Episode 28 | Ask the Expert | Guest: Kate Shilland BSc, MSc, Registered Sports Nutritionist, ISAK Level 1, UKAD Advisor
Ask most people what they should eat around exercise and you’ll get a confident answer. The problem is that those answers – cut the carbs, load up on protein, avoid fat – are usually wrong, or at least missing most of the picture.
In this episode of the London Bridge Sports Medicine podcast, Lucie sits down with Kate Shilland, LBSM’s Sports Nutritionist and Head of Nutrition at Crystal Palace FC Academy, to talk through what performance nutrition actually means – from the everyday foundations to race-day fuelling, from young athletes to women in their forties. Kate brings 14 years of experience working across recreational and elite sport, and she has a rare ability to make complex nutritional science genuinely simple.
Start with the basics: health comes before performance
A common mistake Kate sees is athletes focusing on race-day nutrition while neglecting the foundations. “What you eat all the other days – that’s much more important,” she says. Before any performance strategy can work, the body’s basic nutritional needs for health, growth, and wellbeing must be met. Without that baseline, optimising around training and competition is largely futile.
The concept she returns to throughout the episode is eating with purpose: understanding what to put in, when, and why. Not following a plan, but understanding the reasoning – so that when life doesn’t go to plan, you can still make a good decision.
For everyday nutrition, her framework is straightforward: every meal should contain carbohydrate, protein, healthy fat, and colour (fruit and vegetables). “Think of food like your toolkit,” she says. “You need the right tools for the right job – and the better quality the tools, the better quality the work.”
The problem with nutrition advice: fads, fear, and social media
Kate is blunt about the state of nutrition information in the public domain. “Nutrition is so miscommunicated,” she says. Social media and popular press are full of contradictory advice – and most of it, she observes, is built around cutting something out. “Generally, these fads tell you what to cut out. And if you cut out, you’re generally missing out.”
The two biggest culprits:
- Carbohydrates – “everyone loves to hate the carb,” says Kate. In reality, carbohydrate is essential fuel for both health and performance. Demonising it is one of the most damaging things an athlete can do.
- Protein – “protein definitely has the best PR agent.” Over-emphasis on protein at the expense of other macronutrients is a common pattern, particularly among strength-focused athletes.
Her advice: seek guidance from a qualified, registered nutritionist rather than social media. The title “nutritionist” is not protected – anyone can use it – so looking for registration with the Association for Nutrition (AfN) or the Sport and Exercise Nutrition Register (SENr) is the way to ensure you’re getting credible advice.
Fuelling for performance: before, during, and after
This is where performance nutrition diverges from everyday health eating – and where confusion is most common. Kate sets out the key principles clearly.
Before training or competition
Carbohydrate is always the priority before exercise. The closer to the session, the simpler and more easily digestible it needs to be – so that it converts to usable energy quickly without causing digestive discomfort.
For a main pre-event meal (two to three hours before), something substantial and slow-releasing works well – porridge with banana and honey, eggs on toast, a bagel with peanut butter. For a top-up about an hour before, something simpler: a banana, a Rice Krispie Squares bar, or even a spoonful of honey. “Something is always better than nothing,” Kate says.
For those who genuinely can’t face eating on the morning of an event, Kate has a practical workaround: load up the day before. A carbohydrate-rich breakfast, lunch, and dinner the previous day, plus an extra carb-based snack before bed (a bagel with honey, a bowl of cereal), means you go into race morning already well-stocked.
During exercise
For any event lasting over an hour, topping up carbohydrate mid-session is important. Kate uses a helpful mental image: an imaginary fuel gauge that you’re keeping in the green. When you run out of stored glycogen, you hit the wall – and she speaks from personal experience, having run her first marathon without a single gel and paying the price by mile 21.
Options during exercise don’t have to be expensive or complicated:
- Energy gels – not the most pleasant, but effective for delivering rapidly absorbable carbohydrate with minimal gut stress
- Jelly babies or similar sweets – simple sugars that are easy to carry and quick to digest
- Sports drinks – combine carbohydrate and electrolytes, useful for simultaneous refuelling and rehydration
- DIY sports drink – half juice, half water with a small pinch of salt; a cost-effective alternative to commercial products
After exercise
Recovery nutrition is where Kate sees the biggest gap between what athletes know they should do and what they actually do. “Exercise isn’t complete until you’ve refuelled after it,” she says.
The goal post-session is to replenish glycogen stores, provide protein for muscle repair, and reduce inflammation – ideally as soon as possible after finishing. The so-called “anabolic window” (the 30-minute post-exercise window often cited on social media) is real, but longer than most people think. That said, eating promptly is still wise, particularly if appetite is suppressed – which it often is, because exercise temporarily down-regulates hunger hormones.
For a quick, practical post-training option, Kate’s go-to recommendation is chocolate milk: it provides carbohydrate, protein, and electrolytes in a convenient liquid form that’s easy on a post-exercise stomach and available almost anywhere.
The key framing she offers: “If you’ve trained, don’t waste your effort. If you’ve invested the hard work, don’t miss the benefit by not eating well afterwards.”
Macronutrients: what each one actually does
Carbohydrates
The primary fuel source for sport and exercise. Stored in the muscles as glycogen, they power everything from a sprint to a marathon. The type of carbohydrate matters depending on context: for general health, complex, high-fibre carbs are preferable; around sport, simple, low-fibre carbs are better because they digest quickly and are less likely to cause gut discomfort. “A pack of Haribos would be a rubbish breakfast – but just before a run or at half-time in a football match, it’s actually a really good option,” says Kate.
Protein
Essential for muscle repair and growth, but frequently over-emphasised at the expense of other nutrients. Kate recommends thinking of protein as something to distribute throughout the day rather than front-load: roughly every three hours, to maintain a steady supply of amino acids for muscle turnover.
Protein requirements vary by sport type:
- Endurance athletes: up to 1.6g per kg of body weight per day
- Strength or hybrid sport athletes (CrossFit, HYROX, rugby): up to 2.2g per kg, to compensate for higher muscle protein breakdown
For competitive athletes using protein supplements, Kate flags an important safety point: always look for the Informed Sport logo, which confirms the product has been batch-tested and is free from banned substances. Without it, there is no guarantee of what’s in the product.
Healthy fats
Fat has a PR problem – the name alone puts people off – but healthy unsaturated fats play a wide range of critical roles that many athletes underestimate:
- Reducing inflammation – particularly important for recovery from training and injury
- Brain health – omega-3 fatty acids support cognitive function and focus
- Bone health – fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin D require dietary fat to be absorbed; without it, calcium absorption suffers
- Energy density – at 9 calories per gram, healthy fats are a concentrated fuel source; particularly useful for ultra-endurance athletes who need to carry sufficient energy without excessive bulk
“Carbs, protein, fat, and colour – they’re like teammates,” says Kate. “We need all of them to perform at our best. If you take one out, you’re going to suffer. It’s like fielding a team of seven on a football pitch and expecting to win.”
Nutrition across the lifespan
Young athletes
Children and teenagers are not small adults. They have significantly higher nutritional demands than a fully grown person doing the same sport – because they’re meeting the energy costs of training on top of the energy required for growth and development. Kate sees widespread underestimation of this, often unintentional.
Calcium and iron are of particular concern in young athletes. Bone stress injuries – increasingly common in youth sport – are frequently linked to insufficient energy availability: the energy that should be building bone is instead being spent on training. Iron deficiency, particularly in teenage girls, is also prevalent and has a significant impact on both health and performance.
“What you eat when you’re growing is an investment in yourself for life,” says Kate. “You only get one body and you have to live in it for your whole life.” Education of young athletes, their parents, and their coaches is, she argues, one of the most important interventions in youth sport.
Older athletes and women over 35
After around the age of 35, the body becomes more resistant to the anabolic (muscle-building) effects of protein and exercise. Muscle is lost more easily, and a more deliberate approach to both training stimulus and protein intake is required to maintain it.
For women, the hormonal changes of perimenopause and menopause add another layer of complexity. Oestrogen is protective for bone health, so as levels decline, calcium and vitamin D requirements increase – not unlike those of a growing teenager. Anti-inflammatory nutrition (healthy fats, colourful vegetables) also becomes increasingly important for joint health as we age.
Kate’s research focus – her Master’s thesis was on muscle mass and strength in women over 35 – reinforces a clear message: “muscle is your investment in yourself.” Strength training combined with adequate protein and recovery nutrition is the most effective strategy for maintaining physical resilience as we age.
She also makes the point that body weight is a poor proxy for health. Body composition – specifically muscle-to-fat ratio – is a far more meaningful measure: “weight is a small part of a big picture.” This is something LBSM can assess in clinic.
Practical tips for busy athletes
The perfect nutrition plan is one you can actually follow. Kate’s practical recommendations for real-world athletes:
- Don’t try to be perfect. Something is always better than nothing. A cereal bar from a petrol station is a legitimate pre-training snack.
- Pack your snacks like you pack your kit. You wouldn’t forget your trainers; don’t forget something to eat.
- Batch cook when you can. Making double the bolognese takes almost no extra time. Having a meal in the freezer is the difference between eating well after a long day and skipping recovery nutrition entirely.
- Use liquid nutrition when appetite is low. Smoothies and chocolate milk are quick, easy, and effective post-exercise options.
- Stock your cupboard with staples. Microwave rice pouches, eggs, tinned fish, peanut butter, oats, and frozen vegetables can become a nutritious meal in under ten minutes.
- Change one thing at a time. “The little things you do consistently well make a difference. Even if you just change one thing, but you do it every day – that’s great.”
The bottom line
Kate’s overarching message is one of education over prescription. Rules and plans have their place, but an athlete who understands why they’re eating something, and when it matters, will always outperform one who is simply following instructions. “The better you can understand the why and the when, the more autonomous you become – so that wherever you are, even if planning hasn’t gone to plan, you can make a good choice.”
The performance triangle – nutrition, training, rest – only works when all three sides are given equal attention. And in Kate’s experience, the side most often neglected is nutrition. “I’ve yet to meet one athlete that eats and rests as hard as they train.”
Kate Shilland (BSc, MSc) is a Registered Sports Nutritionist, ISAK Level 1, and UKAD Advisor with over 14 years’ experience across recreational and elite sport. She holds the position of Head of Nutrition at Crystal Palace FC Academy and is First Team Nutritionist at Bromley FC. Kate runs Performance Canteen, a consultancy specialising in nutrition for young athletes, and sees patients at LBSM on Tuesday mornings – appointments are available in person and remotely.
To book an appointment with Kate or another member of the LBSM team, visit lbsm.co.uk/booking
Listen to the full episode below ↓
