Food Is Science, Eating Is Behaviour: Matildas Dietitian Alicia Edge on Fuelling Female Athletes

"My knowledge is pretty irrelevant if I can't translate it to people's lives. And that's where we now are in a coaching-based membership style." - Alicia Edge

We dive deep with Sports Dietitian and Compete Performance founder Alicia Edge to discuss the behavior of eating, not just the science of fueling. Alicia shares her work with the Matildas and the challenge of combating the "lighter is better" culture in women's sport. This is a critical listen for athletes, coaches, and parents interested in nutrition resilience, food relationships, and preventing disordered eating

Key Takeaways:

• The Missing Link in Nutrition: Turns out, nutrition information is not the missing link. The real power lies in behavior change—understanding the root cause of why you aren't doing what you know you should be doing.
• Performance is Relative: Compete Performance defines an athlete as anyone who would like to perform, making success relative to their personal definition, not just elite status.
• The Partnership Model: Effective nutrition coaching is a partnership, where the athlete is the expert in their own life, and the dietitian is the expert in food.
• Shifting the Focus for the Matildas: The long game in elite female football has been shifting the focus away from body composition and toward performance through wellbeing—emphasizing cooking, body confidence, and relationship with food.
• Body Composition is a Symptom: The IOC's 2023 paper on body composition found correlation, not causation, to performance. It's a symptom of maturity and training habits, not a behavior.
• The RAVEs Framework: Learn this simple yet powerful framework for assessing and building a healthy relationship with food: Regularity, Adequacy, Variety, Eating Socially, and Spontaneity.
  
  

Additional Resources & Support:

Alicia stresses the importance of community and support when dealing with food and body image.

• Eating Disorder Support: Butterfly Foundation (OrgHome), National Eating Disorders Collaboration (NEDC Home).
• Body Image Resources: The Embrace Collective (TheembracehubHome - The Embrace Collective).
• Alicia's Business: Find coaching resources at @compeat_performance and CompeatperformanceClient Challenge

Episode Breakdown:

• 01:18 — Young Alicia: The energetic perfectionist and the role sport played in her life.
• 06:46 — The Compete Performance Mission: Designing a non-family-friendly career around online coaching and tech.
• 08:12 — Unlearning the Meal Plan: Moving from the science of food to the behavior of eating.
• 13:13 — Inside the Matildas Effect: Shifting the team culture away from the "lighter is better" focus.
• 23:23 — The Performance Triangle: Why you can't focus equally on Health, Performance, and Body Composition at all times.
• 36:21 — The Alarming Stats: Rates of disordered eating in the active population are 30% to 85%.
• 42:52 — The Sandwich Press Cookbook: Creating realistic expectations and performance eating on a budget.
  
  

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