For 14 weeks, NOW health reporter Cornelia Naylor has been assigned to undertake a “Fortius challenge,” setting fitness and performance goals and experiencing first-hand the many ways Burnaby’s Fortius Sport & Health can help.
As a rehab project, the team will zero in on a lingering shoulder injury, but Cornelia will also get a chance to sample everything else Fortius has to offer, from massage therapy to diet advice and from vision testing to a scientific analysis of her running gait.
Here’s her fifth report:
Fortius Sport & Health dietitian Ashley Charlebois and I are negotiating.
A week ago, I’d sat down in her office and she had grilled me about my food intake the day before, including the types of food I’d eaten, the time of consumption and the portion sizes.
Charlebois eschews normal weights and measures like pounds or litres. When querying me about the tortellini I’d eaten, she had asked how much in relation to the size of her fist. One fist? Two fists? How many thumb-sizes of cheese? Was that piece of meat about the size of a deck of cards? About a ping-pong ball’s worth of cream in your coffee, then?
We had gone through what I’d eaten and drunk from waking till sleeping, and Charlebois has since plugged the information into a nutrient analysis program.
Today we are going over the results and coming up with a diet plan.
“Your total fat intake was a little on the higher end,” Charlebois says, looking at tables on her computer. “Your saturated fat content was about double what you’d actually want it to be. That’s probably the biggest thing I would focus on.”
Considering not dying of a heart attack like my mother was a goal I’d set with Charlebois last week, that seems fair, but I ask the slim, clearly fit 30-year-old, who recently finished her first triathlon, if she ever feels judge-y talking to people about their diets.
“Yeah, but I don’t like that feeling,” she says.
She explains that she doesn’t judge but sometimes gets the feeling that others might think she is.
“I think a lot of times people are hesitant to say what they actually eat, but it’s like, if you really want help, just be honest. I’ve seen it all.”
She tells me my baseline diet is healthier than most people’s (which I’m pretty sure is just a ploy to get me excited about eating even better) but almost everyone can improve.
Toward that end, Charlebois has worked out what and how much I should be eating based on my weight, height, age, activity level and goals.
After giving me a few miscellaneous pointers – like that I should consider a vitamin D supplement and generally try to get vegetables to cover half my plate at any given meal – we start hammering out a detailed “daily nutrition plan.”
Let the negotiations begin.
“I do it with you,” Charlebois says, “so that you have feedback as to what’s on your plan so that you can enjoy what you’re eating as well.”
What that looks like, is me trying to hang onto my evening potato-chip snack, while she amiably and persistently tries to get me to give it up.
“There’s no way I could sway you to switching that to popcorn once in a while?” she suggests. “What about trying to reduce the amount and trying to add a fruit on the side?”
The same goes for switching the cream in my coffee to milk and cutting down my prodigious cheese intake.
“I’m just going to keep trying,” she says.
By the end, we have a plan that starts with breakfast and ends with an evening snack (sometimes popcorn, sometimes chips).
Given my vague dietary goals going in, my consultation with Charlebois is pretty straightforward, but for people coming to her with high-level performance goals or debilitating chronic illnesses, she can be a godsend for sorting nutritional fact from an avalanche of fiction.
“You can find so much information on the Internet,” she says, “and it’s so hard to filter through. What I do is try to guide them.”
Next stop, performance vision screening.
Follow Cornelia’s journey at www.burnabynow.com.
