Olivia Decker Athletes. Think about your typical day. When do you wake up? What do you eat for breakfast? What is your class and training schedule? How often are you eating throughout the day and what are you eating? For many of you, it’s not enough. You’ve all been there. Rushing directly from class to practice, not stopping to eat a meal, or even a snack. In the moment it seems harmless, but overtime it can put you at risk for a dangerous condition known as Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports, or RED-S. RED-S is a condition that develops from chronic low energy availability, meaning you’re expending more than you’re consuming. With high energy output from long training hours, and not enough time to re-fuel due to other life commitments, patterns of low energy intake is an easy habit to slip into. With persistently low energy intake, low energy availability will occur. To further complicate this, a side effect of chronic low energy availability is diminished physiological hunger cues, meaning that over time, your body will stop reminding you to eat, further increasing the likelihood of low energy availability and development of RED-S. Many athletes are unaware of the harm these inconsistent eating habits are doing to their body. While sometimes low energy intake is intentional, such as during periods of rapid weight loss for weight-category sports, often it is not. Either you don’t prioritize eating, or you aren’t eating enough because you don’t realize exactly how much you need to eat. Increased expenditure through high intensity training sessions or competitions increases the amount of food an athlete needs to eat, and this amount can vary daily. This complexity is why having a sports dietitian is crucial to athletic performance. Sports dietitians are trained in counseling and intervention techniques and can work with you to ensure you have an individualized plan promoting peak athletic performance. They understand the stress a student athlete is under between athletics and studies and can provide easily implementable solutions for eating more food more frequently. Studies have shown that athletes who have access to a nutrition education program have positive nutritional changes and improve their health and performance. Access to relevant nutrition education is so important that the NCAA has begun their own nutrition education program to address common issues in sports that often result in low energy availability. Education should provide information on how to maintain adequate energy availability, as well as general nutrition and fueling strategies. Having access to a sports dietitian ensures that nutritional plans are individualized. This is important as each of you are different, and will have different needs based off your own body and your position on the team. However, one of the most important nutritional strategies for every athlete is snacking. Emphasizing decreasing meal sizes while increasing meal frequency makes the idea of eating more food less overwhelming. Athletes who are struggling with eating enough should aim to eat small snacks consisting of both protein and carbohydrate, frequently throughout the day, with the most important time for a snack being directly after a training session. This could be as easy as a protein shake after your workout, It is important for you to eat. But you also need to understand why you need to eat, and how much. Think about where you can add snacks into your day. Carry non-perishable snacks with you like a protein bar, an apple and peanut butter, or crackers and a cheese stick. Eat these on your walk between classes. Have a high protein yogurt with berries before bed. Eat an additional serving during your normal meals, or add another glass of milk or juice to your day. Even one additional small change per day can make a huge impact. Franchini, E., Brito, C.J., & Artioli, G.G. (2012). Weight loss in combat sports: physiological, psychological and performance effects. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 9(1), 52-27. Keay, N., Francis, G., Entwistle, I., & Hind, K (2019). Clinical evaluation of education relating to nutrition and skeletal loading in competitive male road cyclists at risk of relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S): 6-month randomised controlled trial. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, 5(1), e000523-e000523. Papageorgiou, M., Dolan, E., Elliott-Sale, K.J., & Sale, C. (2018). Reduced energy availability: implications for bone health in physically active populations. European Journal of Nutrition, 57(3), 847–859.
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April 2023
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