It is about your development of physical resilience, and psychological flexibility… stability through change.
You are not machine
One of the most important things to understand about yourself, is that you are less a predictable machine, and more a probabilistic system. This has wide implications not only for how you program your nutrition and training, but your expectations of them… and yourself.
We are are our mind, body, and behaviour—a nested system within our wider systems (relationships, work, the world!)—which is in constant flux, and influenced by external and internal stimuli to think, feel, and act.
Rather than a mechanical machine, we are much more a weather system, where a pressure change in one area creates a reciprocal pressure change in another, often with a lag in effect. Short-term forecasting is more predictable, while long-term forecasting remains probabilistic.
For example, if you eat a doughnut, we can predict with fairly high accuracy the rise and fall of your blood glucose over the next three hours. However, we cannot accurately predict how this blood glucose excursion will affect your body, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours the rest of the day, let alone the next day. And yes what you eat today, can impact your life tomorrow.
Foods are more or less helpful not primarily based on their composition, but their eaten context, including what you think and feel about what you just ate.
We can though identify patterns, and learn about the unique effects food, exercise, sleep, and general life have on our mind, body, and behaviour. Eating a doughnut while sitting at your office desk may lead to feeling lethargic, distracted, and hungry later. However, eating that same doughnut immediately before your training session, may lead to feeling more focused, dynamic, and powerful.
- Not eating the doughnut at your desk, likely prevents excess daily energy intake, likely improves focus, and satisfaction in the work you were able to complete, and may influence how you view yourself.
- Eating the doughnut before training, may improve your mood and motivation, lead to a greater training quality and stimulus, reduce time to recover, prevent compensatory snacking later, better athletic development, and body composition over time. Yes I said that.
Same doughnut, different outcomes… different person (mind, body, behaviour).
Allostasis: load, stress, strain or adaptation
A schema I teach clients is viewing everything through the lens of load—the demands of training and life being placed on you, your capacity to handle the stress of the load, the resulting deformation (mental, physical), your ability to recover and prevent strain (cumulative deformation), and the resulting increase in your capacity to handle future loads.
This is allostasis, achieving stability not by returning to the previous baseline, but through ongoing adaptation.
Stability through change.
Allostasis is the process of achieving internal stability through adaptive change, adjusting your internal environment to meet the perceived and anticipated demands of the external environment.
We evolved to survive, and survival is about safety, resources, efficiency. Our nervous system is constantly interpreting signals of safety or threat. Should we move toward or defend, escape, or collapse.
In relation to nutrition; what you eat, how you eat, and when you eat can shift our system towards a state that supports action, engagement and growth, or defence, withdrawal, or shutdown.
This is why I believe dieting (energy restriction) strategies alongside training, have to be applied with care. It’s not simply taking energy away, but rather dieting on the most food possible.
Can we maintain the signal to the body that “everything is OK” as much as possible, whilst asking it perform.
Fundamentally it is about your ability to handle progressively greater loads in sport and life. It’s about the management of that “OK” signal, to allow the body to upregulate health, growth, and athletic development (which includes favourable body-fat levels).
Ultimately the athlete who is the happiest and calmest, and therefore can accumulate the most volume of quality training and positively adapt from it, will have the most success.
If you are defending, you are not performing.
Interplay: cognition, emotion, behaviour, physiology
useful. coaching draws on cognitive-behavioural theory, recognising that our physiology, thoughts, emotions, and behaviour form an interconnected system. Positive change not only comes from addressing each element, but also the patterns and processes that shape how we relate and respond within this system.
Is this nutrition 3.0?
Nutrition could be defined in the following terms…
- Nutrition, v1.0 – how to eat for life-long health
- Eating to meet the nutritional needs of your body
- Sports Nutrition, v2.0 – how to eat for athletic development
- Eating with purpose, eating even when you aren’t hungry
- Cognitive Behavioural Nutrition, v3.0 – how to eat to influence your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour
- Eating in a way that will influence who you are, how you experience yourself, and your actions
I truly believe what we eat, how we eat, when we eat, and what we think and feel about eating, can have a profound impact on us on various levels. From training recovery, to your relationship with your partner.
Having had well over 3000 hours of conversation with 400+ clients, it is clear that nutrition is far more than just food and supplementation.
Would you like to work together?
If you are interested in working together, see Climbing Sports Nutrition for details, and complete the coaching profile.