‘I’LL GIVE IT a seven,’ I said.
This was my first food tasting with Raymond Blanc, and you could have heard a pin drop as I delivered my score out of ten to him and his chefs. We were collaborating on a year-long project to upgrade the match-day recovery food at a football club. Our aim was to see our nutrition targets for the players translated into the best fresh meals, with responsibly sourced, seasonal ingredients. The project delivered the perfect marriage of performance and great-tasting food.
However, at the time all I could think was, I can’t believe he made me go first.
I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with some excellent chefs through my work in sport, but it’s Raymond Blanc’s philosophy and attention to detail that I try to take with me when we reach the stage of the Energy Plan that sees us bridge the gap from plan to plate.
I’ve always hated the concept of bland food in Tupperware. It is possible to enjoy good food and still achieve your goals; and in fact, if you are working hard, it seems to me to be even more important that food is a pleasure.
As you’ll be well aware of by now, the athletes I work with aren’t on diets. They are instead given the tools to help them meet their goals, and this includes cooking skills. At Arsenal we used to run cooking classes with the club’s head chef Christian Sandhagen for all the players, particularly those new to the club. We would work through everything from online shopping to food hygiene, to chopping and knife skills – very important for multimillion-pound players to get right – and would teach them to prepare meals according to their goals and activity levels, just as you learned in the Performance Plates chapter. The most important aspects, however, were to make it fun and as straightforward as possible and to engage the players.
Ten years ago in sport it was a different story. Nutrition didn’t carry the weight then that it does today, so there would only be one chef cooking for the players and cooking ‘healthily’ was understood to be keeping the food low-fat.
Today I can be working regularly with several chefs – at the training ground and stadium and the exec-travel chef – and this doesn’t even include all the personal chefs working with individual players, which is a growing area of the industry and really highlights the importance of food in sport.
A personal chef to a football player is cooking for a finely tuned athlete, not a fine-dining restaurant, so they need to be able to provide performance plates in the form of both meals and snacks that fit the right nutrient profile and quantities. And the best chefs are great problem-solvers, and are able to field these sorts of questions from me:
‘Can we get more protein in that snack to reach 20 g for muscle recovery?’
‘Can we increase the levels of antioxidants in the salads and drinks after the match, to support repair from muscle damage?’
‘Can we create a jelly shot high in vitamin C and gelatin to increase collagen synthesis and support tendon health?’ I even have conversations with suppliers about the dietary nitrate content of their vegetables and juices and how the soil is monitored. The details matter.
I say all this not just to highlight the impressive resources available to us in professional sport, but to highlight the importance of good-quality, responsibly sourced and tasty food to the Energy Plan, alongside its core role as a fuel.
A lot of time is put into developing the kitchen skills of young athletes I work with, so that they can prepare the meals they require to recover when they get home. Some of the world’s most confident and proficient athletes start off having no idea how to put meals together – but then, unless they’re shown the ropes, many people don’t. And like any new skill, confidence in the kitchen takes times and effort to build.
As a starting point I’d recommend a selection of core, versatile recipes.
As mentioned in Chapter 9, the average person has nine recipes in their repertoire. Some people have many more, of course, but the truth for many of us is that, while we might like the idea of cooking, we don’t always have the time to scroll through websites and then go to multiple shops to buy the ingredients.
It’s my job to assess what the limiting factors are to a performer being able to execute their nutrition strategy, and with the Energy Plan the most common limiter is, of course, time. So in this chapter I’m going to show you some strategies to shop smarter and set up your kitchen more efficiently, and some of the key factors I used to build my recipe collection, so that you can become the performance chef in your Energy Plan.
Your starting point is your weekly check-in. No matter how busy your week, this slot is essential as an anchor to your week (refer back to the chapter on monitoring for a reminder of the details). As well as reflecting on the previous week, this is when you plan the week ahead – it’s the first step in making the journey from plan to plate.
CULTURAL AND DIETARY DIFFERENCES
Multiculturalism helps shape food trends in countries around the world. In cities like London there is a thriving restaurant and food scene, with restaurant-goers having a choice of cuisines from countless different countries and regions: from Afghan to Peruvian and just about everything in between.
We see this in professional sport too, especially football. At Arsenal Football Club we had 16 different nationalities in our first-team dressing room.
I have also worked with the BBC’s GoodFood.com to create a Marathon Hub for recipes and nutrition information for the London Marathon;1 another sporting event showcasing a wide range of nationalities and food requirements and preferences.
In both these cases, the solutions and meals we provided needed to appeal to a range of cultures and dietary needs. The guiding principles for all the plans were exactly the same – we just used different foods for the solution.
In elite sport the challenge is to ensure that athletes get all the relevant fuel necessary in accordance with their dietary or cultural preferences. It’s certainly easier to provide fuelling solutions for someone who eats meat and has no restrictions, but there’s always a way to provide an answer for athletes who have other preferences.
And with the Energy Plan, your food solutions too will be tailored to your individual cultural needs, as well as your likes and dislikes and dietary needs such as vegetarianism or food allergies.
I have always worked with people who are time-poor, which is why one of my biggest frustrations earlier in my career was recipes with huge lists of difficult-to-source ingredients; it just reduces the likelihood of adding new recipes to a limited repertoire.
So, when working with a chef to create new recipes, this is the brief I set out, the same that I used with the England football team’s chef Omar Meziane. This brief produced the recipes currently available on my website:2
I would encourage you to use some of these pointers yourself when building up your recipe collection to use at home. A professional chef may not be at your disposal in person, but plenty of recipes by professional chefs most certainly are, on the internet and in many cookbooks. Resources like the BBC GoodFood.com recipe hub are a good starting point. Look for recipes with minimal ingredients, those that are quick and easy to prepare – almost all recipes have a guideline as to the cooking and preparation time – and, most importantly, using what you’ve learned so far with your Energy Plan, evaluate whether this meal is composed of the right types of fuels for you.
Look at whether the recipe can be made in more than one way. If it’s a chicken dish, could you substitute that for fish? For vegan dishes, could you try a different grain or pulse as the protein source? As we’ve discussed throughout this book, the starting point for every meal is the protein, so look at meals built around things like tofu, eggs, pulses, fish and meat, depending on your dietary requirements.
Cooking can be fun and the rewards for your Energy Plan can be huge, so trying new dishes and adding to your recipe collection can help you learn, grow and stay engaged with food. In my experience, I’ve found that pasta, rice, omelette or stir fry are things that most of us can cook, but they can become a default option when the cupboards are bare, the family are hungry and time is of the essence. So let’s look at the habits we can build with our Energy Plan to ensure our default options, with the narrow variety of fuel that involves, don’t become too regular an occurrence.
Some people love a visit to the shops, browsing the aisles and trying new foods for new recipes, while others hate it, making smash and grab raids on the local ‘metro’ supermarket most nights of the week, often while on the phone and very hungry. That last one is a particularly easy trap to fall into.
There are now more tools than ever at our disposal to make food shopping easier. Online supermarket shopping takes a lot of the hassle out of it and means your shopping can be done from your desk without eating into your schedule, and there are a whole host of companies that will send you boxes of ingredients and recipes, with all nutrition information listed. These can be enormously helpful, provided the recipes fit your goals and fulfil the criteria of performance plates.
But whatever your approach to shopping, here is the Energy’s Plan’s three-step approach to elevate getting your groceries to performance shopping:
These are multipurpose ingredients that you’ll use all the time. Buy them in one big shop (stock up on utensils and storage containers here too):
●Grains and seeds
●Pulses and tinned goods
●Spices
●Oils and fats
Spending an hour on this on a Sundayfn1 will stop the endless supermarket visits during the week and give you ownership of the week ahead:
●Fruit and vegetables
●Dairy
●Wraps and bread
●Meats and fish
●Herbs
This is the quick Wednesday-night visit to top up the fresh items – just 20 minutes in a convenient supermarket or other food store:
●Dairy
●Fruit and vegetables
●Specific ingredients for new weekend recipes
PERFORMANCE SHOPPING HOME ESSENTIALS
●Water bottle (with a fruit infuser, if you prefer)
●Protein shaker
●Coffee capsule machine (to understand your caffeine dose and timing, and keep it consistent)
●Storage boxes (for lunch and snacks at work)
●Kitchen essentials: sharp knives, chopping boards, non-stick pans, griddle, saucepans, baking trays
●Heavy-set glasses and cutlery (see Chapter 7, Winning Behaviours)
With your performance shopping you’re in the driving seat to deliver everything your engine needs for the week, and doing some preparation on a Sunday, such as ensuring you have all the ingredients, or even preparing part of your meals for Monday and Tuesday, can only make the start to the week easier. So here you might want to break out the food containers, which is fine as long as you remember it’s what’s inside that counts: make sure they are filled with food that is new, interesting, exciting – or reassuringly tasty and familiar – whatever it takes to make that meal an enjoyable experience for you.
You’ll already have your week mapped out in terms of your social and work engagements, your training plan and the types of days you need on each – high, low or medium days – and now you can spend a bit of time looking at which meals you could get a start on preparing to keep in the fridge on a Monday and Tuesday night. As a first step, just having the foods at home will make it easier to stay on plan. Your Wednesday ‘top-up’ shop will ensure you have fresh vegetables, fruits and other ingredients so you can try out some new recipes with family or friends. With just a little preparation at this stage you can avoid having to eat into your pinched after-work time and instead, when you’ve completed your training, step into the kitchen to meals you’ve already made a start on. Any leftovers can also work well as lunch the next day, so it’s well worth investing some extra time here.
And if you prefer to cook as you go, that’s fine too. Just having the ingredients ready to go in your kitchen will make a big difference, especially if you normally find yourself having to spend time visiting a food shop every night after work.
SHOULD I BE EATING ORGANIC?
The Soil Association’s 2018 Organic Market Report revealed another 6 per cent rise in consumption of organic food and drink, the sixth consecutive year of growth in the market. Total sales were £2.2 billion.3 It’s a similar tale in the US, where the Organic Trade Association reported a 6.4 per cent rise to give total sales of $49.4 billion (£37.5 billion) in 2017.4 Organic is big business, clearly; but the debate about its benefits has rumbled on for years, with lots of opinions and, unsurprisingly, lots of conflicts of interest, just as with supplementation (see Chapter 14).
With the Energy Plan we always look at the quality of the evidence first, and one systematic review (review of studies that meet a certain standard) highlights the number of variables that can affect the nutrient content of both crops and livestock before they reach the plate. It concluded that there are no significant differences between organic and conventional produce in terms of nutrient content.5 However, a wider discussion point is the environmental impact and how you source your food. Wherever possible – depending on budget and other factors like convenience, of course – sourcing food locally and seasonally, prioritising sustainable standards, reducing packaging and waste are all steps we can take.
I often warn my clients about the ‘halo effect’ of language such as organic, healthy and gluten-free. These foods still need to be tailored into a plan. We talked earlier in the book about how you can overdo it with too many healthy foods eaten indiscriminately; and bear in mind the mantra: if it’s not helping you reach your goal, what is its role?