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This chicken teriyaki has 190 calories, 28 grams of protein, 4 grams of fat and 8 grams of carbs.
My tummy was rumbling, but my head was still digesting these numbers. I was at Terra, an upscale health-focused restaurant in Senopati, studying an array of proteins, from barramundi, lean ground beef, egg balado, to vegan soya steak, that were warmly lit and nicely garnished on its counter. Each one looked appetizing, but I couldn’t help judging each dish based on the information card placed in front of it.
100 gr of spiced tempeh has 210 calories, much higher than 100 gr of marinated chicken breast at 165 calories? That’s unexpected. I chose the chicken breast.
That small card made a world of difference to me.
For Terra, the idea to label the nutritional value of its meals is perhaps intuitive, as the restaurant was built hand in hand with its boutique gym, Reload. The two go together because, these days, there’s no separating fitness and nutrition.
What wasn’t immediately intuitive to me was why health-conscious gym-goers would choose the higher-calorie tempe over the chicken.
I used to think that working out was straightforward. You lift weights, you build muscle. You run, you get a stronger heart. Being fit means consuming the same amount or even fewer calories than you burn.
But it turns out that for the growing population of people who have now found themselves in the recreational-athlete time of their lives, food is no longer just sustenance.
Eating vs. fueling
Recreational athletes don’t eat; they fuel.
Eating sounds a bit too broad, a bit aimless. Fueling, which means providing what your body needs to generate energy, sounds more intentional. That might mean choosing nutrition over taste and prioritizing planning over impulsive decisions.
Training for a marathon or a triathlon or a Hyrox competition involves several hours of training every week, pushing the body to its physical limits. All this requires more energy.
“Our bodies ‘demand more food’ and need more nutrients for recovery and adaptation during training,” explains Andri Djunaedi, a fitness and nutrition coach based in Jakarta. Adequate food is needed “to help repair muscle tissue damaged by the training process, while building stronger muscle tissue so it can withstand more training in the future.”
More protein is the key, he says.
For Desy, 37, a marathon runner, fueling looks different depending on whether she is maintaining or bulking. On a normal maintenance day, breakfast is simple: two spoons of rice, one whole egg and two egg whites. For lunch and dinner, she simply reduces her carbohydrates and increases her protein intake. Since she typically eats outside, she simply makes sure that she gets the macronutrient needs without overcomplicating her daily diet.
But once she's deep in marathon training, her diet turns more rigid. "I usually need two kilograms of chicken on the days leading up to a marathon," she says. She preps this in bulk; cutting the chicken into 200 gr chunks, freezing them, then boiling in water or with a touch of margarine as needed. When she needs to catch up on her protein target, she'll chug 400-500 gr of chicken breast blended with protein milk and Nescafe for flavoring (she swears it tastes better than it sounds).
Not only does she need to bulk up on protein, she also increases her carbohydrates intake. Around one week before the marathon, she starts making sweet potato ‘drink’. “I’ll boil sweet potatoes, then put them in a blender. Sometimes I add whey vanilla, but not by much. I already like the taste of sweet potatoes,” she says.
Both ‘juices’ were born out of practicality. For instance, she needs to eat two kilograms of sweet potatoes for several days to bulk, and it’s “exhausting” having to chew such a large amount of food, so blending became the workaround.
Sounds intense, but what happens when recreational athletes aren’t able to provide their bodies with the fuel it needs? At best, “muscle loss and a drop in immunity due to slow recovery,” says Andri. At worst, fatigue, collapse, injury, or, in extreme cases, even death.
Sometimes that means simply consuming more food, while other times it means reconfiguring meal plans. Either way, what we eat becomes even more critical when we’re putting our bodies under intense physical constraints.
A different mindset
Desy’s story shows me the kind of discipline I thought was reserved only for career athletes. But apparently, even recreational athletes now are willing to shift what their idea of a ‘good meal’ is for the sake of their sports.
Because eating now needs to be intentional and purposeful, their perspective on food also needs a shift. “Since I started eating more intentionally, I stopped seeing chicken as a chicken. It’s protein. Same goes with fiber and carbs,” says Desy.
For Fenito, 34, who plays tennis two to three times a week for two to three hours at a time, good eating would involve two meals with 100 grams of chicken each, each serving provides roughly 30 grams of protein, which meets his 60-gram daily target. He adds an egg or two to round it out if needed. He arrived at this 60-gram target working off a rough baseline of one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight.
Additionally, he avoids sugary drinks and chooses brown rice over white rice. These swaps help him build a protein-rich diet, one that doesn’t just fuel him to play tennis, but has also helped him lose 15 kg of weight.
Samuel, 43, a recreational basketball player and freelance fitness trainer, similarly prioritizes protein at every meal. Breakfast consists of five boiled eggs. For lunch, he consumes rice, vegetables and two types of protein. And for dinner, he mainly consumes vegetables and protein.
This is the kind of fueling he needs to power his early morning gym sessions five times a week. He used to consume twice his body weight for protein, but he no longer strictly follows this rule as he has reached his body goal.
This disciplined approach to food is not so different from fitness, according to Andri. “It can be boring, especially in the beginning. You need a program and a set of skills you can build slowly.”
“Boring” meals, however, don’t mean tasteless. It means consistency. It means not making impulsive decisions when you’re starving. It means having a reliable warteg to go to, says Andri.
The easiest way to do this is by sticking to a few default meals 80% of the time, says Andri. Like having scrambled eggs for breakfast, “so you don’t have to think every single day,” he says.
In other words, eating isn’t just a daily ritual, but a strategy. And not just a short-term strategy, but one that demands rethinking our favorite foods, cooking skills, budget, time constraints, even considering the diets of others who live in the same space with us.
With so much effort needed to adjust the mind and body, I ask Desy: why?
“Because it took me years to build the endurance needed to run a marathon! I don’t want to regain my weight back and waste all of my effort.”
Good over perfect
It sounds like a more intentional approach to eating, but also somewhat difficult to sustain. Which is why the experts say aiming for ‘good’ instead of ‘perfect’ is more helpful in the long run.
For Fenito, the solution isn’t to have a cheat day every week, but to allow himself to eat flexibly. As long as he consumes enough protein a day, “the rest is anything goes,” he says.
Over time, he found alternatives to satisfy his cravings, like popcorn, a low-calorie, high-fiber snack that he now calls “a miracle food.”
But you still need to calculate calories, right? How else are you going to discipline the mind if not through some kind of monitoring mechanism?
Not really, Andri says. “That’s not necessarily the key to building a sustainable diet program. Sometimes people get too ambitious when it comes to dieting.”
The hyperfixation on numbers was also something that Desy resisted. After months relying on scales and apps to track her meals, she decided to let them go. “What matters more is following the principles of consuming sufficient macronutrients,” she says.
Standing at that counter in Senopati, I thought I was making a diet choice. But I was actually learning, however briefly, to see food the way athletes do: not as something to consume for survival, or to restrict to lose weight, but as the thing that makes the next training session, the next race, the next personal best possible.
