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Tips from Nancy Clark

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Tips from Nancy Clark

Don't Arrive Too Hungry

One prerequisite to successful nighttime dining is to eat a hearty lunch or an afternoon snack. This prevents you from attacking the refrigerator the minute you walk in the house in the evening.

Nancy Clark's Sports Nutrition Guidebook ( Human Kinetics, 1997), p. 88

A Game Plan for Good Nutrition

Food is one of life's pleasures. Food is also important for fueling your body and investing in your overall health. As an active person, you may want to eat well but you struggle with juggling food and good nutrition with your busy schedule of work and workouts, family and friends. Students, parents, businesspeople, and athletes alike repeatedly express their frustrations with trying to eat high quality diets. "I know what I should eat," they tell me. "I just don't do it." Although they take the time to exercise, they don't always make time, or know how, to eat right.

One basic trick to winning with nutrition is to prevent yourself from getting too hungry. Hunger depletes the energy you need to choose the foods that both support your sports program and enhance your health. Whether you are a fitness exercise or an Olympic athlete, you can nourish yourself with wholesome foods, even if you are eating on the run.

What shape is your diet?
Whereas square meals and a well-rounded diet were once the shape of good nutrition, the food pyramid reflects nutrition for the 1990s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has developed this new model that divides food into six groupings of varied sizes that stack into a pyramid. The pyramid supports the concept of a carbohydrate-based sports diet and offers the visual message that you should eat lots of breads, cereals, and grains for the foundation of your diet; generous amounts of fruits and vegetables; and lesser amounts of animal proteins and dairy foods. The tiny tip of the pyramid allows for just a sprinkling of sugars and fats.

Three basic keys to healthful eating:
When choosing your meals and snacks, try to base your nutrition game plan on these three important keys to healthful living:

1. Variety. There is no one magic food. Each food offers special nutrients. For example, oranges provide vitamin C and carbohydrates but not iron or protein. Beef offers iron and protein but not vitamin C or carbohydrates. You'll thrive best by eating a variety of foods. I often counsel athletes who severely restrict their diets. One runner, for example, limited herself to plain yogurt, rice cakes, and oranges. Besides lacking variety, her diet lacked iron, zinc, vitamins A, E, K, and much more.

2. Moderation. Even soda pop and chips, in moderation, can fit into a well-balanced diet. Simply balance out refined sugars and fats with nutrient-wise choices at your next meal. For example, compensate for a greasy sausage and biscuit at breakfast by selecting a low-fat turkey sandwich for lunch. Although no one food is a junk food, too many nutrient poor selections can accumulate into a junk food diet.

3. Wholesomeness. Choose natural or lightly processed foods as often as possible. For instance, choose whole wheat rather than white bread, apples rather than apple juice, baked potatoes rather than potato chips. Natural foods usually have more nutritional value and fewer questionable additives.

From Nancy Clark's Sports Nutrition Guidebook, Second Edition (Human Kinetics, 1997), pp. 3, 5-6

Nancy Clark, MS, RD, personal nutrition counselor at SportsMedicine Associates in Brookline MA, teaches casual and competitive athletes how to eat to win. Her best-seller Nancy Clark's Sports Nutrition Guidebook, Second Edition is reputed to be among the best books on this topic. It is available by sending $22 to Sports Nutrition Services, 830 Boylston St. #205, Brookline MA 02467 or via http://www.nancyclarkrd.com.