Eat to Support Your TrainingA few weeks ago I blogged about how the Menopause transition is NOT the time for us to eat less and exercise more. Since then I've heard from a few of you about how do you determine how much to eat. First, aside from making us feel nourished and healthy, our food intake should fuel our daily activities. We need to eat enough that we can adapt to our training demands. We need to eat enough so that we have enough ENERGY to get us through our busy day, training session at the gym, and all of the other things we do throughout the day. So how do we determine how much to eat? First we start with taking some important, albeit, uncomfortable measurements. To know how much to eat we need to know how much lean mass we have. I can do that for you with excellent accuracy during our check-in. You can also go to MSU and measure you lean mass via the BODPOD. I mention these measurements can be uncomfortable. Not because the tests are uncomfortable but rather the results can be upsetting for some. In order to understand what our lean mass is we first have to measure our body fat percentage. That can be upsetting for some folks. However, we can't determine mathematically how much to eat without that vital statistic. Once we know our lean mass we can determine 2 important nutrition targets, our daily total calories which we will call Optimal Energy and the amount of protein we need. Knowing Optimal Energy is important because there is an increasing trend amongst the active aging population (that's all of us CrossFitters, women and men over 40) to not eat enough because we are trying to lose weight or are concerned about gaining weight. This is NOT the time to eat less and exercise more. It can lead to a dangerous condition called Low Energy Availability (LEA). According to the Menopause continuing education course I just finished from the smart scientists at Feisty Menopause: Active women are especially at risk for LEA because of high training loads and the traditional emphasis on being as lean as possible for many sports. If you have days, weeks or months when you feel like you just don't have enough energy to do ALL. THE. THINGS. and your performance in the gym decreases, you might just be in an LEA state. The menopause transition is an especially vulnerable time because as we are trying to ride the crazy waves of natural hormonal fluctuations we need to eat enough to continue to build muscle like its our job. Because my strong and powerful sisters, it is our JOB to build muscle in menopause. Low energy availability is a state we slip into after just a few days of not eating to support our optimal energy. Here's what I learned in my Menopause CE course: Clinical studies show that when you reach an EA less than 30 calories per kg of lean mass, your health starts deteriorating after just several days. Now that we know our optimal energy ratio is 30 for women and 25 for men (i'm looking out for you guys, too:) we can determine how many calories we need each day. We do this by multiplying our optimal energy ratio and our lean mass (in KG) to get the calories we need to eat each day just to survive.
For example, my lean mass is 135lbs. To convert that to KG, I divide by 2.2 to get 61KG. Now I multiple that by 30 to get 1840 calories. That is the minimum calories I need every day just to keep my body operating. This number 1840 is pretty darn close to the number of calories I need based on my BODPOD test. It calculated 1921 calories on a SEDENTARY day. On active days I should eat more. I mentioned that our lean mass is important for a second nutrition target. It is the minimum protein we need daily to maintain our current lean mass. In other words, I should eat at a minimum 135g of protein to prevent any loss of bone and muscle. If I'm trying to increase my bone density and lean mass (muscle) I need to eat more protein to support my training. How much more? We will cover that in another blog. Do you need help determining your optimal energy? Book a check-in with me and we can will calculate it together.
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