My clients often come to me with two different types of goals: aesthetic and performance. What is the difference between nutrition for performance compared to weight loss or aesthetic goals?
Aesthetic goals (weight loss or body transformation)
With aesthetic goals, your main focus is using fitness and nutrition behaviors to transform how you look. This may involve competing in a bikini, fitness, or body building competition, or it might center around looking good in a bikini on vacation, fitting into a specific outfit, or feeling confident in the way you look and feel. (Keep in mind, with all of these, body image isn’t just about how you look or your weight on the scale. There is a lot of mental work and mindset shifts that need to be addressed to improve body image).
Aesthetic goals include:
- Body fat measures
- Visible muscle tone
- Weight, the number on the scale
- Circumference measurements, etc.
Performance goals
With performance goals, you are adopting the right training program and eating the right foods at the right times to optimize physical and mental performance in your sport(s) and/or your work or school.
Each type of goal has different results and side effects as you work towards it. Nutrition for performance is often very different compared to nutrition for weight loss.
Performance goals include:
- Increased speed
- Increased strength
- Jump height
- Improved endurance, power, skill, etc.
Nutrition approach for aesthetic goals
With aesthetic goals, the typical nutrition approach involves:
- ⬇️ Eating fewer calories, carbs and fat
- 🥩 Very high in protein intake
Unfortunately, athletes can develop RED-S symptoms (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport) as a result of focusing on aesthetics. Symptoms include stress fractures, missed periods in those who menstruate, iron deficiency and decreased athletic performance.
Additionally with its intense focus on body size and image, this approach can lead to disordered eating and disordered body image, or perpetuate an unhealthy relationship with food and body.
Nutrition approach for performance goals
With performance goals, the broad fueling approach focuses on:
- 🍞 Eating an optimal amount of calories, carbs, protein and fat
- 🕚 Nutrient timing before, during, and after workouts
There aren’t negative outcomes associated with nutrition for performance goals, but often the biggest challenge for people is letting go of the aesthetic or weight loss goals. This may mean that we need to work on embracing & accepting your body as an athletic body, no matter what it looks like, or what you think it “should” look like.
Goal setting & underlying motivations
When setting goals related to your workouts, think about your why. If you’re exercising only to change your body’s size, it can feel very unrewarding if you don’t see the results you’re looking for fast enough. Not to mention, aesthetic goals are often so subjective, you may never feel like you’re good enough, always striving for a lower weight or more defined muscle. On the other hand, when you focus on performance, you can track continuous improvement as you make progress that truly feels like an accomplishment and benefits your body and health.
The question that’s often on everyone’s minds is: But can I do both? Can I implement nutrition for performance and for weight loss? The answer is, as usual with many nutrition-related questions, it depends. When dealing with an eating disorder, disordered eating, or RED-S, it is not in an individual’s best interest, in terms of health and recovery, to focus on weight loss. With athletes, weight loss goals should be implemented out of season because restricting carbs and/or calories will result in performance reduction.
In general, my approach is to begin our interventions with nutrition for performance so you can start to feel your best when exercising, working, and living your life. As we continue to work together, we may be able to implement some behavior changes will focus on aesthetic or weight loss goals. Again, with eating disorders, weight loss and dieting can often trigger relapse into extreme dieting and disordered behaviors. For those clients, we can continuously check in on mindset and relationship with food and body as we talk about and implement certain nutrition and fitness behaviors.
If you have any questions about how to shift from setting aesthetic goals to performance ones or goal setting in general, click below to schedule a free initial consult call!