A clean start?

2018. A new year, a new training diary, a clean page…. a clean start with a revamped “clean” eating regime? NO!! No damn way!

My twitter feed is agog with talk of new year’s resolutions, fad diets, get fit quick schemes and humpteen other marketing gimmicks designed to play on the soul-searchingly vulnerable. At this time of the year, people seemingly feel compelled – through guilt, tradition, societal pressure, misguided judgment or other – to “better” themselves somehow. What if the you of December 31^st 2017 was just fine as she was? I never make new year’s resolutions. Never have, never will. One, because I think they are doomed to fail and then you feel crap, and two, because they are often seen as being a temporary thing (dry January, that’s the best one!). Shouldn’t healthy living and healthy habits be applicable all year, not just for the first 4 weeks of it?

I see it every year at my gym: numbers soar; you have to set your alarm for midnight a week in advance to get a place on most of the classes; your favourite bike by the window is constantly occupied and you are left to join the queue that limits use on it to a maximum of 15 minutes (what a joke! 15 minutes might be ok for these new year’s resolutioners just embarking on their quest for fitness, but that’s a mere warm up to those of us who are following long-term structured training regimes for endurance events). It’s ok, I sooth myself, most of them will be gone by February… along with their resolve and enthusiasm to keep up the regime. Of course, with my tongue-in-cheek humour, I generalise, but I strongly believe that you cannot look upon eating habits and exercise regimes as a temporary fix. You have to eat well and exercise appropriately all the time, January through to December, come rain, come shine.

So many new exercise DVDs and cookbooks are launched in January. ‘Lean in 15’, ’15 Minute Abs’ (trust me, I do way more than 15 minutes on my abs and they are still barely to be seen!) But, my biggest bug bear is this fairly recent trend for “clean eating”. Pardon the language but what the fuck does that even mean? Who is to decide what is a clean food and what isn’t? And if you are suggesting that something is clean, are you diametrically opposing it to all other foods which must, by default, be dirty? Why dirty? Have they been rolling around in the mud? (In which case, all root veg must therefore be dirty?) I have strong issues with this terminology because it is largely the preserve of the well-to-do middle-class female elite, who can afford to shop organic in Waitrose and at local farm shops and dive headlong, unquestioningly, into all the latest fad “superfood” trends. (They are easy to spot, stepping out of their Range Rovers in the Waitrose carpark, clad from head to toe in Joules and/or Seasalt…. occasionally Boden or White Stuff, but only on weekends….). It is easy to snub certain food groups when you have never known deprivation and when your food choices have never been restricted, be it for financial, psychological reasons or other.

Back when I had an unhealthy relationship with food, I would mentally categorise foods as ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’. Such practices are in fact extremely common within those with eating disordered behaviours. Some would call them ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ foods, but whatever the terminology, it all adds up to the same thing: you rule out entire food groups (dairy, meat, sugar, fat, carbs) and they become forever consigned to some demonic culinary Room 101 that you are henceforth forbidden from accessing: DANGER! UNCLEAN FOOD! UNSAFE! NO ENTRY! Whilst I still retain this same bizarre categorisation system for all fruit items (ask me about it, I’ll vehemently defend my choices on clean and unclean fruits to the grave! And ask Matt what happens if he dares to eat a banana outside of the kitchen and leave the skin lying around…), I have thankfully long since moved on from viewing all foods as such a strict dichotomy.

The thing is, amongst triathletes, these fad diets are rife. There’s not a day goes by that athletes whom I follow on Twitter and Instagram aren’t uploading photos of their plate of ‘oh-so-virtuous-but-vom-inducingly-repugnant-tasteless-pile-of-miscellaneous-shit'. It’s like it is suddenly justified to cut out all carbs from your diet because it’s in the name of “training” and is thus designed to improve performance. Sod that for a tale. If I am in hard training and forcing my arse out the door at stupid o’clock day after day, doing 10 hours of high intensity cardio a week, I’m going to bloody well eat what I want as a reward for it. Usually what I want is something nutritious and nourishing, but occasionally (well, more like once a day actually), I will also feed my body cake or chocolate, because I like it, I’ve earned it, I’ve burned it off and so why the hell not? If I were a Brownlee-level elite athlete, seeking every precious second I can get because triathlon was my profession and not just a hobby, then I might look to tweaking my diet a bit: introduce more protein, cut back on the sugar and the weekend alcohol. But I’m not; I'm me: a gin swilling, cake munching, non-elite wannabe who still has so many performance improvements to make in so many areas before I need to start thinking about overhauling my diet (which, incidentally, is pretty healthy 80% of the time anyway). And that is why I find it sustainable: because I am good 80% of the time, I can be naughty for the other 20%, and I can keep this up all year round; as opposed to being 100% good in January, getting bored with all the restrictions, and reverting back to unhealthy habits again in February. So, if we must assign our nutritional intake into strict compartments, maybe ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ is a better means of categorisation than the rather circurmspect 'clean' / 'unclean'?

So, no “clean starts” for me in 2018. Just a continuation of the moderately dirty life I have been living for the past five or so years. Because, quite frankly, if “clean” eating means waking up to a pile of plain cottage cheese with a side accompaniment of raw kale, egg white and chilli powder, washed down by a foaming glass of turmeric, well, I think I’d sooner stay dirty thank you very much.

Oh, and addendum: The Brownlees are both devotees of Frey Bentos pies, fish and chips and cake stops on their long rides. Enough said.

Yours,

Lean, mean, not-so-clean triathlon machine, Ellie .... off to source some cake....