Blog Takeover: Meet Brooke.

My name is Brooke and I am a former Division I college basketball player. I played at the University of Kansas and the University of San Diego. I graduated in 2015 and after graduation, I eventually found myself back in the fitness world. I began managing a gym in 2016 and received my personal training certificate while training under a former NBA trainer. Although I realized that managing a gym wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, it did make me realize how passionate I was about fitness, nutrition, and an overall healthy lifestyle. I am now currently in nursing school, am an assistant basketball coach at Valor Christian High School, and a personal trainer on the side. 

In high school and college, I ate everything under the sun, because I could. I would burn a minimum of 2500 calories per day in workouts and basketball practices and would easily eat three servings of pasta for dinner. However, once I graduated from college, I realized that I did not truly know how to fuel my body. I knew that I loved carbs, and ate a ton of them because I was always being told that I was too skinny for basketball. Our nutrition "talks" in college also told me that I needed protein for energy and recovery (so I thought), so I continued to pound the pasta with chicken, even after graduation. When I started gaining weight after college, I panicked. I began to "diet" by restricting myself from many of the foods that I loved, thinking that maintaining a very strict diet would give me my ideal body. I also watched many of my former college teammates continue to gain weight after graduation and began to get angry that nobody actually taught us how to eat correctly, or how to treat our bodies. In college athletics, you are constantly told that you are "too skinny" or "too fat" or "not fast enough" or "not explosive enough," and you spend four-plus years trying to prove that you are whatever they tell you that you are not. This leads to terrible habits, terrible self-esteem, and a rough road after college for many. 

My wake up call with my nutrition came when I started nursing school a year and a half ago. I am in an accelerated nursing program, which means that I am constantly stressed and constantly telling myself that I do not have time to meal prep. For the first 8 months of school, I often ate out, drank more coffee than my body knew what to do with, rarely worked out, and got minimal sleep. I was surviving in fight or flight mode and my body couldn't sustain it. When I began to feel myself break down physically and mentally, I knew that I had to make some changes, and it was going to start with my nutrition. 

In the last 10 months, I have begun to educate myself further on what truly fuels my body. I genuinely believe that this is unique for everyone. What works for me might not work for the next person. I began to experiment with different protein sources, I started to add more fats to my meals, and I moved some of my carb intake to earlier in the day. However, what has really helped me sustain a more consistent nutrition intake is making time to meal prep. I often take Sunday mornings to grocery shop, then prepare my meals for the week. I will make my oatmeal the night before (shoutout to overnight oats) and stick it in the fridge. That way, when I wake up early, I can grab my food and go. I have also begun to experiment with meal prep companies such as Green Chef. I use Green Chef for dinners during the week, mainly because I am not a great cook, and it allows my boyfriend and I to have fun in the kitchen while also making a delicious meal. Regardless of what food I make or how I prepare it, what I truly try to focus on is balance. I know that "balance" is a popular buzzword in regard to nutrition, but it’s true. I tend to eat healthy throughout the day, but you better believe that I have a cookie every night after dinner. Why? Because I love cookies and I am allowed to eat cookies. After college, I used to think that if I ate too many carbs in one day that I needed to stick to eating only salads the next day or barely eating at all. That is not healthy. Essentially starving myself doesn't make me skinnier or healthier, it actually hurts my body. Nutrition is a real struggle that many people deal with every day, but it doesn't have to be. You can treat yourself while still reaching whatever goals you want to reach, and it took me some time to learn that. 

In finding my way in the nutrition world, I have found my love for fitness again too. For a long time, it was a chore to workout because I had been "forced" to workout for five years in college. So when I graduated, you better believe that nobody was going to tell me to workout anymore. This meant that I would go on a two or three-month streak of completely depleting my body in the gym, to then barely working out for the next two to three months (while feeling very guilty about it). However, when I started to hone in on my nutrition and create a balance, it allowed me to create a better relationship with fitness as well. I started to do shorter workouts at the gym, instead of going until I wanted to pass out, and I didn't force myself to go to the gym every day, some days I slept in instead. While I continue to try to keep this balance in my life, my fitness and nutrition is still a work in progress. There are still days when I feel guilty if I don't go on a run (I sort of hate running), or if I only lift for 30 minutes, but I try to remind myself to be kind to my body. Many of us put our bodies through a lot, whether it's school, work, working out, sitting at a desk all day, trying to keep up with children, etc., and we need to recognize that sometimes our bodies need a break. Sometimes we need to watch a movie on the couch and eat a pizza, and that is OK. 

-Brooke

You can follow Brooke on instagram @brooklynj1