1%er Number 5 - Go and see a Nutritionist

1%er number 5 is a pretty straight forward one. Go and see a Nutritionist.

Over my years of training and racing it took me a while to go and see a Nutritionist, but once I did I wished I had done it years earlier. I was so impressed with the advice and results that came from seeing my nutritionist that I built in as part of my regular routine from that day on.

The benefits of seeing a good Sports Nutritionist (note the word good) are twofold. I emphasise the word good here because like any service that relies on advice, all this only hold true if that advice is actually good. Anyway, assuming that your Nutritionist is good then they can help you figure out a couple of really important things. Firstly a nutritionist can advise you on your fuel plan for a race. More importantly a Nutritionist can also help you determine the best diet for you leading into the race. A good diet leading into an event will ensure you have enough fuel and nutrients to get through the load of training and also ensure that you reach race day at your optimum race weight. By optimum race weight I don't simply mean 'as light as possible', but rather the weight that is healthy for you to sustain leading into a race without increasing your risk of injury or illness.

One of the tricks with planning nutrition for a race is that there is a lot of information out there for people who are looking. The internet, sports magazines and nutrition brands all pour a bunch of info into the world. However, much of this information is anecdotal and some is even contradictory. It can be hard for athletes to filter out the good from the bad. This situation is even worse for people just looking for good sensible dietary information for an athlete. In the world of fad diets and changing fashions it is very easy for an athlete to head down the wrong dietary path. e

For myself a few years of reading and some fairly unpleasant trial and error meant that I eventually got a good idea of how to fuel for a Half Ironman. It unfortunately took me about 4 or 5 Half Ironman to get that right, which is a fairly painful way to figure something out. My first attempt at fueling an Ironman in 2013 was quite spectacularly wrong.

When it came to general nutrition I thought I was fairly well educated. Through years of being in the Western Australian Institute of Sport and involved in other high level sports I thought I had a good idea of what I should and shouldn't eat. However, despite all that in late 2015 I was struggling to get down to what I suspected was my correct race weight. For years I had been sitting around 75kg, but I suspected a more appropriate race weight for me was 72kg. However, try as I might I simply could not get down to that weight.

In the end it was this frustration that sent me to see a Nutritionist, in this case David Bryant. David spoke to me, got an idea of what I ate, what I liked to eat, the amount of training I did etc and then set me a diet plan. The diet plan was nothing extreme. The diet didn't cut out sugar, or fat, or carbs, it wasn't high in fat, or only eat things available to prehistoric man. In fact all the diet really did was tell me how to eat a sensible balanced diet with correct amounts of fruits and vegetables, which, it turned out, I hadn't been eating nearly enough of.

To my amazement, within 2 weeks of starting the diet plan I was down at 72kg. From that day until the day I stopped racing the diet kept me at or near that weight. To me that proved the value of expert nutritional advice.

This usefulness of this advice carried over to racing too. As I said above, by the time I had been racing for 12 months I was fairly sure I knew how to fuel a triathlon. However, I can't help but wonder if seeing a Nutritionist when I first started racing might have saved me 12 months of trial and error. Plus, even though I eventually got to a point where I was happy with my Half Ironman fueling strategy, David was still able to provide me with some useful tweaks and changes that helped optimise my racing. When it came to a full Ironman David's advice was even more significant, providing me with a plan that got me through Ironman Western Australia in 2016 without a hiccough.

For the money you pay, it is my opinion that proper nutritional advice is some of the best value sporting guidance you can get this side of a coach. In Australia a lot of health insurance providers give a rebate for nutritional advice which makes the value of the nutritional advice even greater. It really is a 1%er that is hard to argue against.