Introducing: This Week's Fuel

Post # 143

The idea of sharing a weekly recipe has been floating around my head for a while now. As an athlete - one in a weight-based sport, no less - people are always asking me what I eat. Problem is, that's a simple question with a complex answer. Sure, I eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains (my standard answer to that question), but what am I actually having for dinner on a Tuesday after lots of hours of training? That's what people were really getting at.

So I created something called "This Week's Fuel." Each week, I'll share a recipe I've made, liked, and recommend. I'll post a link on Twitter and under the TWF page on my website to where I got the recipe. When I tweet it, I'll add the hashtag #thisweeksfuel so it's easy to search for.

What to eat used to be a huge complex question in my mind and I didn't really know where to start. So a few years ago, I figured the best thing to do was to research food and nutrition. I read books about it, watched documentaries, listened to interviews, and looked at the science. I started to understand what's good, what's bad, and what the latest trends are. I spent a lot of time experimenting in my kitchen and have made some successful new creations as well as some awful mistakes (first attempt at Black Bean Brownies were disgusting!). Through all of this, I figured out a lot of things that work for me and discovered that cooking and baking can be awesomely fun and rewarding. It's an ongoing process and I'm still learning, but I consider it part of my job to feel ready to attack each workout and recover quickly afterwards, and that requires careful attention to what I'm putting in my body.

So whether you're one of the kids I've coached, an extended family member, one of my personal training clients, a former or current teammate, a coach, mentor, or neighbor...or someone I've never even met (how has this blog come to encompass such a diverse audience?!), I hope you'll try a few - or all - of the recipes that will be coming at you. Let me know what you think of them or of you have ideas for new ones.