Olympian Laviai Nielson: Paris Olympics Journey & her Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Diagnosis

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2:17Hello and welcome to the pod where we dive into the food and lifestyle and diet choices of our amazing guests to show you just how easy it is to live a healthy life whilst enjoying those guilty pleasures and we get the real talk and the real life stories from these amazing people that have done amazing things in their life and career because I myself used to get ill time and time again every winter and I decided to take it into my own hands look at what I put in my body and then find out how amazing and how good I could live my life and feel and so I'm here today to try and help you do the same.

2:59Today I'm joined by Lavia Nielsen whose speed, strength and determination makes him someone to be a force to be reckoned with on and off the track. You have a fascinating story and I'm very keen to get into it because you've been a European and a world medalist on the track you've been to the paris olympics and you've reached the top of the game you're an olympian right that's that classic ancient greek thing of you're an olympian you're the best of the best you're an athlete but i want to get into the story behind who you are who made you who you are today what food you put in your body how do you get to be an olympian it's uh something i'm fascinated by um so i'd love to get into the start of your journey yeah let's do it let's get into your heritage where you came from first memories of family and food from a young age what did that look like I love this question because I'm so proud of my heritage so I'm half Sudanese my mother's Sudanese I grew up with a single mum so being Sudanese is all I know um and food is such a huge part of our culture it's um we would visit Sudan every year twice a year actually every summer and every Christmas we'd go over to Sudan and mealtimes were almost ceremonial I would say they were very much um centered on hospitality like when we would arrive home and I say arrive home in quotations because it's this big sort of homecoming um we would be welcomed with like endless amounts of food from not just our family but like friends friends of friends and neighbors and people would just come around and bringing food was almost a way to show love and I will say this I think my friends are super nice and they're super kind and I but I think it drives them up the wall I eat so slowly like beyond slow that's a good thing yeah it's good I think it's a good thing um but so slowly and they're really kind I can tell it kind of drives them up the wall and it's because food times or meal times will never just sit down finish your plate and leave it was we all eat from the same communal tray um with like bread or what we call kistana which is a flat it's a flat bread made of fermented sorghum flour and still to this day like one of my favorite foods and we would use that sort of like a utensil to share from this communal tray and so it was never this plate's in front of you you must finish your plate it was we're all eating together we're all going to share this together and so it was yeah mealtimes lasted hours and i remember like you know even the the cooking process um the kitchen would be filled with the women of the family mums aunts sisters my grandma who was the matriarch of the house and the leader of that she would yeah she would they'd be in there for hours and so food was almost just um the backbone of like the whole day and so yeah i grew up with a really great relationship with food and it was because yeah it was the social occasion yeah and what what was a typical meal or what does it consist of?

6:00So, Sudanese food is, it's very interesting because we are both African and Arab. So, our food is very heavily influenced by, yeah, sort of like African cultures as well as Arabic cultures. So, there's a lot of like stewed beans, very light salads, almost like tabouleh, tomatoes, cucumbers. One thing that I found really interesting when I was growing up is Sudan is a really big exporter of peanuts. Oh, really? And peanut butter or like their version of peanut butter is not seen as like a spread it's almost seen as a flavoring so we actually have a salad um that's kind of mixed with like lime chili and peanut butter not the way that we know it yeah and it's a in arabic it's called a peanut salad peanut dress salad um so a bit of that sort of hearty stews a lot of bread a lot of rice a lot of like good hearty carbs so i grew up on a lot of carbohydrates which was great when i finally transition into athletics and yeah using nutrition to feel real good food right yeah real meals the funny thing you say when i was 17 18 i stayed i went and traveled around gambia and senegal for a couple of months and going to live with an african family and you had that meal time where the whole extended family was there and it was just one big bowl of essentially rice and a type of curry and you just got your hands stuck in and would like their technique i just found it fascinating because a the social side of that is brilliant it brings everyone together and that's a huge part of food and i think it's really important but b there was no cutlery and you're thinking dirty hands in africa whatever people would normally freak out but they they did it in a special way so you kind of grabbed a bit the curry and the rice rolled it into a ball into palm your hand and then ate from the palm when you were scooping out you're only scooping with your fingers so there was a level of kind of hygiene that they kept in it which i thought was really fascinating because i just think we're so disconnected from the realities of like food and it's microwave dinners and it's whatever that eating it in the rawest sense possible with your hands and with community i just thought was awesome yeah it's amazing it's so good well that must have been and it was a childhood thing that you did every couple every year you were going back twice a year yeah so it's you're it's ingrained and you love it so do you still go back today um no and i would like to actually take this opportunity to maybe highlight what's going on in sudan if you allow me because they're my people and we've um unfortunately been for two years been um through a really horrible civil war that absolutely nobody wanted and I think Sudan is currently experiencing the largest displacement in the world at the moment with I think 12 million people which is half of the population either displaced internally or seeking refuge abroad so unfortunately I haven't been able to go back now for six years six years double that with COVID and yeah it was on the red list for ages so I haven't been able to go back for six years but I still try and live that culture at home through yeah food which is such a big part of my personal culture as well yeah thank you for I think they they um love to be seen and heard and shed a light on at the moment so what were meal times like at home here in England as a kid growing up do you have memories did you yeah what was your experience of English food and culture um yeah my mum was very adamant on our household being a Sudanese household she was very very proud of the heritage and she wanted to bring that back to the UK so much so that we actually spoke Arabic at home rather than English you can speak English at school and obviously with your friends and outside of the home but at home I want you to learn my mother tongue and so we spoke Arabic at home and we ate Sudanese food and I think when my mum moved over to the UK I think she was actually in a lot of shock at how much um the food the quality of food here was just so bad and I think when you're so in tune with eating good quality food and home-cooked meals you really start to taste that difference when they're not not good quality and not really good and rich home-cooked meals and so yeah she would make sure I think actually for most of our childhood I'm very lucky to say this we would eat home-cooked meals school pack lunches um no actually we ate school dinners I see you ate yeah you got a bit of the chips and beans chips and beans you got a bit of pasta bakes yeah and yeah oh god i love the tray bakes at school you do i love them um but yeah at home it was it was mostly home-cooked meals um and it was communal it wasn't you know i mean we were doing sport growing up as well and we would never rush our meal times we would go to school and then do the after school sports clubs and then come home and yeah it'd be a couple hours on the dinner table eating from that same communal tray as a family of three and um really talking with each other on the dinner table what's amazing because you struggle these days to get a kid to sit down for 20 minutes yeah right but if you're sitting there for two hours having this family meal I mean what an occasion I never in front of the telly it's really interesting now obviously like when I go to these competitions abroad with my my peers my athlete peers they're used to um the meal times where it was kind of squeezed in between school and the after school club so they're all like really fast eaters and they have a go at both my sister and I'm very slow eaters they have a go at us for how slow we eat but it's literally because I know no other way like I never felt the need to like rush my meals and I think yeah I think it's a really I always reply back with like the Japanese eat slow and they're some of the healthiest people in the world yeah well it's conscious eating right you let your body give it the signals that it's full I think And as part of the challenge, we eat so fast that our body doesn't even know how much we're consuming and if we're full or not.

11:59So we just keep going. And then that's when, you know, people often overeat. Isn't it that it takes something like 20 minutes for the signals to reach your brain? I don't know the exact number, but it's somewhere around that. It needs time. It needs time. And, you know, often we just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Oh, I'm still hungry. But you're not. Perhaps sometimes you drink a glass of water and you'd be fine. but people just keep eating unfortunately which is something we need to cure isn't it like when you eat too much and i'm so full i should have eaten so much because you've eaten so quickly well yeah if you if you eat a slow you know family meal it's definitely a different thing versus quick well fit down you know your body needs time to digest digesting food is one of the most resource intensive things in the body all right so if you eat a big meal but just before you go to sleep you'll sleep worse because your body has to then go and deal and process with that food process that food instead of like resting and helping your body recover of course yeah that's why you get that kind of morning hangover if you've had a late curry or something and just go straight to bed um but i'm really interested so when you were young what when did the training start when was the you know when did they say okay you guys are gonna be athletes what what was that like how was the fuel was food part of it yeah massive I was um I was a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to my sport um I first knew of athletics when I was around eight years old and that was through school competitions and sort of county competitions and district competitions um and our teachers would tell us you know like you should really try actually go to an after school club after school athletics club this is really really young and I will say my sister and I were just not interested in the in the training aspect of it like we love the sport and I was such a fan of the sport before I ever became a sports person but I think we we come from a family where no one is really a sports person um sports is almost seen as um dare I say something that women don't do and you know that I think that kind of culture in that tradition we kind of saw it as that as well as like something women of the family don't do like we'll leave the football to the guys of the family and so I think we were never really encouraged or sort of pushed to do it by our family um it was more so the school teachers and it was only actually until the London 2012 Olympics came basically to our hometown we grew up in Leytonstone which was the neighboring town to Stratford which is where the Olympics were held and that's when we really started to realize the significance of sport because when you don't when it's not something that's really common in your household and you don't really watch it and you don't know anyone who has become a sports person you can't really like they say you can't be someone you can't see yeah and so I think that was definitely what what happened with us and so when London 2012 came around we actually had the opportunity to volunteer at those games at 16 years old our PE sports teacher kind of put us forward as people who were growing up in the borough and there was that legacy of wanting to to inspire the next generation and that definitely happened with us and so we stood in the um Olympic Stadium carrying kit for the athletes and taking them from the start line back to the finish line where they would finish the race and collect all their that must have been a real moment right they're just impressioned in your brain yeah I can't forget it to this day it was 100 ,000 people and I actually carried Jessica Ennis's kit in the heptathlon 200 good kit choice good lane choice yeah obviously she eventually went on to become olympic champion but in that moment stood on the track and I think there were only a few people who were allowed on the track and it was the athletes themselves obviously the officials photographers and then the volunteers so we were some of only a few people who allowed on the track and stood there 100 ,000 people camera flashes going on everywhere they were screaming her name and it was like she couldn't hear any of it she was so dialed in and so focused I was looking at her like are you hearing this they're shouting your name and I remember at the time thinking what would it take to be that focus and that disciplined in that moment to block out all of this and become Olympic champion and I was so inspired by those games exactly as they said the legacy would and um yeah a month later I started actually training really everyone said that you should yeah everyone said that we should and um I started off with 800 and then after a year realized that I wasn't that wasn't my foret I wasn't very good at the middle distance found my way over to the 400 and within three years in 2015 I was on the world championship team with Jessica Ennis and I approached her and I said so three years ago I was carrying your kit and now we're on the same team she couldn't believe it and I was just like thank you so much you inspired me so much and yeah it was incredible what a great story I mean it just shows how I mean this is an athletics example but how impressionable we are as kids and you know if you set the right example if you feed the right food if you show kids what's possible they can you can do anything right you've just gone at 16 right this is it I'm going for it and And, you know, now you're sharing a track with her, which is phenomenal.

17:15And I think that's half the battle, right? You've got to give kids that inspiration. Yeah, which is now what I think I'm trying to do with my social media, especially with our YouTube channel. My sister and I have a YouTube channel and we are definitely targeting the younger girls' generation. Like this is the rawness of it. This is the fun and the serious and the pressure and the excitement of it all. Just really showing all of it. when I was younger I would have loved to see how Jessica Ennis trained but that was before really the main chunk of social media came about and so now we're just trying to show as much as we can and that's what I love about social media is being able to show people what you can do yeah yeah of course okay so you you've gone into 2015 where you're then on the on the world championship stage I think at this point yeah I can call myself a professional athlete that was professional athlete my first year first year as a professional athlete you're still pretty young at this stage 19 19 what are you eating is food part of the conversation have you got coaches have you got nutritionists yeah what's the deal I remember the first thing that I definitely realized was just how hungry I was all the time because I'm like starting to train now and I think like we mentioned earlier in the conversation when you're eating slow you do notice when you're full and you do notice when you're hungry so I think when I was younger I was just eating to the point where I was full if I wasn't completely satiated I could go back and eat uh seconds or more but when I started training I remember waking up starving and I'm when I was younger I wasn't someone who was a huge breakfast fan so now I'm like waking up starving and I'm thinking like okay I definitely need to like start fueling my body more because I know overnight the body's recovering from these intense training sessions and the competitions and also I remember some of my first few races I didn't really have a fueling strategy I wasn't really eating the right foods to fuel for those competitions and so yeah I started working with a nutritionist around 2015 for the first time um and yeah I think I um I had to as someone who I would say now I'm a bit more of an intuitive eater but I had to start tracking calories yeah calories what was going in what was coming out macros yeah protein hats they were like you're not eating enough protein I remember my first nutrition was like you're eating a lot of bread which is good but you need to include more protein yeah um so yeah I started tracking um a food diary and yeah that I think that was one of the first aspects of training because training isn't just running and lifting right there's nutrition sports psychology there's a lot that goes into it nutrition was the one I was most interested in and most and wanting to really knuckle down and get right um so yeah it was a it was a bit of a journey I would say those first two or three professional years of I think what we tend to do with sports nutrition is say these are all the studies this is what you should do but I think now we're definitely seeing a bit more of a shift in that conversation in that we're not just fueling the athlete so similar training we're not just training the event we need to make this really specific and individual to you so i remember that my first nutritionist when when she said you're eating too much bread i started to cut down on how much bread i was eating but i grew up with bread like that's all we ate on the train and after about two weeks i remember telling her i feel really lethargic i feel really tired and she was like what are you swapping out and i was like nothing look that's all i know okay bring it back in bring it back in because that's what you used to so it's kind of um yeah tailoring nutrition to not just your fueling needs but what your body is accustomed to and what works for you and like we always say like the day before a race don't try something new you know stick to what you know and and um yeah fuel your body in the way that feels right to you at boar's head we've been going back to school for over 115 years and this year every school lunch is reason to celebrate with the flavors your kids love and the exceptional quality you expect helping you make school lunch fresh easy and delicious ring the bell the deli is open boarshead committed to craft since 1905 while every other channel is fighting for your customers attention podcasts are where they've already given it no one accidentally listens to a podcast for 45 minutes.

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22:12so when you go on the international circuit running races around the world what how does your food and diet change is it all controlled do you take stuff with you or are you just left to your own devices wherever the championship is a little bit of both um it depends very much on the competition and the championships um like one example i will say the paris olympic village the food was terrible absolutely horrible i couldn't i was like this is the pinnacle of our sport and the food was terrible um just what were they serving um it was a lot of i to be honest it's a buffet situation buffets to me my worst nightmare actually my worst nightmare i can't stand them um so it was a lot of like identifying what the meats were like looking at like what is this yeah there's a picture on my phone that i show people all the time i'm like can you guess what meat this is because i couldn't at the time which is crazy like i was competing at the pinnacle of my sport so i always bring something with me i always bring i know like high protein snacks high protein drinks high carbohydrate drinks um loads of gels like when I go away to a championship which is often two to three weeks long there's a suitcase of my kit and there's a suitcase of my food and I'm not joking there's a lot of yeah a lot of like supplements and snacks things that I know just work for my body because I'm also someone who if I don't like what I'm eating I will not eat it like I won't touch it if I take a bite I'm like don't like that I won't finish it I'm very very I would say now I'm very picky but I think is just because I know I don't like to put bad food into my body.

23:54What works. Was Paris the Olympics where they tried to be all sustainable and then made half the food vegan and then all the athletes kicked off because there wasn't enough meat? Yeah, we ran out of food. Can I show you the picture? Show me, yeah, I'd love to see it. I mean, it's kind of weird. It looks translucent slash not beef, but then at the same time not pork, not chicken. I mean, if I had to guess, it would probably go pork. It's chicken. It's chicken. Wow. That looks dreadful. And it pains me to say it because the Olympics, Paris Olympics were incredible. The venues, the crowds would say incredible.

24:34Just the village was just... Just, you've got to look after the athletes, guys. Come on. I mean, there are horror stories, aren't there, from the Olympic villages, like the accommodation's always like really cheap, like... Cardboard beds. Cardboard beds and all this stuff. Fishnet mattresses. Great time. Just a great time. It was an amazing time. We live to tell the tale. But yeah, I think... It's the one sport in the world where you are the top of the top and it isn't compensated the way any other sport in the world is and you get treated like crap. Yeah. It's terrible. I mean, I kind of get it because we have thousands of athletes at the Olympics.

25:09They're trying to mass cater to thousands. But I think, yeah, I've got one more Olympics in me and nutrition will definitely be something that I don't think are the olympic village do you have to stay in the olympic village can't you don't have to it does make things a bit harder for you if you don't yeah um but we had one of the athletes on the team actually brought their own personal chef and was cooking in an airbnb nearby and bringing it into the village i mean 100 yeah and i said that's genius i don't think about that but i'm gonna do that next time yeah i mean invite me i'll come and cook for you oh i'd love okay la yeah i mean i love hello hello is great um but i mean i just think it's so insane because we were talking to jamie murray a few weeks ago and you know on the tennis scene going to all the championships around the world and you go to the us open and they give you papa john's and burgers and you're like what do you mean like you're about to go and play a tennis match like at the top of your game and they're gonna feed you papa john's pizza like come on like surely we understand more about nutrition now yeah to then not do that if you want to perform your best i just it amazes me i'm shocked papa john's is crazy it's crazy but you look at it with i mean i know it from football a bit because that was my thing as a kid but you know back 20 years ago footballers retired at 32 and that was it they were done they were finished you know but they drank they ate whatever they want you know it was a kind of party boy lifestyle now look at cristiano ronaldo into his 40s absolutely crushing it because he looks after his body he feeds himself real food he refuses to touch the coca-cola when it's on the podium in front of him and you know he's literally all about real food proper training and you know he's very dedicated as well but i think jockovich is similar jockovich is very particular about his food and nutrition and you know getting the right natural whole foods in because it makes a difference and in some regards we've kind of put it down to the science right you need this many grams of carbohydrates this many grams of protein this many grams of fat whatever eat that you'll be fine but it's not the case it's really not the case there's micronutrients and there's polyphenols and there's antioxidants and how these foods interact with our body that just aren't considered at that kind of base level sports nutrition which i just think it's a big miss and then when you see the athletes that go against that they have years extra in their career yeah right yeah it's so important so hopefully now that those are bringing into the being brought into the conversation a bit more because yeah i think it was all very base level it's all carbs and proteins carbs protein um but yeah now i think if you're wanting to enhance your recovery we're talking a lot more about antioxidants and the different micronutrients that you can use to aid your training sessions as well it's just incredible so you've got a twin sister lena do you train with her do you eat with her what's the relationship there we train together um we lived together for a very long time we only recently moved apart um because we're growing up a bit now um but we still do eat a lot of our meals together we live very close and um yeah we train in slightly different events but it does mean that sometimes we have some training sessions together and it's incredibly beneficial i think i think we're so lucky to have each other because we are competitive in a very healthy way and the way i describe that is it's not so much that we come to training and like i want to beat you today and i want to beat it it's more like okay well you're there i should be right next to you because we are carbon copies of each other literally um so that's that's kind of the competition we had a great training session yesterday and it was we we were like side by side and we kept like surging with each other.

29:03It was like one person would surge and then the other would surge. And it was that kind of half a competition in the sense that we know we should be pretty similar. Yeah. Up there with each other. Well, we all need a bit of a push now and again, right. To kind of take us to that next level where maybe we couldn't go on our own. Yeah. I think that's fascinating. It's so imperative. When we say, we have this quote that we say often, it's better together because it's true. We always say like, if you want to start running or there's a new exercise you want to start doing high rocks for example um we always say find someone to do it with because not only do they hold you accountable but it helps push each other are you doing high rocks no not the one no not the one not for me seems a bit intense crossfit 2.0 right i think it requires a very specific type of personality i'm not sure i've got it in there yeah just absolutely some people get off on just beating their body up i guess yeah it's quite sadistic in a way but all right so moving forward I want to get into you know a bit what's going on today and what's going on in your life and training and food and diet but in 2021 you had a diagnosis can you talk a little bit about that yeah so in yeah 2021 I started to notice some different sensations in my body um at the time I couldn't quite and looking back now it was probably really obvious considering my twin sister had been diagnosed when she was 18 years old just before her 18th birthday and as identical twins her consultant did say because you've got it your twin sisters are very high likelihood of having this as well but in 2021 I started to experience um first thing was numbness down my left side and then um very weird sensations like I felt very sort of like fuzzy in my body very like pins and needles and sort of burning pain sensation especially when I would train so my body heat would increase especially like training outside in the summer I'd get very hot I'd get very tingly all over pins and needles all over and yeah I went to my sports doctor and started describing the symptoms and he was like have you got any history of autoimmune conditions in the family and at the time my sister was actually private with her diagnosis no one had known about it except for immediate friends and family i said yeah strangely enough i have a twin my twin sister's got ms and he like looked just looked very seriously at me and said we need to go to a neurologist um so within a week went to a neurologist had two mri scans and got diagnosed in july of 2021 with multiple sclerosis which is an autoimmune condition which affects your nerves it damages the nerve linings and what that means is that signals can't efficiently jump between nerves which normally happens if you're healthy and normal so that can kind of cause some symptoms like the ones I was describing it can also affect your vision hearing mobility and coordination so that was two days before I went out to the Tokyo Olympics what yeah I got diagnosed two days before i left i remember sitting in the um consultant's office and he was like that this is what we can see in the scan he was showing me my brain and my spinal cord and he was like these are the lesions so we're officially diagnosing with ms and i thought i can't talk about this now and he was almost like telling me like you need to be really careful now with exposure to illness like you know covid was right at the time he was like you need to be very careful with um your exposure to to illnesses and um yeah like you're basically vulnerable at the moment and I just thought yeah yeah cool cool cool don't want to hear about don't want to hear about it and then I was on the plane to Tokyo um and that's kind of like when it started to sink in because I was thinking I should be going to Olympic Games in the best possible shape of my life thinking I'm invincible like I can do anything and I felt very sort of different at that time I felt very very vulnerable very weak um physically my I felt very disconnected to my body when someone tells you this is what your body has and this is what it's doing and yeah I felt very disconnected mentally from my my physical body and to make matters worse when I got to Tokyo I actually got put in isolation in quarantine for coming into close contact with the COVID case and then the alarm bell started ringing I was like oh god I'm gonna get COVID it's gonna affect my MS and it was just a really difficult um psychological period at that time 10 days isolation 14 days and i was at your own yeah for to fester with a diagnosis like that yeah and but yeah 20 22 hours of the day in in quarantine and by the time i got out i was just not the same person and it was a really hard pill to swallow being at the olympics and not wanting to be there that was my whole life all I've ever wanted since 2012 was to be an Olympian and then finally I could call myself that and I just didn't recognize it um so yeah when I think it was only when I came home from those Olympics that I really start to accept that that diagnosis and start making the changes in my life you went ahead and ran yeah and ran disassociation just put it in a box and just carried on yeah um which I mean to go to Paris three years later I will safely say I felt like in the best shape of my life I felt invincible I felt like I could do anything and it was but was there not a thought this was it it's over no no no not at all didn't let it come into your mind because I'd seen my sister do incredible things with her life being diagnosed from a very young age and um yeah I think when you when you're diagnosed with it the doctor does say like you might want to reconsider like he's he's one of the things he said to me was you might want to minimize stress in your life and when you're an Olympic athlete you are stressed pretty much all the time um and so they they do sort of advise you to reconsider some aspects of your life but I didn't see it as a as an end I didn't see it as a as a stop to what I was doing I just saw it as okay this is something now that I have and I have to deal with and I'm going to deal with it in the best possible way and I will say it started with nutrition yeah entirely yeah so what have you changed since I think before when I before the diagnosis food for me was especially when it comes to being an athlete was how can I fuel myself for training and competition in the best way possible how can I eat and nourish well to recover from training competition it was all very straightforward it was all very I eat I perform I recover I sleep I eat again now with the MS diagnosis it kind of added an extra layer and it was um okay now I have to fuel myself and nourish myself not just for performance and recovery but for optimizing health short-term health and long-term health and had a lot of conversations with my sister about things that she was trying to reduce in her diet and what worked for her I think for us the biggest thing now is we're very careful that's why i say now buffets are just my worst nightmare because there's risk of contamination food being left out for long periods of time and so now when we go away to competitions um my sister and i always get sent um the menu beforehand we get sent exactly what which times the food will be left will be laid out and we must look like such keen beans when we go down to milton with the first ones there because yeah we're the first in the queue because we're like we don't want anyone touching it before we do and that's to avoid contamination because one of my sister's biggest flare-ups was from um bacteria contamination and food one of my most recent flare-ups of ms was also from a bout of food poisoning and so we know that there's that connection now between gut health and immune immunity and so we really try and um optimize our gut health so that's even another thing that we do alongside trying to fuel for training and performance and there's a lot of things that we do cut out entirely in our diet fried foods is a no-go for us absolutely no don't can't remember the last time i had something fried um i'm not perfect i will say there's definitely things i know that i should be cutting out um especially when it comes to like ultra processed foods um i'm just a sucker for biscuits i love a biscuit i love a biscuit my tea and biscuit time is like do you know what i'm always a bit of a biscuit advocate in a way in a weird way because most people want a sweet treat and you can't get away from it but if you eat a bar of dairy milk chocolate it's 56 % sugar but actually if you get a proper scottish shortbread it can be about 14 % sugar and then the rest is all butter and so actually as far as sweet treats go it's a much better one yeah yeah my tea and biscuit time is precious to me um love a good bicky yeah but like i don't like i remember i used to love like supermarket cakes come out entirely like so yeah i think we try and reduce sugar fried foods i don't really eat like processed meats i don't go anywhere near like ham or anything like that like really highly processed meats and and it's a bit of trial and error it's it's really it's really sort of taking me on a journey to eating a lot more intuitively again actually just going back to my roots um I still do track my food but I'm not very strict now with um calorie intake macros um I actually just track it just to kind of get an overall image but yes it's it's um respond like feeling how I'm responding to certain foods um especially when I go abroad I always try and stick to sort of the safer options um and yeah just trying to minimize inflammation which can minimize the immune reaction so you noticed a particular food has set it off aside from the buffet bacteria thing like is there something that you know if you eat that that's going to put me into a flare-up fried foods just yeah anything french fries yeah anything like that um because i think um with those oils i think when they just I can feel like it just sits there you know and I just immediately if I ever have something fried like immediately want to like cleanse like my gut like that's what it feels like to me it's um yeah it's just trying to feel I don't think I eat in the sense that okay this will minimize information but it's almost like I know if I eat this I'll feel amazing afterwards yeah or if I if I eat this I know I'll feel horrible afterwards and it's just that connection to overall well-being that I think is really important.

39:50Well, you touched on your test and learn approach of like listening to your body, understanding what works, what doesn't. Because I guess there's no blueprint, right? The doctors didn't say, okay, you've got MS, this is now what you need to do. Because it's quite badly understood as far as I am aware. Yeah, MS is, there's research happening all the time. It's becoming, I would say, more and more understood. There was even a massive difference between when my sister got diagnosed at 18 and when I got diagnosed at 25. um when I got diagnosed the consultant said to me we wouldn't have been able to diagnose you like this so quickly three or four years ago like the research has come such a long way um in saying that a lot of the medicines at the moment are still sort of trial and error um there's not so much like really high success rates so I think I will never say that there's never a place for medication but I think there's a place for nutrition and lifestyle and just feeling well again and just feeling overall yeah really good in yourself and and just bringing that connection back to my body especially yeah four years ago I definitely felt a disconnect to my body and it's just kind of making sure that I feel whole within myself I mean it's inspirational because most people would get a diagnosis like that think their life's over give up no cure xyz you know but you've just gone whatever I'm gonna figure it out I'm gonna feed my body intuitively feel what feels right and you know you're still an Olympian you're still doing everything you do it's I mean it must be so inspirational for anyone with MS yeah thank you I think it's yeah insane I think anyone maybe with a chronic condition as well I think I will say I think it's a myth that an athlete will show up to a start line 100 okay we all deal with really tough situations and yeah I think we get a lot of messages my sister and I about um how inspirational it is to live with MS and train with MS and compete with it but I think there's so many athletes who yeah deal with a lot behind the scenes that we just don't know and I think yeah just giving athletes that grace I think a lot of us will look at athletes and think they're invincible and they're superhuman but we're not we're just we're all just humans training to the best of our ability well but this is the fascinating part about it right like hearing from all these different amazing people that have done insane things uh and you're just like how did you do that that's impossible but then everyone has their own little guilty pleasure their own vice their own thing that are not doing right or they want to improve on and their own story about it and we're all just human as you say and it is i think it's so fascinating to see and hear what you've done firsthand and you know where you're going with it so you know well done to that but thank you what does fueling up for a big race look like now now that you you know you have your diagnosis you know what what's working for your body what isn't what what's a three-month prep look like for a race it's so interesting because so i train for the 400 meters which which is a combination of speed, power, endurance.

43:02Yes, stamina, speed, endurance. I think it's an all-round event. And so my training varies massively throughout the year. So in the early months of our training block, we do a lot of high aerobic work, which is a lot of endurance. So my carbon tank just shoots up. Now I'm in like the middle of my season. I've got the British Championships next week, actually. So at the time of recording this, we're very much in the bulk of the season. um my carbon tech has come down slightly because my energy levels my my energy gosh what's the word i'm looking for my energy intake need what's the opposite of that output output there we go my energy output is a lot lower um so i'm not needing as many carbohydrates so now going into competition i'm just thinking very specifically about um how much protein i'm consuming to recover from the very intense sessions at the moment um high speed um but not high volume so kind of the training kind of goes from high volume to low volume high intensity so i'm at that high intensity stage at the moment so a lot more protein um still quite moderate carbs um and less fat as well to kind of lean up as we go into the world championships which is still six weeks away six weeks away do you still have a cheat meal yes you do well not so much a meal a very specific snack go on like i said i love my biscuit my friends cannot understand this for the life of them i love party rings party rings really i love party rings and my friends like why that's such a child step i'm like i i think it's just the simplicity of it it's just a biscuit with icing on top that's it and i love it so much i'm eating less of them now i gave you grace and said biscuits are healthy and then you give me party rings i mean come on i'm pretty sure they're bad we've looked at party rings and they're like a biscuit that's 40 percent sugar or something yeah it's the icing yeah it's the icing sugar yeah it's the worst it's bad but i love it so much like that is my guilt during the winter when i was like really training hard I was going through a lot a lot of a lot less now but yeah I think as the season goes on I start to eat less and less because my energy output just isn't that high so I can recognize that that I need a lot less and it just naturally comes down that body fab.

45:30Nice awesome okay so now it's time to get into the good the bad and the healthy so you've just told us you're bad which is party rings but there might be more we'll uncover but let's start with something good that you are you know proud of that you've picked up along the way how you look after your health and your diet something good I think definitely the um intuitive eating I think um I'm really proud of how well I'm able to recognize those signs from the body like I for example even this morning I was eating a bagel and I got halfway through and I started to slow down and i know when i start to slow down my body's like that's all we needed thank you that's all we needed um whereas like in the winter i can maybe have dinner at like six or seven it gets like eight and i'm like i'm so hungry like i've trained so hard today yeah and i will actually go and eat something whereas like maybe before when i was younger i'd be like well that's dinner done that's dinner i shouldn't eat anymore whereas now i'm like okay if my body's telling me you need more then i'll eat more so i'm very very proud of listening to my body signals i think there's such a good one intuitive eating i mean we all don't really do enough of that and our body tells us what it needs yeah right hunger signals aren't oh i've hit my calories for the day there's like no your body needs something go give it to it and it'll feel and do better yeah you know that's really good okay so then is there another bad one other than party rings as bad as it gets party rings are probably as bad as it gets and you know what's even better the mini ones mini ones they come in like little bags and there's six of them in there and they're like this small so they're like one packet six that'll do me we need to look up how much sugars in a pack of party rings but and what else is in there but okay that's your bad so then let's go to the healthy one swap or health hack that you've applied that you're proud of um i just thought of one like very recently i've started adding cottage cheese into my scrambled eggs come on saw that on tiktok actually tiktok made me do it yeah don't tell me tiktok doesn't teach you anything but yeah it's like if you add 100 grams yeah it's 100 grams of cottage cheese to like i usually have three scrambled eggs it adds like 20 grams protein um and yeah i've started doing that it adds kind of like a creaminess and a tanginess i love cottage cheese cottage cheese is a game changer so good i love it there's a little hack so like double your protein with oh you can put it in anything as well yeah it literally goes with everything you can make it sweet you can make it savory you can do whatever you want with it i mean you can bake cheesecake with it oh that's interesting it's so versatile it's phenomenal and it's one of the cheapest foods in the supermarket it's brilliant love that okay so now it's time for off your trolley next section oh you were asked to bring in the receipts from your latest shopping trip yeah can you share it with me sure i do an ocado shop oh very good we like ocado i can show you my recent ocado order peek behind the curtain and see what's actually in your basket there's no pie rings in that basket so i'll try to be good oh you cheated you knew it was coming and you kept all the bad stuff Wait, when was that order?

48:47What does it say? 30th of June. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I've been traveling quite a lot recently, so that was my last at home. No, you didn't know you were coming on this then, though you haven't cheated. This is legit. Pomegranate seeds, very good. Mangos, pineapple, mushrooms, mint, tomatoes, green beans, broccoli, salad. Rockful juice. You've got some Warburton's white sandwich things. They're probably not very good, are they? I think you could do better. I think your Sudanese bread would be better than that I know, I know I make a very I use it as a snack I make like a tuna melt sandwich as a snack Why the thins?

49:25Think it's less bread? No, it kind of adds like a crispiness Crispiness Like the You make a sandwich Got to get you off that That's proper ultra-processed bread I know, I did say I'm not perfect Listen, no one is It's all good Let's see what else you've got A good bit Are there any biscuits? on there. I'm scared. You've got oysters, you've got chicken, sweet potatoes, sausages, there is some cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, 10 % fat, very good. Semi-skinned milk, you want the full fat. You've got to go full fat. Paneer, great. Gnocchi, very good. Oh, you've got the Isigni sam mer unsalted butter that is the best butter oh that butter is like if you like your butter that butter is a game changer it's unpasteurized grass-fed cows amazing butter tastes by far the best i do think it tastes amazing poppadoms not that i think they were quite not that healthy really on there as well actually that was the paneer i had a paneer curry that day mango chutney poppadoms paneer yeah okay fair enough uh no biscuits oh good i mean look it's a good shot all in all it's a good shot mayonnaise with olive oil very good you're on it thank you it's a good shot just what was it again so the poppadoms and no chutney what was the first one oh the semi-skinned milk semi-skinned milk a full fat's just got more nutrients in it the nutrients in milk are in the fat and so it's less processed i think i can do that you can do that it's an easy swap and everyone prefers the taste of full fat anyway i think most people do um and you don't need to worry about calories so why would you have semi-skinned okay and you've got some steak in there it's a great shot it's great food i mean you're an olympian so marks out of 10 marks out of 10 i mean if i'm being critical i mean maybe the veg isn't organic but that's just that's you know that's just me i think um it's not just me you know there is pesticide residue left on fruits and vegetables and we know it's not good to consume pesticides yes you can wash them properly use bicarbonate soda and other things to get it as much as you can off but most people then don't and so then they've done studies where they test your urine and you know organic family versus non-organic family and there's a difference in the visible pesticide level in their urine which you know i don't fancy that in my body okay so what what would be the best way to ensure you're getting organic so just choose because i think it's with supermarkets it's quite hard isn't it it's hard they don't always have everything it's tricky there's something called the ewg clean 15 and the dirty dozen um which is a study that's done every year they update it regularly where they test all the fruits and vegetables and see which ones have the most pesticides and which have the least so the clean 15 is like i think number one's maybe avocado so you can buy avocado non-organic don't worry about it they don't use many pesticides and because of the shell you're not going to be consuming any um but then stuff like strawberries really bad lots of pesticides it's all over the fruit and then you've really got to try and wash it well but berries are one of the things i always try and buy organic if i can um but obviously it's an affordability thing as well it's it's expensive um so if you can't afford it then just make sure you wash it with some bicarb of soda so it really takes it off and gets rid of those even shopping at supermarkets go for the organic option or if you can if you can i mean i don't think you have to be totally militant about it like there's stuff in my shopping basket that isn't organic sometimes because you just can't get it and so then i choose to eat food versus you know restrict myself but i tend to walk around the fruit and veg aisle just picking up everything they've got organic and then if they haven't got it i'll just walk out okay um and then i'll make my meals out of that but also you know i live in devon at the moment so you can go to your farm shop and get it all organic there and there's some really cool um cool stuff in devon even our petrol station sells organic vegetables that's how bohemian uh it is where i live in devon um yeah it's not bad but right let's get into some quick fire questions i'm always so bad at these well you can't be bad It's just the first thing that comes out of your mouth.

53:51It's like when someone says, tell me about yourself. I'm like, I don't know who I am. Don't panic. You're an Olympian. You'll be fine. So, favourite guilty pleasure takeaway? I don't know how much more I can say party rings. Party rings. Takeaway. Takeaway. All right. Start again. Start again. I know it's not fried food, but. Okay. Takeaway.

54:13I told you I'm bad at this. Indian? Isn't that? Indian, yeah. I love a curry. Can't go wrong with a good curry. Specifically Dishoom in London. Dishoom's the one. Specifically. They do do a very good curry. Go-to meal after a tough training session? Definitely something hearty, carb-y, like, yeah, pasta, like a gnocchi. Gnocchi. Yeah, like something, a lot of carbs. Nice. Then one food you can not stand? Avocados. You hate avocados? What? It shocks people. it yeah i know you missed the whole avocado and eggs trend of the last like decade what's going on follow the ground honestly it's it's something that people just cannot understand i'm like it's a fruit it's a fruit and you have to add lemon juice and salt and chili flakes to make it taste good like it's it doesn't make sense to me guacamole coriander chili can't do that's even worse it's the texture for me so the guacamole is even worse like you've just smashed it up now it's like having a mushy banana but how's it different from like cottage cheese a similar sort of creamy texture i think i think it's the taste and the text i just can't get around it and my sister loves avocados really she's really tried with me like she once made like handmade sushi at home and hid like avocados in there and i ate the sushi and i kid you not i spat out the avocado i found it she tried i didn't know an avocado could be so offensive that's crazy one food or wellness hack that you swear by what are you taking in your supplement suitcase to your races beef liver capsules oh okay i have only recently started taking them in the last few months i think they're incredible i think as someone who i i wouldn't generally eat liver yeah but because i just don't like the taste um i think it's given me a lot more energy during the day so yeah beef living i've heard a lot of athletes speak about them now which is great so it's the most nutrient dense food in the world yeah they're in my supplement and oysters that's why they're in my cardio shop that's why they're in your cardio shop very good lots of omega-3s yeah very good sink as well yeah good for the training um favorite quick energy boosting snack when you're training uh dates or banana oh very good i'll ask you about gels because you mentioned energy gels what's your feeling about that that's a good question i think i i'm definitely something i have a carbohydrate drink that i sip throughout training because my training session can last hours sometimes um i think they serve a purpose because i know most gels and carbohydrate drinks are ultra processed foods and as someone who's trying to reduce ultra processed foods it's very weird for me to say that they serve a purpose like Like for example, my carbohydrate drink is maltodextrin.

57:08Yeah, it's not even sugar anymore. It's not sugar. Because sugar's too expensive apparently. It's maltodextrin, which is a cornstarch. It's a cornstarch, yeah. It's highly processed. Awful stuff. Yeah, but it's a quick release in carb when you're training. Yeah, but you could have honey. I could have honey, yeah. There's a study, actually, they've just recently done a study with honey versus running gels. No difference in performance. Really? That's so interesting. I mean, I don't want to advise an Olympian that and then you go and run worse or slower. I know. You'd have to test it for yourself.

57:40Yeah. For me, it's through training sessions. I know, I don't know what it would be like for marathon runners who need to have obviously that quick, that quick release. But yeah, I think it's even things like whey protein. That's an ultra processed food. It's a byproduct. It's a byproduct of milk processing. Cheese, making cheese. Cheese, yeah. Yeah. but I think that that's a really for most people are digestible if you're not lactose intolerant really quick digestible protein yeah and look some processing is not a bad thing in food right and there's nuance in it that we shouldn't be so militant that it's like all processing's bad get rid of it but you know when you could have traditionally made Sudanese flatbread or sourdough which is just three or four ingredients and it's fermented so the gluten's part digested and makes it much easier for your body to absorb the nutrients you could be having that but instead you've got this bread with 25 ingredients in it yeah you have to start to question well do i need all of those are they really beneficial for my body yeah you know and can we do better in places like that yes i think if you're having yeah those um supplements drinks gels protein powders i think they're genuinely i say they're fine as long as you are still having a very nutritious balanced whole food diet as well they shouldn't be i mean that's why they're called supplement they shouldn't be called there shouldn't be a replacement yeah they should be used when and when you need to i mean this is wholly an animal study so you can only take it with a pinch of salt but they they looked at dogs and what dogs ate in their lifetime and they did a study on it was labradors and they looked at how long they were living and there was a population that were living to about eight nine and then a group of Labradors that were living to about 14, 15.

59:28But in the middle of the data set, I can't remember how many dogs they looked at, but there was just not very many or the odd anomaly. So there were these two clear, distinct lifespans for these same Labradors. And they're going, wait a minute, why is one set living a considerable 30 to 40 % longer than the others? What's the difference? And it came down to dog food. But the reason why I bring that up is because obviously the eight and nine year old dogs were dying because they hate 100 % ultra processed dog food all the time. And the other group were eating real food. But the interesting thing was some of the dogs actually did eat part of their diet being ultra processed, but they also were having real food in and amongst that, which then means you're getting the nutrients and the things you need from those real foods with it.

1:00:21And then, you know, The human body, a dog's body, is incredibly resilient and can deal with probably a bit of that ultraprocessing, which is why I'm not so militant about stuff. I'm like, sure, have your treat, have your thing, but you need to get the foundations right. Yeah, exactly. So I do agree with what you're saying there about the gels. And you're an athlete, so you're running and you're burning it off. And I did a marathon once upon a time, and I had to live on them. You couldn't run 26 miles without an energy gel. Yeah, three, four hours. yeah you just burn out and you just be like oh my god i'm about to yeah be done i will try the honey though give it a go yeah it might work for you it might not yeah especially when i'm training like i say a banana but sometimes when i'm they're so intense i can't stomach anything yeah that's when the carbohydrate drink is useful but then honey would be pretty similar pretty easy honey and peanut butter peanut butter is the other one to get good fats and calories in when you're doing well I suppose you don't do so much long distance but the longest I run in training is 500 meters that's my kind of training yeah that's my kind of training yeah so I when I did I did a marathon I did the Paris marathon and then it was like that's too long training takes too long started doing half marathons then I was like that's too long takes too long then went to 10ks then went to 5ks and then I just gave up running I just kept going yeah never had track and field near me so oh yeah didn't ever go down to like 400 meters um there's no science to prove it but you do run a lot quicker on a track so even if you want to give a 5k yeah i don't know what it is i think maybe just running the same circuit again and again and again interesting try 5k on a track give it a go my my racing days are over there i think now i've got two kids so definitely out of shape and writing a book so i don't have any time to go to the gym at the moment which is brutal and I can't wait to get back but um yeah amazing stuff it's really interesting thanks for coming in love this is really great chat yeah thanks thanks having me well thanks for sharing everything about your story and your resilience and your journey and the fact that you're still in it and you're about to go to LA and you know it's just so fascinating to me and everything you do and everything that you've overcome um so thank you for bearing all and talking to us today it's always a pleasure thank you and to everyone listening until next time keep your trolley full of the good less of the bad and always plenty of the healthy very good

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