Just because you’re an elite athlete and you’re going to the Olympics doesn’t mean you have control over all the determinants of your success. Not even over something as simple and essential as your diet. It can even be the opposite. Talk to judoka Catherine Beauchemin-Pinard.
Second in the world rankings in the under-63 kg category, the 30-year-old Montrealer will begin her third Olympic competition on Tuesday. The last time, at the Tokyo Games, she won the bronze medal.
After the 2021 Games, she went through a period of depression. “I was exhausted. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be good enough with my medal at the Games. I would wake up at night and cry sobs because I was lost,” she says.
With the help of a psychologist, she came out of this bad patch with two ideas in mind: qualifying for the Paris Games and completing the book project she had been toying with for years on the nutrition of athletes and their eating disorders. Her book, entitled Nourish your body. CHow Nutrition Finally Helped Me Perform at the Tokyo 2020 Games (Crescendo Edition!, 2024), was published a month ago.
Just be happy
A mixture of the story of her personal journey, principles of nutrition for elite athletes, tips and recipes, her work notably recounts the “fall into hell” that the judoka experienced in her stubbornness to remain, by all means, in the same weight category (-57 kg) despite the transformation of her body at the end of adolescence.
Intent on doing the right thing, her parents tried to help her stick to the increasingly strict diets she set for herself. “It’s normal,” she said in an interview. “People don’t know the science of athlete nutrition. They think these are necessary sacrifices.”
Concerned about his health, his coach at the time encouraged him, instead, to simply accept moving up a weight class, arguing that it was doing more harm than good to his athletic performance.
The main person concerned turned a deaf ear for a long time, fearing what would await her in this weight category (-63 kg) that she did not know, of losing her sports funding and of the impact on her physical appearance.
Exhausted by her increasingly unhealthy fixation on food, her episodes of bulimia and the massive weight loss she inflicted on herself in the run-up to competitions, she finally called on a nutritionist and a psychologist specializing in eating problems.
“I just wanted to finally be happy, eat my fill and have a good relationship with food,” says Catherine Beauchemin-Pinard. “Now I understand that an athlete who feels good about herself will perform better than an athlete who has an eating problem.”
Girls have more body image issues than guys. They want to be thinner and fit into beauty standards, while guys will be happy to gain weight or muscle mass.
More common in athletes and women
We would be surprised to see the low level of knowledge about nutrition among elite athletes when they arrive as teenagers at the Institut national du sport du Québec (INS), says Catherine Naulleau, a sports nutritionist who revised the judoka’s book. “They are already Canadian champions, but half of them don’t know how to make rice. They rely on what their parents, their coach, their friends, and social media influencers have told them.” There, as in the general population, we see fads that are rarely based on science: gluten-free diets, ketogenic diets, intermittent fasting, etc.
Eating disorders are common among elite athletes, the expert continues. “High-level sport is not necessarily a primary cause – like growing up in a very rigid and demanding family environment – but rather acts as an accelerator.”
Their prevalence is greater in judged artistic sports, where physical appearance is valued, as well as in sports organized around weight classes, such as combat sports, weightlifting and some classes in rowing.
And as in the rest of society, eating disorders are also more common in women than in men, explains the nutritionist. “Girls have more body image issues than guys. They want to be thinner and fit the beauty standards, while guys will be happy to gain weight or muscle mass.”
No need to rack your brains
However, says Catherine Naulleau, athletes should “not have to rack their brains” when it comes to their diet. “The body is well designed to tell us what we need. When we’re hungry, we need to eat. When we’re no longer hungry, we stop.” Then, the next step is to learn how much and what proportion of each of the main food groups to put on your plate. “It’s definitely going to be different compared to the average person who doesn’t spend 15 or 20 hours training.”
“Do you want to eat poutine? You can,” she said. “Maybe you just have to choose the right time.”
Speaking of a good time, Catherine Beauchemin-Pinard intended to take advantage of the Paris Games to do more than just judo. A foodie, she promised herself to try all sorts of good things. Like a Nutella crepe? “Why not? I have the right to eat everything.”
This report was financed with the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-The duty.