Success Story: Brian Bennett

November 22, 2015

Meet Brian! Brian came to HEAL looking to fuel his body properly for his first marathon, but he accomplished so much more. The intense headaches he’d been dealing with for so long disappeared as well! Brian corrected his diet and ran his first marathon! Now he’s thinking of a triathlon in 2016!

Unlike many people, I haven’t really had any kind of body weight issues. I have never said ” if I could only lose 5 or 10 pounds”. For me it wasn’t an issue eating whatever I liked and maintaining a healthy weight. With a physical job and an active lifestyle my weight and body shape at 46 wasn’t really that much different than when I graduated high school. In 2010 I started running to stay healthy but mainly to meet new people. Shortly after my first 5k race I started getting headaches on and off. Doctors told me it was probably nerve impingement in my neck and the impact of running was making it worse. With lots of Advil and some massage therapy I continued to run and lived with the headaches. Five years later, my love of running brought me to the point where it was time for my first marathon. I wanted to do the best I could so I knew that along with training, and proper sleep, nutrition would play a big role. That’s when I went to see Tara.

Tara analyzed my training schedule and my diet plan and realized quickly that I wasn’t eating nearly enough calories for the distances I was running. Tara came up with a nutrition plan that covered before, during, and after my workouts. She told me that I was burning close to 3000 calories on my long runs and not even coming close to replenishing the lost calories and nutrients. Maybe the headaches were my bodies way of telling me….Hey eat more! It was difficult at first to get all that food into me at first, but after a while I started to realized I had more energy throughout the day and I wasn’t so beat after my 2 hour runs.

The headaches went away and on October 18 I finished the 42.2km of the Toronto Waterfront Marathon with (mostly) a smile on my face.
Thanks Tara! Next stop… Triathalon training and…. my first Triathalon sometime in 2016.”

Brian Bennett, Toronto