Today’s podcast focuses on athletes, but even armchair athletes can benefit from the suggestions below. Although not as extreme, the average person goes through the same transitions in life resulting in the same issues.

As an athlete your body is muscularly dense from training and competition. Those muscles burn fat giving you a higher resting metabolism than the average person. To maintain weight and provide your body with the appropriate fuel for maximum performance in your sport, you need to consume 3000 to 5000 calories per day. For the average person, this calorie intake would equate to weight gain, possibly extreme weight gain.

As athletes age, their phase of life changes in ways such as starting a career, getting married and raising kids. These changes take an athlete from extreme training to real life, meaning all the eating habits they’ve been practicing since early adolescence no longer work in their more sedentary, adult lives. If they aren’t aware of the drastic decrease in their activity and adjust their activity and food intake accordingly, weight will creep up on them resulting in a ripple effect of injuries to joints, which will decrease movement further. At this point, feelings of stress and apathy bring out poor food choices.

You can avoid that path by realizing it is time to reset your thinking for the present day you. Your new reality of time restraints, energy barriers, pain, injury and whatever else “the older you” deals with on a daily basis, can be overcome by resetting your thinking. Make better food choices and watch your portions. Realize that taking a walk or a leisurely swim, while not the extreme sport you were used to, is still exercise and is safer and less painful to your aging body, which may be suffering joint aches and pains from your younger years. I encourage you to use a physical therapist to get a solid understanding of the movements that are safe for your particular pains or injuries.

Suggestions to help you think through your life’s changes:

1) Consider keeping a food journal for a week or two to see where your calories fall and then write out a list of habits that you would be willing to work on, such as “I will start eating off of a smaller plate to encourage changing my vision of what a normal portion size looks like.”

2) Write out a list of movements that feel good to your body or movements you would be willing to try, such as “I will purchase a pedometer to aim for increased steps and make an appointment with my surgeon who repaired my knees to see if I should be investigating physical therapy because I have completely quit moving due to pain!”

3) Where am I mentally? Could I benefit from a few therapy visits to get my emotional eating under control? Such as, “My life has changed so drastically from when I played softball. I was the best at my sport/felt amazing on the field/loved the smell of fresh-cut grass before games, but now I am working 40 hours a week at a job I do not love, and I am too exhausted to push through a workout when I get home. I feel like I have lost my passion, and lack of energy has consumed my life.”

Journal questions

1) When, during your life, have your eating habits changed dramatically?

2) How do those memories and feelings impact your desire to live healthier now?

3) Who do you think you could talk to, to reflect back on about these drastic changes?

4) Do you really want to exercise now like you did then? Think about the time and effort required for those results (two-a-days… no, thank you!).

5) Think back on what you learned from that time period and reflect on how that can support you now.