Spoiler: that was the problem.

There was a time when carbs were the enemy. Not in a casual, “maybe I should clean things up a bit” way. Full-on plague avoidance. The kind where you second-guess a banana, skip fuel during workouts, and convince yourself that feeling terrible is somehow a sign you’re doing it right.

As a type 2 diabetic, it felt completely justified. Keep carbs low, keep blood sugar controlled, don’t mess with what’s working. On paper, it made sense. In practice, it wasn’t working nearly as well as I wanted to believe.

Training felt harder than it should. Recovery was inconsistent. Energy was unpredictable. And underneath all of it, that low-level mental noise around food and recovery that Taryn Richardson calls the “always tired triathlete” — not being able to get off the couch after training sessions.

That was me.

I joined the Triathlon Nutrition Academy in July 2023 because I knew something was off. Not broken, just not aligned. I didn’t need someone to hand me a script. I needed to understand what I was actually doing and why.

That’s what the Academy does well. It doesn’t tell you what to eat — it teaches you how fueling, training, and recovery actually work together, and how to apply that to yourself without turning it into another set of rules you’re afraid to break.

For me, that meant confronting the carb fear directly. Not recklessly, not all at once, but deliberately. I started adding carbs back in around workouts, then expanded from there as I got more comfortable. The difference wasn’t dramatic overnight, but it was obvious pretty quickly.

Workouts became something I could execute instead of just survive. Recovery started making sense. The constant second-guessing quieted down. And over time, I lost 30 pounds — not because that was the goal, but because I finally aligned how I was eating with how I was training.

That’s the biggest thing the Academy gave me. Clarity. Not perfection, not rigid control — just a better understanding of what my body needs and the confidence to act on it.

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If you’re training consistently but something isn’t clicking, take a hard look at your fueling. Most triathletes don’t have a training problem. They have a mismatch between what they’re asking their body to do and what they’re giving it to work with.

The Triathlon Nutrition Academy is one of the few places that actually teaches you how to think about nutrition instead of just telling you what to do. For a diabetic athlete who’d spent years fearing the thing his body actually needed, that distinction changed everything.

Doors open April 17. Get on the waitlist here: https://www.dietitianapproved.com/academy

If carbs still feel like the enemy, there’s a decent chance that’s exactly what’s holding you back.

It was for me.