3 Reasons Your Nutrition Falls Apart When Life Gets Busy
If you’re an active human that feels guilty taking a snack break, listen up because this one is for you!
Here’s what I see all the time:
Athletes are trying to raise the ceiling of their nutrition before they’ve built the basement.
The ceiling is what we believe will bring us optimal performance and gains– the supplement stack, periodized macro splits, and weighing every single bite.
The basement is what you’re able to do on the hard days. The busy weeks. The days when you’re tired, stressed, traveling, and don’t have the brain space to nail your nutrition. This is what most athletes are missing when it comes to consistency.
Don’t get me wrong– I’m not anti-discipline, but many athletes are putting discipline in the wrong places.
Here are the first 3 things you can start working on this week if you want to make better fueling a non-negotiable part of your day rather than an afterthought.
Reason #1: You treat eating like something you have to earn.
Many of my clients don’t feel like they can take a break from eating because they believe rest is earned through their productivity. Or they feel like they must finish a task and hit a good stopping point where they have “earned” a meal.
Eating becomes something that comes after.
The problem is that when eating isn’t a given or a priority, it gets delayed. And delayed. And suddenly it's 2pm and the only thing you’ve had is coffee and you’re starving. If you’re an athlete, you’ve also missed several opportunities to get fuel and protein on board to support overall health and recovery.
Here’s what to do instead:
Give yourself permission to let nutrition come first.
This is a bit of a mindset flip. Rather than seeing eating as something you “get to do” once you’ve finished your task list, make it the first thing you do to set yourself up to do everything else well.
Even if you don’t have a specific plan, practice taking non-negotiable food breaks. Practice what it means to put eating first even if your mind protests at times.
Reason #2: Your standards are so high they’ve turned into a wall.
If you’re someone who values hard work, discipline, and grit, this might feel a little backwards.
While in many areas of life, holding yourself to a high standard is helpful, when it comes to nutrition it may be working against you.
Feeding yourself is an action that must be repeated multiple times each day. You may not have the bandwidth each time to make it perfect– plus it doesn’t need to be!
There is truly no need for perfect eating, even for the elitist of athletes.
The biggest needle-movers in sports nutrition include eating enough and frequently throughout the day. And if you’re doing that, you’re already doing more than most athletes.
When you make eating something that must be done perfectly, the most common cycle I see is this: anything that falls short of that standard is a failure and can turn into a task that you avoid because it’s a source of misery.
Here’s what to do instead:
Bring in self-compassion.
This isn’t “being soft” or “giving up,” by the way.
Self-compassion is an evidence-based tool that helps coach you towards change rather than trying to shame you into doing things “right.” While shame may help in the short-term, it’s not a reliable way to build a growth mindset and self-led positive change.
Think of how you might coach a friend and how you might encourage them to start eating more consistently.
I bet you might say something along the lines of:
“You put a lot of effort in, but there’s a lot on your plate right now. You still need to eat something, even if it’s not perfect.”
That can feel very different than telling yourself you failed, fell short AGAIN, or that you never seem to get this stuff right.
Self-compassion can be very challenging and feel like it’s going against the grain.
Good.
Reason #3: You’re trying to solve lunch when you’re already starving.
Part of this is because of the permission problem and the beating-yourself-up problem. But independent of this, many athletes struggle with lack of planning.
It makes sense– there’s a lot going on between work or class schedules, scheduled lifts, practices, household duties. On top of this, fueling for sport can feel like a part-time job.
And when there’s no planning, fueling tends to fall to the wayside and becomes an even bigger source of stress in the moment. Plus, you may already be drained, hungry, and irritable when you’re making eating decisions.
Here’s what to do instead:
Start flexibly planning.
Hopefully you’ve already brought in the willingness to make eating a priority and to practice self-compassion, because those tools will serve you well!
Rather than making decisions in the moment under duress, we want to make decisions when we have the capacity and space to make them.
This helps make the transitions to eating easier. Think about it: if you need to take a pause in a busy workday to eat and decide what you’re going to eat at the same time, the burden has essentially doubled.
You don’t have to plan every single aspect of eating.
Start small. Maybe you just decide when you’ll eat, pick an entrée, or bring your attention to the sandwich ingredients hanging out in your fridge. Yes, this is also how you stop “forgetting” the bag of loose greens in your veggie drawer.
Either way, thinking ahead can help with following through.
Quick pause here because I want you to notice something:
There’s no list of foods that you “have” to eat or cut out.
I didn’t tell you need to write down and track everything you eat.
And there’s nothing in here about just “trying harder” and being more disciplined.
Nutrition is often a systems and a skills problem rather than a knowledge or a discipline problem.
Focusing on these three pieces first is key for moving towards the things you actually need to support your nutrition as an athlete; not just eating better, but eating consistently.
Because of just these three pieces, you can stop white-knuckling your way through the day and start trusting that you’ll actually feed yourself. You may find food becoming less stressful, too.
These skills are the foundation that everything else is built on. Once in place, solid, repeatable nutrition can happen.
And like any skill, they get easier with practice.
That’s exactly why I created the 5 Day Fueling Foundations Challenge.
Over five days, we’ll take these ideas into your actual life. Each day includes a short, podcast-style lesson, a few workbook prompts, and a practical challenge. This helps you build the muscles needed to move from “thinking about nutrition” to “doing nutrition.”
The only discipline required is to show up each day with an open mind and a willingness to get just a little uncomfortable by trying things differently than you have in the past.
