Could healthy eating be the answer (to everything)?

Does a competitive runner (or athlete for that matter) really need thousands of calories every day? I went in to a nutritionist and I was told I needed to be eating more, approximately 2800 calories per day. Do I really need to eat this much? Or do I need to just eat better? This is something I've been struggling with/studying/searching/EVERYTHING!!! This post and others to come will focus on healthy eating and what it really means to do that, but here's a post that introduces the concept, gives some examples and real-life stories and then I'll tell you what my plan is. How do you feel about that? Me too. Good. Let's go...

I am looking into going raw. Tim VanOrden does that at http://runningraw.com/. He's running about the same mileage I am, 66 miles per week, but hardly eats any calories. This guy eats a ton of fruits and vegetables. He takes no supplements and performs surprisingly well. To seeTim VanOrden's meal plan click here. Is he super-human? He says he's been asked a hundred times where he gets his calories, carbs etc. and you can click here to find that out. I don't know if this guy is right or wrong or both, but what I do know is that I have learned that I know almost nothing and even people with Ph. Ds can be be really wrong...

There's a lady by the name of Meredith Fishman who was a VERY active woman. Marathon runner and everything and all the sudden started having health problems, specifically rheumatoid arthritis. You can go to the story of Meredith Fishman for more details. Basically, once she started eating healthily all of her problems went away and she then ran a marathon, qualified for and ran in the Boston Marathon.

One of the best runners in this nation is finding this out too. Dathan Ritzenhein is the current American record holder in the 5,000 meters and he blogged about his views on nutrition. You can read a full account of Dathan Ritzenhein's diet views on his blog post. Basically one of the greatest American distance runners is realizing that, in his words, "...if the furnace is hot enough it will burn anything. Unfortunately it took me a long time to figure out that is not true." So he's changed his diet.

I am no doctor nor do I have all or many of the answers, but in my mind, from what I've read and experienced I have found the following to a make a lot of sense: When you start eating healthy food all the time meaning lots of fruits and vegetables, no processed foods, no white flour and more whole foods and whole grains that haven't been processed THEN you start seeing your body change into the body you want and you begin to see health problems literally disappear. I think that the major cause for health problems in the world is poor nutrition, pure and simple. I look forward to writing more posts about this and I hope you look forward to reading them. Have a great day and run fearless!