Alicia Kendig, the USOPC’s Senior Sport Dietitian, recommends best approaches to balanced eating, including how to work with picky appetites for athletes of all ages and levels.
Learn more about Alicia Kendig.
Video Transcript
Balanced eating and the idea of balanced eating is addressing this idea that yes, we need a bunch of different nutrients and they’re packaged, those nutrients are packaged into different types of foods. So, typically you think of an athlete plate or just the USDA, “my plate” and there it’s broken up into a bunch of different categories, so you have your protein sources, you have your whole grains, your carbohydrate sources, and then you have your fruits and vegetables.
So balanced eating is getting enough of each one of those things to address your lifestyle, your medical background, or your genetics, and what some of your goals are with your nutrition. The my plate is one example of how to eat and our athletes actually need a bunch of examples and it’s really addressing their energy expenditure and the type of training that they’re doing on a daily basis.
And so we have some endurance athletes that they’re training for five, six hours a day, and they need fuel to be the energy for those long training sessions. So they need more carbohydrates, for example, some of our sprinters just do high explosive activity and they don’t need all the carbohydrates, but they need more protein to address the tax on their muscles and the breakdown of the muscles. And so, depending on the type of athlete, we really adjust the carbohydrate intake that’s the big thing. Protein intake stays pretty much the same it might be a little bit higher if an athlete is trying to be stronger or they’re doing really high intensity, powerful type movements. But the carbohydrates really is what fluctuates most.
If an athlete or a young athlete is not a fan of a certain type of food, so it’s leafy greens for example, I would say go for another type of green, eat another vegetable that’s green, and then constantly be trying different things. The other thing is change up the preparation. I had an adult athlete that was mid thirties that hated green beans because of how his mom prepared them when he was a child and he’s like, “Let’s try something else, let’s cook it a different way, let’s stir fry it instead of microwaving it until it’s mushy.” It’s variety, but then trying different preparations that can really help address if they don’t like one thing, let’s try it a different way.
For young children and young athletes, supplemental forms of these nutrients are… You’re missing the point of developing their eating habits. And it’s the last result that you would go to, especially, if you’re getting to the point where you have clinical nutrition deficiencies, then a supplemental form of certain types of nutrients might be necessary and recommended by a medical provider but that would be the last result and definitely not a route I would take for an athlete that’s picky.
One of the things that I remember learning when I was going through my coursework as a dietician was relating to young athletes or adults and equating it to, if you’re at a dinner party and you are forced to eat, whatever it is they’re handing out, you’ve never had it before and you don’t know what it is, it can be scary. So have it be more adventurous and fun because during that stage of development, that’s really when they’re developing their eating habits and how their nutrition habits are going to be for the rest of their life.
