EllaStephan

Ask most athletes what a sports dietitian does and you’ll get a version of the same answer: they tell you what to eat. Maybe they give you a meal plan. Maybe they fix your pre-race breakfast. It’s support work — a nice-to-have for elite athletes with full performance teams, a luxury for everyone else. This

Orthorexia is one of the most common eating disorders nobody has heard of by name. Most people who develop it don’t recognize it as a disorder at all. It doesn’t look like the popular image of an eating disorder — there is no dramatic restriction, no visible weight loss necessarily, no obvious crisis. What it

Most runners and endurance athletes train in the morning. It fits the schedule, it gets it done before the day takes over, and for a lot of people it’s simply when they feel best. But morning training creates a specific nutritional challenge that afternoon and evening training doesn’t: you wake up in a fasted state

The conversations that happen around food in a high school athlete’s home have an outsized effect on how that athlete thinks about food, their body, and their relationship with eating — effects that often extend well beyond the high school years. Parents who want to support their athlete’s performance and health are working with genuinely

Ultra-processed foods became one of the most talked-about nutrition topics of 2025 and 2026, and for good reason. A wave of research connecting ultra-processed food intake to outcomes ranging from cardiovascular disease and metabolic dysfunction to gut dysbiosis and depression landed in mainstream media in a way that nutrition research rarely does. People who had

Most athletes understand that nutrition matters. Fewer have a clear picture of what working with a sports dietitian actually involves, what it produces that self-directed nutrition research doesn’t, and whether the investment makes sense for them specifically versus for elite athletes with professional support teams. The short version: a sports dietitian does considerably more than

If you’ve been training consistently — hitting your workouts, getting your long runs in, showing up — but something still feels off, you’re not alone. The legs are heavier than they should be. Recovery takes longer than it used to. Paces that felt manageable a few months ago now feel like all-out efforts. You’re doing

The question comes from a parent watching their kid grind through two-a-days, eating whatever’s available, running on fumes by Thursday, and wondering if there’s something missing. It comes from coaches watching talented athletes hit performance plateaus that training alone isn’t moving. It comes from athletes themselves who feel like something is off but can’t name

Gut health has become one of the most searched nutrition topics of the past several years, and the content landscape around it ranges from genuinely useful to spectacularly misleading. Probiotic supplements promising to transform your immune system. Elimination diets claiming to reset your gut in 30 days. Fermented food trends that are partly rooted in

If you’ve spent any time on nutrition social media in the past couple of years, you’ve seen the seed oil debate play out in its most theatrical form. On one side: influencers and wellness figures calling seed oils one of the most dangerous things in the modern food supply, claiming they cause everything from inflammation