Understanding the difference between eating and nutrition helps explain our work.
Eating refers here to the choices you make: foods, recipes, cooking methods, textures, flavours, and whether you prefer fruit whole or blended.
Nutrition includes the largely involuntary processes through which the body digests, absorbs, transports and uses nutrients. You do not consciously direct the Krebs cycle or digestive enzymes, but your choices and health still influence these processes. Let us use a banana as an example.
As a food, a banana is simply a banana, whether larger, smaller or grown in the Canary Islands. Nutritionally, its effects depend on several factors:
Your biology, including genes and their expression
Metabolism, anatomy, physiology and gut microbiota all contribute.
When you eat it
After waking, before sleep, before strength training, during a long ride, after tennis, under stress or after a long gap without food: the surrounding needs differ.
How you eat it
Ripeness, cooking and accompanying foods affect the result. Riper bananas contain more readily available sugars, greener ones more resistant starch, and frying adds fat and energy. Cooking and cooling can change starch characteristics in other foods too.
How much you eat
Three bananas at once are different from half a banana or three spread across a day. Portion matters, but the body does not have a simple fixed ceiling for absorbing protein, fat or carbohydrate per meal. Eating 10 chicken breasts would not mean all protein beyond a small limit goes unabsorbed; digestion, metabolism, storage and requirements are different concepts.
Putting it together: the body uses more than the names of foods such as oats, chicken, soya drink or tofu meatballs. It needs nutrients: protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals and water. Our work is to estimate what suits your circumstances and training, then turn that into a weekly menu with recipes you enjoy. It is a rewarding job! ; )
For help with your nutrition, explore our sports nutritionist service and prices.
