PUBLISHED 12/06/2005
If you're reading this, chances are you're a runner. And if you're a runner, chances are you've got at least one quirky eating habit. Whether it be a harmless holiday craving (a compulsion to sample every pumpkin pie you encounter between Thanksgiving and Christmas) or a more serious nutritional pitfall (a 12-bar-a-day energy bar addiction), runners tend to be more inclined toward food fetishes than sedentary folks and even many other types of athletes because weight and energy levels play such a huge role in running. "Disordered eating and excessive running often go together," says Suzanne Girard Eberle, R.D., a sports dietitian and author of Endurance Sports Nutrition.
In pursuit of a perfect diet that will produce optimal running performance, many runners forget about the need for balance and variety in their eating. "Some runners even develop a fear of a particular food or food group," says Susan McQuillan, R.D., the author of Breaking the Bonds of Food Addiction. Such restrictive eating patterns can wreak havoc on your running goals--they'll slow you down, tire you out, and even make you sick.
To determine the most common nutrition mistakes made by runners, we asked Karen Reznik Dolins, Ed.D., a nutritionist at Columbia University and Altheus, a performance enhancement center in Rye, New York, to analyze the diets of 35 runners from the New York Flyers, a Manhattan running club. Though this was a survey and not a scientific study (we took the runners' words on what they ate), Dolins found 10 ways the runners cheated themselves nutritionally. Read on, and find out what they did wrong. You may even recognize yourself.
