Endurance sports nutrition advice for calorie-conscious athletes

There’s no doubt that long marathon training runs and two-a-day triathlon training workouts burn lots of calories. Heck, one reason why some of us train as much as we do is because we can then eat more than our couch-potato counterparts.

That said, it’s still a lot easier to eat 100 calories (four Hershey’s Kisses) than it is to run them off (at least one mile). So those in marathon training, triathlon training, and any other endurance sport training still have to be aware of approximately how much fuel they are taking in on a daily basis. And the easiest way to monitor your food intake is to be able to size up serving sizes at a glance. Use the following visual cues to help you calculate how many servings of any given food you might be taking in at your next meal or snack.

• One serving of fresh fruit or vegetables is about the size of a tennis ball.
• A quarter-cup of dried fruit is about the size of a golf ball.
• Three ounces of cooked meat or fish is about the size of a deck of cards or your palm.
• One ounce of block cheese is about the size of your thumb or a tube of lipstick.
• One cup of flaky cereal or one ounce of snack foods like chips and pretzels would fit in your two hands cupped together.
• One ounce of nuts will fit in one cupped hand.
• One serving of grains is about one-half of a bagel that is the size of a hockey puck.
• One tablespoon of oil or salad dressing is about the same size as a checker or the width of your two thumbs side-by-side.