Episode 130 - Female Athlete Series: Part 4: Must read book! Up To Speed by Christine Yu

Female Athlete Series: Part 4: Must read book! Up To Speed by Christine Yu

 

Joining me for this episode is Christine Yu, author of new(ish) book: Up To Speed – The Ground-Breaking Science of Women Athletes. A must read for any active female!

I learnt so much from the book.

If you haven’t read it yet, go and grab yourself a copy!

Get the book on Amazon.

Links:

Check how well you’re doing when it comes to your nutrition with our 50 step checklist to Triathlon Nutrition Mastery: dietitianapproved.com/checklist

Start working on your nutrition now with my Triathlon Nutrition Kickstart course: dietitianapproved.com/kickstart

It’s for you if you’re a triathlete and you feel like you’ve got your training under control and you’re ready to layer in your nutrition. It's your warmup on the path to becoming a SUPERCHARGED triathlete – woohoo!

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Episode Transcription

Episode 130: Where Stamina Meets Science: Peek Inside the Triathlon Nutrition Academy

Taryn Richardson  00:00

Welcome to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. The show designed to serve you up evidence-based sports nutrition advice from the experts. Hi, I'm your host Taryn, Accredited Practicing Dietitian, Advanced Sports Dietitian and founder of Dietitian Approved. Listen as I break down the latest evidence to give you practical, easy-to-digest strategies to train hard, recover faster and perform at your best. You have so much potential, and I want to help you unlock that with the power of nutrition. Let's get into it.

Taryn Richardson  00:42

Joining me on the podcast today is Christine Yu who is the author of a new-ish book 'Up To Speed' the groundbreaking science of women athletes, and I absolutely have loved reading it. And it's really refreshing to read something not by a sports dietitian and not read an article for a change that beautifully summarizes where we're at in the female athlete space, I'm really excited to talk to you and like pick your brain a little bit. I recommend you know more things than a lot of people in the sports nutrition world based on all the research you've done. So welcome.

Christine Yu  01:16

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you.

Taryn Richardson  01:19

Thank you for staying up late for me. So before we dive in, can you give me a bit of a rundown about your history as a journalist like you're the first journalist I've had on the podcast, usually at sports, dieticians, you know, other experts in the nutrition space. But how did you land in a world of journalism in female athletes in particular?

Christine Yu  01:39

Yeah, it's a little bit of a roundabout path. So journalism is actually kind of a second career for me, I used to work in the non-profit sector, here in the States doing a whole bunch of other things. But I lost my passion for it. And during that period of time, I just had started writing again. And mostly it was like, for myself, I started blogging, this was back in, you know, early 2010s, when like fitness blogs and running blogs are like all the rage, and everyone had their own blog. But for me, that was really just a reminder or a reintroduction to writing and storytelling. And a reminder that actually I really kind of like this. And it was really fun to be able to tell stories with folks, and really was introduced to the idea of freelance journalism, and realizing that we, I could actually write about the things that I care about, which is science and sports and health, and maybe get paid for it, which was like kind of a novel idea at first. But like, sports has always been something that's been a part of my life, I played sports, since I was young, I've always been active in science has always been something that's been part of my life, too.

My dad was a doctor, my sister's a doctor, like there's lots of doctors in the family, I was supposed to be a doctor. So I was pre-med in college. So I've always been really interested in the human body. And really just understanding like how the body works, how it performs. And then when it comes specifically to sports is really understanding almost selfishly, right, like how the body can improve performance, how the body can avoid injury and rehabilitate from injury, mainly because I want to know, those things worked for my own, you know, selfish reasons. But yeah, and through the course of realizing that 1. I liked writing, 2. I can make a career out of this, 3. I could write about these areas in which I was really interested in. I started honing in on female athletes and women's health, in part because I felt like those were areas that weren't really addressed. Well, there were a lot of questions in those areas. Again, partially, selfishly, I wanted to know about it, but I knew that there was a lot of good information that we need to get out there. Yeah. And so I've kind of like, made this little niche for myself, where you know, it really is this intersection of really thinking about women athletes, as well as like how the sport science really fits in and relates to them.

Taryn Richardson  03:55

And what inspired you to write an entire book on the female athletes like to dive so deep down so many rabbit holes and piece everything that we know today together into a book? What motivated you to do that?

Christine Yu  04:08

I joked and said that my agent who had said, 'you should write a book'. I was like, I don't want to write a book. Like if you should read a book, this is really good. This is a great opportunity for you. But beyond that, really there were two reasons. One was that again, it was around the time when I'd started blogging more started doing some more freelance writing this again, like early 2010s, 2013, 2014 or so, really realizing how little I knew about my own body, as a woman and as an active athletic person. And starting to understand that like, oh, wait, my menstrual cycle is more than just a couple of days that I bleed. It's actually this whole cycle of hormones fluctuate throughout the month and and has all of these things that these hormones do outside of just coordinating fertility and I was like in my 30s. And I'm like, why is this like just a revelation now, right like, and really understanding the relationship between our hormones and bone health and particular nutrition and all of these other things, that it made me feel like one angry because I wish I had this information when I was younger, right? Like, I wish I had this information growing up, because just feeling more empowered in terms of just understanding my own body and what that body needs in order to be healthy, regardless of like, athletics, right, but just to be healthy, and to build a solid foundation for yourself. So on the one point, it was like, I was mad, because I wanted this information for myself, and I want to try to get that information to other people. But the other piece of it was, again, through my work as a journalist I kept talking about and writing about the same topics over and over, right, so talking about things like bone stress injuries, or eating disorders, and body image issues. And oh, my gosh, women get knee injuries more than men. And like all of these things, where like, there might be some people up in arms being like, oh, my gosh, this is such a big deal. We need to do something about this, this is really important. But then it would go away. And then the next year, the same things like the same type of articles would come up. It's like, oh, my gosh, we really need to do something about this. But then nothing happened. Right? I was frustrated as to why we weren't making more progress in this area. And I wanted to understand what the underlying issues were because I felt like there had to be something right, there had to be something connecting all of these seemingly disparate issues that was keeping us from making any progress.

Taryn Richardson  06:41

So on that, what are your hopes and dreams for the book, then it sounds like you've got big aspirations, what's the grand plan,

Christine Yu  06:47

My ultimate hope is that it really starts more conversations about what it means to inhabit a female body and to be athletic and performance-driven, or just active, right? What it means to support female athlete health in a way that not just is about performance, right, which I get it like performance is really important to a lot of people. But it's really about longevity, really about having like a long term athletic life, from when you're young through to when you choose to stop. So it's really about like, getting information out. For me, the most important audience really was thinking about those girls and the you know, the younger girls, their parents, their coaches, so that they had good information, or at least more information than they currently have, right? So that we can really set girls up with a solid foundation for healthy athletic development for the long term. That's my ultimate hope. Right? It's like that we can like, get it right from kind of the beginning so that we're setting up this infrastructure in place, we're helping them not only know their bodies better, but to make, hopefully better, healthier choices so that they can be healthy and happy. And then ultimately, right, you perform better.

Taryn Richardson  08:09

Yeah, it's really refreshing to hear you say that my tagline for my business Dietitian Approved is health plus performance, and we can't have one without the other. And so often, particularly triathletes that I work with, they're always striving to perform better and do the latest thing and all the sprinkles on the icing on the cake. But don't have the foundations of just general healthy eating and energy availability, right first, that's really refreshing because we need to kind of take a big step back from that and go build from the ground up, because there's no point doing really high tech, really specific individualized strategies like particularly with nutrition if you don't have those big rocks and foundations in place first.

Christine Yu  08:48

Yeah. And I get it right like those higher tech, more advanced things like catches, what makes it sexy. It's exciting, right? And like we see the pro athletes do it too, right? You know, we aspire to try to be that do that same thing. But no, actually, if we just toggle it back a bit, and focus on those basics, focus on that foundational level, everything else falls into place. Ultimately,

Taryn Richardson  09:17

I honestly learned so many fun facts from reading the book, I definitely take for granted the fact that I'm a female and I exercise regularly and I've been involved in sport my entire life, like what it was even like 30 years ago, or 40 years ago is just crazy. And we still have so far to go in this space. But some of the things that I didn't know about were that as a female, we were told not to exercise and over exert ourselves because medical professionals thought our uterus and ovaries would fall out like it's just crazy. And so as recent as, like 2005 Women weren't ski jumping because they thought that that landing would impact their body so much Their uterus might burst. Like, it's just crazy. We weren't allowed to jump until 2014. I didn't know this. So there's so many things that like I read in the beginning chapters that I'm like, oh my god, I just take that so much for granted. Yeah,

Christine Yu  10:14

that was wild when I realise how recent it was ski jumping, and like the ideas behind it, like I knew that there was some sort of paternalistic, like idea behind the fact that like, oh, they didn't want women to do the big hill ski jump and all of this stuff, but the fact that it was really about this concern that like, our uterus would literally burst I was like, I don't think that's physically possible.

Taryn Richardson  10:35

We were impacted in the track and field early days learning that we couldn't run any longer than 200 meters, because when they did the 800 meters back in 1928, the girls like that broke records and stuff lay on the ground to catch their breath. And then the whole rhetoric around that was like, we can't over-exert ourselves. Because women can't run that far. Like, it's just stupid. So we didn't run further than 200 meters in the Olympic track and field until 1960. And

Christine Yu  11:04

it makes you think, right, it's almost like we're being set up to fail. Because if we can't achieve it, or you know, it is too, like, difficult as strenuous for us, then it proves their point, right. And then when you do well, and in that case, in 1928, all the top three finishers all beat the current world record, like no wonder they're lying down in the infield to like, catch their breath. Rest. But even with that, it's they're like baiting you, right? They're waiting for you to do this so that it somehow still proves their point.

Taryn Richardson  11:37

And it's so frustrating. The more you tell me, I can't do something, the more I want to do it. Exactly. So I'm glad that I live now. And I can you know, exercise freely. And I'm not held back by like stupid rules. There's nothing that makes me more angry than stupid rules. Yeah. So like it is a beast of a book, and you've covered so many different areas. How long did it take you to research everything? Like how many papers Did you read?

Christine Yu  12:01

So I honestly forgot what the final count was. But it was several 100 papers, like I want to say, close to like, 600 or so pieces around there. It's not.

Taryn Richardson  12:13

Easy going either, like reading literature is not easygoing.  No, I had to do it earlier on the day. So it wasn't falling asleep. Yeah. And then also interviewed, I think it was over 140 different people like and those could be varying lengths of interviews, right? So that's scientists and researchers, medical professionals, athletes, again, at all different levels. How many years did it take you to put the book together?

Christine Yu  12:38

So I started writing in September 2020. And then I think we put the manuscript to bed, in May 2022. So about a year and a half solid,

Taryn Richardson  12:51

One of my goals is to write a book one day, I don't have any capacity, currently. And like you were so well connected in this space as well, I guess that's your job as a journalist, but like, I've reached out to some of these researchers, and I just hear nothing back, like, come and talk to me on the podcast. And it's like radio silence. How did you do that?

Christine Yu  13:11

Yeah, I mean, in part, it was just having built relationships with folks over the years through my reporting, and being really lucky, right? So some of the folks that I've been speaking with really since like, 2017, 2018, around this topic, so they know me, they know my work. And through them, I've often connected through other people, because like, I would find someone else or they would suggest that I speak with someone else. And I could use their name right and kind of named drop-in helped me get in through the door. But then I mean, I've just found that that community of folks who are really researching female athletes, it's a pretty like close-knit community, right? There are a lot of folks there in Australia, in the UK, and the US and Canada who all collaborate and work together on a lot of different projects. So it was I feel like I'm like infiltrating into their little like club, you know, like, still ignore me. I'm just gonna sit here like don't mind who

Taryn Richardson  14:07

I met need to get you to help me like hook me up or something. So I can get a foot in the door because honestly, it is the who's who are female athletes like all of the research in sports, nutrition and injuries and things like that is it is a book of like, who to look out for and what papers to read if you're interested in that space. So when you were doing all that research and reading, is there anything that really surprised you that you found out through the process?

Christine Yu  14:31

For me, some of the most interesting research that I found was around injuries. Again, this might be just a personal bias.

Taryn Richardson  14:40

Did you just have your second ACL repair?

Christine Yu  14:43

My third.

Taryn Richardson  14:44

On the same knee.

Christine Yu  14:44

No, no first, on my left knee. I've had my ACL repair it on my right knee twice. But I think in part in doing that research, it was really expanding my lens of really understanding the injury model because I think we As scientists and you know, even people like normal people, right, we just look at, like, what happens to the body when it becomes injured, like the wrong step that you take or what have you. And I think for me, it was yes, understanding that that is a piece of it, but that the injury model, and really understanding how injuries happen, needs to be expanded a little bit more, we need to understand like the greater context in which you as an actual person, are living, breathing, operating, moving within, and how that contributes to potential injury. I think the other part that I was really fascinated by with learning more about breast bio-mechanics, because I knew nothing going into it. I mean, I think a lot of us have just the assumptions like, oh, boobs move up and down, right, like they can bounce and jiggle. And that's how we talk about it. But really recognizing that, like breasts actually move in this really complicated movement pattern. And that, we have to understand what that is, right? We have to figure out how to model that if we actually want to create sports bras that can support that movement and or make it more comfortable, right. But the fact is, is that we haven't really studied it until really the last 20 years or so.

Taryn Richardson  16:14

Yeah, it's really cool. I'd love that that's kind of come as a result of this highlight of the female athlete too, because growing up, I had to wear two sports bras to call those bad boys down, like all through my years of netball, and things like that. But now there's products on the market that have that higher level of support that just didn't exist 1510 years ago. It's crazy.

Christine Yu  16:34

Well, and I think we're so dismissive of it too, right? Like, it's just a sports bra. But really understanding how breast pain breast movement and having gear like sports bras really does affect one's ability to participate in sports and how it does affect, you know, dropout rates of sports, especially among like, adolescent girls, right? Like there's a huge drop-off there. And a lot of it can potentially be due to breast pain, being embarrassed about how your boobs move, but then we haven't really studied it or like, it's often been dismissed, in part because the field of biomechanics, there's a lot of men obviously studying it, and so wouldn't necessarily cross their mind, right to study how boobs move. But the fact is, is that it can really impact your biomechanics, right. And it can make you less efficient when you run. It can affect like, all of these different things that we never really thought about before.

Taryn Richardson  17:30

Yeah, it's amazing. I used to get headaches like playing netball, because it was so yeah, hard to manage. Like, that's why I ended up wearing two sports bras but I always used to joke about trying to like gaffer tape them down. So they didn't move. Yeah. And working with triathletes who run you know, a marathon at the end of their race, like in try suits aren't built in with shelf bras and things like that. And then I used to struggle with wanting to start the race with what I needed to strap myself down for the run. But that's kind of restricting to the way that you breathe. But thankfully, there's lots of products on the market now that help women through that. Yeah, one of the things I really loved about reading your book, which again was so refreshing was how kind of impartial you were to the research in nutrition. Because I'm kind of banging my head against the wall a little bit, I get quite frustrated, because there's some very loud voices in this space, that prescribing really quite detailed individualized advice for women. And during really strong conclusions from research that's still only very emerging. And it's taking that with a line of caution. And it was so refreshing to hear someone else have that opinion. I felt like I was isolated in that. How did you come to having that, you know, impartial view based on everything that you read and everyone that you talk to?

Christine Yu  18:43

Yeah, I will say, I was probably most worried about ruffling feathers in that chapter. In part because like you said, right, like there are a lot of loud voices in this field. I think that they're, they're some friction between certain camps and certain groups and whatever. And being a people pleaser to rise, like, I don't want anyone to get mad at me, right? Like, I don't want to like alienate anyone or anything like that. So trying to figure out how to talk about it in a way that that was impartial, that kind of really boiled down to things that I thought mattered. It was tricky at first. But again, like for me looking through all the research and understanding. Yes, there may be some studies that suggests this or other studies that suggest that ultimately, for me, the most important message that I did want to get across was the idea of just like, you just need to fuel yourself, right? Like it's just again, like back to what we were talking about the beginning just that foundational piece of like having enough energy in your body to do whatever it is that you need to do. Focus on that first and then like, then you can start playing with some of the other like more advanced nutrition strategies and Like, but that piece for me, it's like regardless of whatever level of sports you're at, or athletics that you're at, like, that's the piece that you need to make sure is in place before doing anything else. Amen.

Taryn Richardson  20:11

Amen. I love that messaging. I was like, I've got to figure out how to do that better because it is about health first. And you know, do you have a regular menstrual cycle like step one, before you start playing around with do this at this phase of the cycle? Do this at this phase of a cycle? Like do you have a regular cycle and is your energy availability, right, like first steps before trying to really fine tune and finesse, these more advanced strategies that we're starting to see come out in the research, but we probably will never get to the point of having generic guidelines around that. Because every female is different. And every menstrual cycle is different. And our hormones do different things like a textbook cycle being 28 days, I don't know anyone with a textbook menstrual cycle, like the range from 21 to 35 days, the first thing that you need to kind of focus on is is tracking and seeing what happens for you, first and foremost, map your symptoms, see how you feel and then dabble in some of those strategies. So it's really nice to hear that from, you know, not a sports dietitian, someone that has read all the things like 600 papers, I learned from that, that I need to figure out how to communicate that better to athletes.

Christine Yu  21:19

It's really hard, because I think that that is one thing that I came to realize, because I think coming into this, I probably thought that of course we can come up with some sort of blueprint or some sort of guidelines around this, right. But I think, again, one of the big realizations I had in researching all of this is just what you said, right? Like, every person in a female body, it's so unique. It's so individual, I feel like even more so than when we say like, generally right, like in terms of everyone's an individual. But I think because of the fact that like, the hormones change so much throughout a month, but change month to month to right and change throughout the lifespan. So it's not like there's this one set thing, like, your estrogen will always be at x level, you know, for whatever period of time, but really understanding that it's like, oh, wait, there is no one set way that this is going to be or one set thing. And so that kind of really matters, right? Like that really matters and in how you experience your body, how you experience, your training, how you adapt to it, and all these other things that it's like, there isn't going to be just one formula that's going to work forever, for every single person. Yeah,

Taryn Richardson  22:33

I say that all the time to like nutrition is not set and forget, particularly as a female, everything changes like every year basically for our whole lifespan, like adolescence and then through like childbearing years, and then perimenopause and menopause and beyond, like it's always going to change. Yeah. So it is a real challenge to distill all of that research that's coming into something that is going to be a clear blueprint. So it was really nice to read that. So based on everything that you have done, where do you think researchers need to then focus their attention so that we can move forward and get some good information in this space?

Christine Yu  23:09

It's hard, right? Because like, on the one hand, we just need more research, right? Like yeah, in, in this field, looking at populations that are not male, looking at more diverse populations in general, so that we can really understand or just have a broader spectrum of evidence across humans, right. And I think that that, in and of itself is a really important thing that researchers need to focus on. At the same time, right? It's like science is about building an evidence base, like we were just talking, it's about building upon each study, building a consensus so that you can get to these evidence based guidelines. And of course, we want to build that solid evidence base so that we can kind of understand what is going on or feel more confident, right, to be able to say, generally, this is what we see happen. But as we were just talking about, we can't always depend on those generalizations to be applicable to any one person. So I think it's this mix of like, yes, doing more research, expanding the diversity of your participant pool, and building that evidence base. But then also, I do think that researchers need to pay attention to the fact that like, people kind of need and want answers now to right, so that might mean doing some sort of studies, right? Where then you can pour in translate some of that evidence into things that people can do now, or at least start to experiment with to see if that works for them. Right. So it is figuring out like, okay, so how do we then do some, maybe it's smaller studies, right? Maybe it's case studies, maybe it's, I don't even know what right, but that you can then start to bridge that translational science gap where you are taking new research, but you're bringing it into the real world a little bit more quickly.

Taryn Richardson  24:54

Yeah, because it is just exploding at the moment. I think that's why those loud voices particularly in the nutrition space, they're being listened to because it is very prescriptive and do this and do that. Yeah. But I think it is important to recognize that it is very merging. And we've got a lot of work to do in this space before we have something that's nice and clear. But also, like you said before, it says big rocks first, before dabbling in the more advanced stuff, and making sure that you are eating enough calories because the female triathletes that I work with 95% of them are carb-phobic. And I spend the entire first phase of my triathlon nutrition Academy program kind of busting myths and getting them to change their mindset around fueling their bodies for performance, because nothing's going to work if we don't. And it's quick, like it's three to five days of low energy availability, that we're starting to affect our bone turnover and things which is crazy, so fast, so fast. And we didn't know that 10 years ago, we need that message out there that nutrition is so important for health, but also long term performance in that too.

Christine Yu  26:00

Yeah, it's wild to me that the fear of eating carbohydrates is still so pervasive, right? I'm much older than you like, it's definitely the tendons of like my diets, right, like growing up with like, don't eat carbs, like low carb, everything. But like the fact that like, we're still talking about this, and still thinking of it as like this bad food group is, is wild to me.

Taryn Richardson  26:21

Same, but then we went through that low fat era, too. So then now people are sort of eating low carb and low fat. And so what on earth are people eating?

Christine Yu  26:29

I know, it's like, what are you eating? Um, you know, rabbit food?

Taryn Richardson  26:33

And, so do you have any advice for the female athlete out there listening?

Christine Yu  26:38

I think a big piece of it really is just, it is stopping and tuning into your own body. Right? Like, you know, for so long. Women and girls have almost been encouraged to kind of leave femaleness, if you will, like behind, when you step into the sporting arena, right, it's like you had to ignore your menstrual cycle, you had to smash your boobs down, you want to be like the boys, right? Then prove that you could be as tough and all this stuff. But I think in doing that, like we've lost touch with our own bodies, right. And then kind of it goes back to the fact that we're also not taught about our own bodies as women and girls. So I think it is part just like getting to know your own yourself understanding like female physiology, what goes on what your cycle is, and tracking it. Because again, like you were saying, like, there are a ton of people out there ready to like, give you like a prescriptive program based on your menstrual cycle, or X, Y, or Z, but that might not pertain to you. So like, the first step really, is to like track your cycle for more than a month, right? Like tracking for several months, so that you can start to identify like, Oh, this is how my body feels, right? Like, this is how I always seem to feel week three, you know, so for me, like, I tend to feel flat, right? Like, no matter what I'm like, flat. And so in the past, I would just beat myself up about that and be like, what's wrong with me? Like, why can I like hit these times? Or why is my workouts feel like crap. And it would be my fault. But I think noticing that it was like, every third week of my cycle was like, oh, wait a second, like, sure it might be because I'm lazy. I'm not really motivated to do something right now. But this part of my actual body may also be contributing to the fact that I don't feel great right now. So I think that that just again, like helps you understand yourself, your body and your experience of being in your body, while being active while pursuing the things that you want to pursue.

Taryn Richardson  28:39

Yeah, I love that. Step one, tune into yourself think that's really important. So if you haven't read it yet, go and get yourself a copy up to speed. I'm not sure if this is going to be backwards on the video or forwards. I bought mine through Amazon so I can drop a link in the show notes for that in like an early copy. But it's kind of available everywhere. Now like all bookstores, Amazon online, where's the best place for people around the world to grab it?

Christine Yu  29:03

Wherever they'd like? Whatever their favourite bookseller. It's also available as an ebook or audiobook.

Taryn Richardson  29:11

And so what's next for you then? What's on the cards? What are you going to blow up in the female athlete's face next?

Christine Yu  29:16

I'm not sure yet. I don't have kind of a firm second book idea. I'm kind of still looking around and poking into a couple of different things.

Taryn Richardson  29:25

Second book, there you go. You heard it here first. We'll see. There's so many different areas and rabbit holes that you could go into and you know, research is just exploiting this space. Are you still reading the papers or if you like, tapped out for a little bit?

Christine Yu  29:39

I've tapped out for a little bit but I'll still enough. Yeah, I'll still see papers come across like social media feeds from some folks that I follow. And like, I'll email them to myself. And eventually, I will read it.

Taryn Richardson  29:51

If you leave it too long. You'll have another 600 to get through. It's just exploding at the moment. Yeah, but it's exciting. Oh yeah. It's so exciting. It's the best So I'm like struggling to keep up with it. So it's nice to have a good little summary in his book to read and be like, I didn't think about that one, like this stuff around concussions not really appropriate for me as a triathlon sports dietitian. So I found that really interesting to read, because I didn't know that females suffered from concussions so differently to males, and I'm a total science nerd as well. And the reason for that, like the axons and stuff, I was like, this is like the best.

Christine Yu  30:24

Yeah, totally nerding out on that part. And when I was talking to the doctor, and the researcher who was doing that, it was like, it was fantastic. Like, tell me more. I'm like, not using half of this, but I'm just so curious.

Taryn Richardson  30:37

Yeah, it's amazing. The body is an amazing thing. Yeah, thank you so much for staying up late to talk to me about female athletes. I think it's a very much a conversation that we need to spread far and wide. And we need to normalize talking about all the weird and wonderful things that happened in our body so that we can perform to the best of our ability. I just feel like we've been squashed in sport for our entire history. And like, it's unleashed now. Like, no, look out.

Christine Yu  31:03

Yeah. Well, that's the exciting thing, right? It's like if we've been, like, constrained and held back in so many different ways, you know, over centuries, right. It's like, imagine what is possible when we actually give women the resources that they need, give them the education and the knowledge, like, allow them to actually do the thing right, and not hold them back.

Taryn Richardson  31:27

Even tennis, like tennis, we still only play three sets and the men do five like come on, sorted out.

Christine Yu  31:31

Yeah, it's wild. It is wild.

Taryn Richardson  31:36

Well, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I'll drop the link for the book in the show notes, but definitely go and give it a read any female athlete. No matter what sport you're in, or where you're at, it's definitely something that you should add to your reading list.

Christine Yu  31:49

Thank you so much for having me.

Taryn Richardson  31:53

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. I would love to hear from you. If you have any questions or want to share with me what you've learned, email me at [email protected]. You can also spread the word by leaving me a review and taking a screenshot of you listening to the show. Don't forget to tag me on social media, @dietitian.approved, so I can give you a shout out, too. If you want to learn more about what we do, head to dietitianapproved.com. And if you want to learn more about the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, head to dietitianapproved.com/academy. Thanks for joining me and I look forward to helping you smash in the fourth leg - nutrition!