don’t get on the mat. First, we’ll do an artificial weight loss from sweating out water weight. Then maybe a liquid diet for a few days. It’s an extreme world, because you have to be so precise on the scale. But these diets zoom in and out -- there are periods of coming back to a more liberal, less detailed approach on diet.
By contrast, with the aesthetic sports, it’s an ongoing, close attention to diet because they can’t afford to put on any extra weight or fat mass. You’re trying to propel your body through air -- dead weight will have an impact.
WE CREATE A STRICT DAILY DIET
Even though there are off seasons, most of them train and compete year round. They have a whole food-based diet that’s very, very natural: regular meats, fresh fruits, nuts and seeds, veggies. These aren’t processed foods. That’s because it’s mainly the quality of food that’s how they’re getting their nutrients.
What we know is that you can get the same nutrition from convenience foods, but it won’t be of the same quality. The quality of the protein you get from chicken breast is just higher than what you’ll get from a powder. Their bodies are their jobs, so how they feel really determines how well they’ll succeed.
A lot of the athletes aren’t using supplements because they have to be careful from a doping perspective -- you don’t really know what’s in a lot of them. There have been cases of supplements containing banned substances. This is starting to be regulated and it’s getting better, but it isn’t guaranteed.
With real food, they know what it is and what the quality of the nutrition will be. Of course, athletes will use bars, powders and gels, especially for convenience while traveling, but it isn’t the main resource we use.
I’d say that Olympic athletes suffer from many of the same challenges and problems that regular people face when it comes to nutrition and diet. Just like at home, here they have a lot of choice and variety: there’s an ice cream machine. They struggle with temptation and boredom eating. When they aren’t at a training facility, they’re living on their own, cooking and shopping. Between jobs and training, they can be sometimes too exhausted to plan their eating right -- that’s very similar to a lot of us.
Also similar, most of them are on a strict budget. In amateur sport, you aren’t making a lot of money. And they also travel for work: they’re navigating changing time zones and cultural food environments.
There are differences, too, mostly related to training. If they train too hard, for example, they lose their appetites. So if it’s a high volume training block or week and it’s very strenuous, they’ll struggle to eat. On the other side, much of training makes you hungry, so they also struggle with increased hunger.
