McGregor Fuel for Thought

A practical guide to fuelling for your adventures
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83981-238-5
Verlag: Vertebrate Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Food should be really simple. It is the means by which we nourish our bodies, providing them with the nutrients and fuel we need in order to live, exercise and socialise. Yet, in recent years, food and nutrition have become more complicated, confusing and polarising than ever before. Fuel for Thought by leading sports dietitian Renee McGregor is a practical and trustworthy guide to sports nutrition, whether you're a world-class or real-world athlete, or just someone who wants to improve their relationship with food. Cutting through the jargon and misinformation, Renee draws on over twenty years' experience of working with sportspeople from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to provide straightforward, accessible advice about how you can fuel your adventures. The follow-up to More Fuel You, in this book Renee looks at sports nutrition through the lens of her own sporting passion - running. She urges caution over the explosion of social media nutrition and fitness experts, apps and programmes that all claim to offer bespoke dietary advice. Instead, she offers practical information based on her own personal and professional experiences, including an A-Z of foods and a section dedicated to her own tried-and-tested, budget-friendly recipe ideas which use simple, everyday ingredients. There is also guidance on how to recognise and get help with dysfunctional behaviours, from REDs to exercise dependency, and how to be informed about your hormonal health when you go in search of appropriate support.

Renee McGregor is a leading sports and eating disorder specialist dietitian with over twenty years' experience working in clinical and performance nutrition. She has worked with athletes across the globe at Olympic level (Rio 2016) and has provided team management on numerous occasions at major championships in a variety of sports. She is the nutrition lead for English and Scottish National Ballet and was actively involved in producing the consensus statement about the management of REDs in dance. She is also on the international task force for orthorexia and is a named author on the consensus document on definition and diagnostic criteria for orthorexia nervosa. She is one of the leading voices in the country in REDs, female hormonal health and performance nutrition, and works with a number of professional athletes, teams and brands on a consultancy basis providing expert support on REDs and ensuring nutritional and clinical guidance for both performance and health. She is the founder of Team Renee McGregor, managing a leading multi-disciplinary team of practitioners specialising in supporting individuals of all ages in their sporting endeavours and providing expert advice to athletes seeking support for a dysfunctional relationship with food and training. This is reflected in her work on social media where she prides herself on proving an educational hub for both the professional and everyday athlete. Renee is the bestselling author of More Fuel You, Training Food, Fast Fuel and Orthorexia: When Healthy Eating Goes Bad, and she writes a monthly column for Runner's World. She is often asked to comment and provide technical support for news and media, and she was the clinical advisor for the BBC documentary Freddie Flintoff: Living with Bulimia. Renee is a Montane athlete and a trustee for Black Trail Runners, supporting and advocating the importance of increased diversity and accessibility to minority groups to the outdoors. When not inspiring others with her work, Renee can be found running in the mountains and chasing the trails around her home in the Lake District In 2022, she became British trail running champion for the short distance in her age group and finished third female in the Montane Summer Spine Sprint. In 2023, she finished fourth female and within the top ten in the Mustang Trail Race in Nepal.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mcgregor, Renee

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2 What kind of runner are you?
I often struggle with this question, because from my point of view, anyone who runs is a runner. The key thing here is about appreciating where you are in your journey and, most importantly, your relationship with running. Running is personal and we all run for different reasons. Let’s take me as an example. When I first started running, it really was just to get some space from home and mum life. It was an opportunity to connect with nature, my body and myself. I would run for twenty to forty minutes up to three times a week, depending on what life allowed. I built up really slowly and had been running for several years before I considered my first marathon, let alone the move into ultra distance. And let’s not forget, I had been a super-active child, swimming six days a week for many years, dancing, and playing hockey and netball. Even after university, I continued to play hockey and joined a gym around the same time as I got my first job as a dietitian in London. Over time, this has changed. I would now describe myself as an experienced runner and I have been running for over twenty years. I run around five times a week and I also ensure appropriate behaviours such as resistance training, sufficient fuelling and rest to prevent injury. I would say I’m fairly competitive but definitely not professional. I tend to choose one or two main goals a year and follow a training plan that helps me to arrive at these goals as prepared as I can be. I started with road running, but I am most definitely a trail, mountain and fell runner now. However, I am also very aware and mindful that running is my hobby, and so training, while important to me, is not always a priority. There are also several months within the year where I don’t follow a fixed plan and the only real outcome for my running is participation, social connection, mental health and my love of the great outdoors. However, in my experience, not everyone has a healthy relationship with running. Running is big business at the moment. While road running has long been established, the number of people participating in trail, ultra-distance and extreme running challenges has risen exponentially in the last few years. While I welcome the growth in participation in running, I definitely have some concerns around those with little previous running or athletic experience moving straight into long-distance events. We have seen a huge rise in run-fluencers, some of whom get paid to create content to promote brands, races and events, but a lot of whom don’t. One of the concerns here is that as content creation is their job, they are combining their training (and racing) hours with their work, leading to unrealistic ideals and expectations for those of us who are trying to fit training around a more traditional 9–5 job or even shift work. While run-fluencers’ motivation to document their running journey may be innocent, their lack of knowledge and qualifications does mean that their content is at times irresponsible. From sharing ‘what I eat in a day’ videos to giving details about specific runs and paces, this all feeds into the psyche of others and can cause real problems. Regardless of how big their following, remember that a lot of them will be providing information based on n=1 (a sample size of one – that is, their own experience), not scientific papers or, even more importantly, actually working in the field. While I’m all for individuals documenting their own progress, is this something that needs to be shared with everyone else? This is why identifying where you are on your running journey really does matter, so that you can make appropriate choices about the next steps that are relevant to you, not because a run-fluencer you have chosen to follow is telling you what they are doing next. I would go as far as questioning that individual’s motivation for creating such a post – what are they getting out of it? Is it validation and adoration, or are they promoting something they need you to buy into? The days are long gone when Instagram was just a place where people posted their holiday photos for family and friends. Now we use our social media accounts to promote our own personal brands. I include myself in this. In an ideal world, I would not be on social media, but I see Instagram as an opportunity to have an educational platform so that everyone can have access to my knowledge to a certain degree. I am incredibly mindful about how much personal information I put on there, and I never discuss specifics about my training or fuelling. I do of course provide nutritional content, but as much as possible, I keep it generic. And while social media platforms may not have any regulations about who can post what, the Health and Care Professions Council, which is the regulatory body for all allied health professionals in the UK, including dietitians (but not nutritionists), has very strict criteria and codes of conduct about what we can and can’t say. TYPE OF RUNNER NUMBER OF RUNS PER WEEK TYPE OF RUNS PER WEEK AIM OF RUNS POTENTIAL OUTCOME ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS Social runner Up to 3 times a week, not necessarily consistently Easy, steady pace, 30–45 minutes Can be on any terrain Regular movement Cardiovascular fitness Social connection Mental health Body composition Getting outdoors Participate in parkrun   New runner Running 3 times a week for 2–3 years Easy/steady runs but maybe starting to include 1 slightly longer run per week Can be on any terrain Maintaining fitness Increasing endurance Social connection Mental health Benefits of outdoors Starting to think about joining a running club Potentially entering a few races Maybe starting to think about adding some resistance training to support the running Starting to be mindful of fuelling, especially if adding longer runs Building up Running 4–5 times a week for 3–5 years Mixture of runs – some easy, some faster tempo Interval-type sessions 1 long run per week Can be on any terrain Maintaining fitness Increasing endurance ...