‘Running on Veggies’ full of plant-powered recipes
Lottie Bildirici learned the hard way that it’s not enough to train and have goals to become a better runner. What you eat before and after workouts also has a dramatic impact on your body’s health and endurance.
After taking up running in her senior year of high school, following a bout with cancer, the Brooklyn native entered a string of races. She got serious about the sport almost immediately and, in an effort to boost performance, became obsessed with eating only “healthy” foods. Yet rather than propel her new heights, the restrictive diet ended up backfiring.
The more pure her diet became, the more her young body broke down with multiple stress fractures.
Realizing she was on the wrong path, Bildirici – a baker and vegetarian since age 17 – decided to take a more mindful approach to her “so-called health obsession” as she entered college. She would view food not either as good or bad, but as fuel.
As she notes in her new cookbook “Running on Veggies” (Rodale, January 2022, $25.99), the turnabout took significant effort, but restrictive eating eventually became intuitive eating, focused on nutrientdense whole foods and lots of vegetables. “I was determined to make it to the other side, emerge with a healthy body and mind,” she writes.
The book features more than 100 (mostly) vegetarian recipes aimed at helping you leverage your diet as a training tool – everything from fruit and vegetable smoothies and nourishing breakfasts to portable snacks, tasty sides, and plates and bowls that incorporate whole grains along with spices, nuts and sauces. A pantry guide for those new to plant-based eating, plus sample meal guides to get your started, adds to its appeal.
FROM CANCER PATIENT TO NUTRITION COACH
Readers also learn the story of how the 27-year-old New York City resident found healing through running and food after being diagnosed at age 14 with Stage III Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Though she was safely in remission by her senior year, she still felt the stigma of being known as the sick girl. It was only after running a 5K to raise money for a local cancer charity
that she finally felt completely healed. “On that starting line, I felt powerful, in control of my life, like I hadn’t before cancer,” she writes.
Years in the making, the book was born of the Instagram account and blog of the same name she started in 2013 to connect with other runners of the same mindset. A communications student at Fashion Institute of Technology at the time, she’d fallen down the rabbit hole of sports nutrition books, and wanted to share.
Endurance athletes, especially females, had little guidance on food and nutrition at the time. To help other runners achieve their nutritional and athletic goals, she logged what she ate pre- and post-workout, along with simple recipes that her followers could make at home.
What she didn’t expect was that professional runners like Kara Goucher would soon be among her biggest fans.
Bildirici was sitting in her college cafeteria 10 years ago when the Olympian first made a comment on one of her posts. She recalls taking a screenshot. “It was insane!” she says. “I just loved everything she embodied.”
In 2015, Goucher invited her to speak at a second retreat in Colorado, and oh, by the way, would she also be willing to come early and cook for her?
Bildirici ended up not only staying in Boulder but also cooking for her mentor leading up to the Olympic Trials in Los Angeles in February 2016.
“It was scary but a great opportunity,” Bildirici says. “So I gave it my all.”
That led to more opportunities with other Olympians, world champions and other professional athletes. In 2018, with her initial college dream of working in the music industry a distant memory, she became the North American Nutrition
Coach for the Adidas Runners community, offering one-on-one nutrition counseling for runners. She was 24.
On a cold and rainy day that October, to mark 10 years since her cancer diagnosis, she also completed an Ironman competition in Louisville, Kentucky, to raise thousands for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
“It was important to not have cancer define me,” she says.