Tonight's Marathon 101 class focused on a topic that I need a lot of help with: nutrition. Nutrition baffles me. If I were tested on nutrition literacy like eighth graders are tested for reading and math, I would be in a low, low percentile.
So I was hopeful that tonight would clarify things for me, and in part that was the case. The instructor had bags of groceries and she pulled out items and had us name their nutritional value - carb, protein, fat, etc. And while this may have been remedial for everyone else in the room, I found it helpful to see these piles growing on the table of varied foods, all having their own nutritional merits pulling for them.
The part that still confuses me is how to get these nutrients into my body and in what quantities. First, there are recommendations for numbers of servings per day, and it varies depending on what kind of nutrition-packed food you're talking about. Then there is rule of having a carb, and protein and fat in each meal. And then there is the complication that not all protein-containing foods have complete proteins and they need to be combined with certain other foods for their benefits to be realized. And when tonight's conversation veered toward glucose levels and amino acids, I started to wonder if I could get by without thinking about all this.
And then there is the question of how much nutrition and how many calories you need to support the training regime you're undertaking. It seems logical that the more energy you're expending, the more fuel/food you need to take in. But what's the baseline, and how much is enough? This warning was sobering: your body will break down and metabolize your own muscle protein if you don't take in enough carbs and protein. So how much food should I eat? They say, "Listen to your body." My body has never undertaken this kind of challenge. My body may not know what it needs. My body wants to eat Cheez-Its for dinner.
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