The Fuelled Female

Someone books a half marathon or a HYROX, and in week one they’re already doing the volume they should be doing in week ten. By week six they’re exhausted, something niggles, and the block they were excited about falls apart. They started where they needed to end.This episode is the shape of a training block: how volume should build, when it should drop, and what your nutrition does through all of it. It’s not a rulebook. It’s the guidelines, plus your mission to test what works for your body.Inside:Why starting where you need to end causes overuse injuries, and why tendons and bones adapt slower than your heart and lungsBuild, peak and taper, and why taper is still peakPoppy’s first marathon mistake: merging two training plans, not pulling back strength as mileage went up, and ending up injuredThe fear of the deload, why it doesn’t cost you fitness, and why holding back when you feel good is an advanced skill for the type A girlsWhy you can’t be at 100% every session, and why Poppy’s intervals sit around 80% of max effortWhy dieting in the peak backfires (low energy availability), plus the “tired but wired” cortisol linkThe numbers: carbs, protein, in-session fuelling and electrolytesPlates don’t shrink in a deload, and taper bloat: why a kilo of water weight is fuel, not fatTwo example days, and what to protect and drop when life doesn’t pauseNext week: peak week nutrition.Poppy has coaching spaces open heading into the new year. 📩 DM @poppy.nutrifit on Instagram.Instagram https://www.instagram.com/poppy.nutrifit/Book a call for online coachinghttps://www.nutrifitcoaching.com/booking-calendar/call-with-coach-poppy?referral=service_list_widget Fuel Guidehttps://www.nutrifitcoaching.com/product-page/the-nutrifit-run-guide-2-0-the-complete-systemAffiliate Links Free Soul - POPS NFC - https://herfreesoul.com/collections/shop?sca_ref=11066339.a8NbRiyvgrMY PROTEIN - POPPY NF - https://creatorlink.shop/4AprR1k

October was about slowing down and managing the stress bucket. November is about what to do when you’ve got a goal. And we’re starting with the most feared macronutrient there is.Poppy works with women who train five or six times a week and are still scared of rice. This episode is the science in plain English, the sports nutrition guidelines, and your mission to go away and work out what applies to you. Because everyone is different, and getting it wrong the first time isn’t failing. It’s data.Inside:The phone battery analogy: how glycogen works, why hard training drains it fast, and why the scale moving up after a good carb day isn’t fatWhy you crave carbs when you’re underfuelled, on your period or stressed, and why that’s information, not a lack of willpowerThe carb guidelines per kilo for light, moderate, endurance and heavy training, and how to build up to them graduallySeeing food as components, not good or bad: simple vs complex carbs, and why dressing your carbs matters, especially if you have PCOSProcessed sugar as a performance tool, and how fibre timing can make or break a sessionTraining your gut for 30 to 90g of carbs per hour, plus Poppy’s own 80g/hr build and carb loading dayWhy performance nutrition is a season, not a lifestyleNext week: training volume, and why less is often more.📩 DMs open @poppy.nutrifit on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/poppy.nutrifit/Fuelling guide: https://www.nutrifitcoaching.com/product-page/the-nutrifit-run-guide-2-0-the-complete-systemLiverpool people come train with me! https://www.nutrifitgym.co.uk/

November starts this week. And I think it goes one of two ways.Either you’re in final push mode — pre-December urgency, maximum output, everything in the calendar. Or you’re the person who loves to train and loves to live, and so November becomes a calendar-cramming exercise. Every friendship group needs a dinner. Every team needs drinks. You’re still up at 6am for the session, out after work for the social, doing it all. And by January you’re not energised and ready to go. You’re depleted. Starting from scratch.This episode is about a different approach entirely.Poppy uses her own 2026 goals as the honest mid-year audit — where she is, what slipped, and the realisation that the reading goal and the no phone in the bedroom goal and the rest day goal and the work boundaries goal are all asking for the same thing. Less screen time. More genuine rest. A nervous system that actually gets to switch off. And why identifying that one underlying need is more powerful than trying to address five separate habits.Including the hibernation conversation — why shorter days are making you want to stay in and go to bed earlier, why that’s actually a biological signal worth listening to, and why after a full year the last two months might be exactly the right time to pull back rather than push harder.The bandwidth audit for type A people pleasers. Why saying yes to everything is quietly emptying the bucket. The vitamin D non-negotiable from this month. The 48 hours of genuine rest that doesn’t have to be two specific days. And why November done well is what February performance actually looks like from the inside.Plus a tease of where the podcast is going this month — because the stress management conversation is done, and it’s time to talk performance nutrition properly.📩 DMs open @poppy.nutrifit on Instagram.

This one came from a client conversation. She messaged after having to swap runs for the bike due to lower leg pain — and when she looked back she realised she hadn’t taken a rest day since the Wednesday of the previous week. She’d trained through the whole weekend, straight into the start of a new week, without a single recovery day in between.The reason it crept up on her was simple. She thinks of her week as Monday to Sunday. So when Sunday ends and Monday starts, it feels like a reset. A clean slate.But the body doesn’t reset on Monday morning just because the calendar does.In this episode Poppy breaks down the Mon-Sun mental model and why it quietly causes so many women to accumulate fatigue they never fully clear. What’s actually happening physiologically when you train hard on both weekend days. Why glycogen never fully restores when Saturday evening is high fat and alcohol rather than carbohydrates. Why the Saturday session’s adaptation gets meaningfully blunted even by two to three drinks — because alcohol competes directly with glycogen resynthesis and suppresses growth hormone overnight.Including the client who looked at a menu full of fried food before a HYROX session and chose pizza — not because it was the healthiest option but because it was the smartest performance decision in that moment. Why calorie banking across the day to save room for a dinner out is working against the body when you’re training hard. And why Monday restriction is the worst possible response to a heavy weekend.The practical scheduling framework. What Monday recovery nutrition actually looks like. And why the most sophisticated training decision you can make is to stop treating Monday like a clean slate and start treating it like day eight of a continuous process.📩 DMs open @poppy.nutrifit on Instagram.

This one follows directly from last week’s cortisol episode. If you haven’t listened to that one yet, start there.Stress eating is not a character flaw. It’s not weakness. And it’s not something you fix by being more disciplined. It’s biological, neurochemical, and hormone-driven, a response to a system that’s under more demand than it’s getting support for.In this episode Poppy breaks down the full mechanism behind stress eating for hard-training women. Why cortisol directly drives cravings for sugar, salt and fat. Why the physical act of eating activates the vagus nerve, the same nerve breathwork targets, which is why it works temporarily and why the brain keeps going back to it. Why underfuelling throughout the day is the most commonly missed cause of evening overeating. And why the restriction response to stress eating, be stricter tomorrow, train more to compensate, makes every single part of the cycle worse.Including the connection to RED-S and why what looks like a character flaw is often a symptom of a system that’s dangerously underfuelled. The difference between stress eating and emotional eating and why the approach to each is different. Why sometimes the work goes beyond nutrition and into therapeutic support, and why that’s not weakness. And the rushing women syndrome, the woman who only stops when she’s broken, who’s been pushing through on adrenaline for so long she’s forgotten what it feels like to actually have room in the bucket.The practical approach, the mindset shift, and why the answer is always more support- not more discipline.📩 DMs open @poppy.nfc on Instagram.

If you're training consistently, eating well, doing everything right on paper — and your body still isn't responding - this episode is going to explain why. And the answer probably isn't what you think.The problem is the bucket.Your body has one stress bucket. Work stress, relationships, financial pressure, the commute, the mental load of running a household, poor sleep, under-eating, training sessions, the 5 to 9 before the 9 to 5, the extra cardio, the evening scroll - it all goes in. One bucket. And when that bucket overflows, the body holds on to everything. No matter how hard you train or how carefully you eat.In this episode Poppy breaks down what chronic cortisol actually does to your body - body composition, water retention, thyroid suppression, sleep disruption, reproductive hormones, gut health, immune function and why the women doing the most are often the ones whose buckets are overflowing the most. Including why someone getting overstimulated at a coffee shop by too many questions about their order is actually a sign their stress bucket is too full. Why reducing running is often the first thing Poppy does in a serious fat loss phase. And why the answer to stalled progress is almost never more it's less, or better recovery, or both.Covers the full checklist of signs your bucket is overflowing. And the practical approach: audit the bucket, eat enough, protect sleep, breathwork, manage training load relative to life stress, and walk - not to burn calories but to actually rest and digest.Next week: stress eating - why it happens, what cortisol is doing to your appetite, and how to manage it without restriction.📩 DM @poppy.nfc on Instagram with any questions.

This episode sits underneath everything. Underneath the macros, the training plans, the race day nutrition, the protein targets. It's the mindset piece that determines whether any of it actually sticks long term.Most women have been cycling between two places for years without realising there's a different way. The locked-in phase — everything tracked, every box ticked, rigid and structured until one stressful week or one dinner out tips the whole thing over. And the nothing phase — no goal in the diary, motivation disappears, early bedtimes go, sessions get skipped, food becomes completely reactive. And then guilt about the nothing phase sends you back to the locked-in phase. And the cycle repeats.In this episode Poppy breaks down why the nothing phase isn't actually freedom — it's the predictable psychological response to sustained restriction. Why the habits that kept you healthy during a fat loss phase or a race block don't expire when the goal does — they're just your baseline. Why the 80/20 isn't a food rule, it's a way of existing. And why food freedom as a concept is being misused in a way that's keeping women stuck.Including why the post-race blues and the HYROX rut are the same mechanism as diet rebound. Why 80/20 is probably the wrong framing and a spectrum is more honest — sometimes it's 70/30 or 60/40, and that's okay. And why food is also a core memory maker — sitting around a table with friends and family — and that doesn't need a label.📩 DMs open @poppy.nfc on Instagram.

Should you avoid processed sugar? It's the question I get asked every single day.And whilst the advice that sugar is bad isn't wrong — it's massively out of context for women who train hard. It was written for a largely sedentary population. Not for a woman training four, five, six times a week asking her body to perform, recover and repeat. That is a completely different physiological context. And applying the same rules to yourself is quietly keeping you stuck.In this episode Poppy breaks down the actual mechanism — why glucose is your primary fuel source for moderate to high intensity training, why the fast absorption of processed sugar that makes it problematic in a sedentary context is precisely what makes it valuable around training, and the three specific windows where it's the mechanistically correct choice.Including the cortisol-craving loop that explains why the 9pm reach for something sweet feels so out of control — and why it has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with what you did or didn't eat six hours earlier. Why the guilt around the gel mid-run is diet culture interfering with sports nutrition in real time. And why the reward mentality — finishing every session needing a treat to feel complete — is keeping women in the same relationship with food they've been trying to escape for years.This is not a permission slip. It's the context most nutrition advice never gives you.📩 DM @poppy.nfc with questions.

Why Your Head Is What's Actually Limiting Your RunningYour legs aren't always the thing holding you back.Sometimes, it's your head.In the final episode of the running series, we're diving into the mental side of running — from ego and Strava comparisons to the very different skill of learning to push when things get genuinely hard.Because there are times when you need to get your ego out of the way: slowing down your easy runs, ignoring what everyone else is doing, and trusting your training plan.But there are also times when you need to strengthen your mind.When your legs are fried halfway through a peak-week long run. When you look at an interval pace and think, there's absolutely no way I'm doing that. When a race starts hurting and your brain immediately tells you to slow down.Running isn't supposed to feel easy all the time.The right training programme should challenge you — and learning that hard doesn't automatically mean bad is a huge part of becoming a better runner.We'll talk about race-day anxiety, negative splits, comparison, Strava, confidence, handling races that don't go to plan, and why every difficult session gives you another piece of evidence that you can do hard things.Because confidence doesn't come from telling yourself you're capable.It comes from proving it to yourself, run after run.Message me on instagram @poppy.nfc if you've enjoyed these running episodes or would ike to know more about the Half Marathon Program.

You've trained hard. Done the sessions. Shown up consistently. This episode is about making sure you don't get the fuelling wrong on the day that actually matters.Because that's where most mistakes happen. Not in the training block. On race day itself, or in the 48 hours before it. And almost always it's not because women didn't try — it's because nobody gave them the specifics. Not the vague eat more carbs advice. The actual numbers, the actual timing, the actual decisions that separate a race that reflects your training from one that falls apart in the second half.In this episode Poppy covers everything from the night before to the finish line. Why carb loading and calorie loading are completely different things and which one most women accidentally do. What to eat the night before and why the night before a race is not the time to try a new restaurant. Race morning timing, quantities, and the small top-up 15 to 20 minutes before the start that most women skip. Why 30 grams of carbs per 30 minutes during the race is the target and why one gel for a two-hour run is not enough. The carbohydrate oxidation study that found one female runner burned 120 grams of carbs per hour at half marathon pace. Why gut training is non-negotiable and how to build it across your training block. And what changes if race day lands in your luteal phase.Nothing vague. Just the specifics.Running series episode three. Episodes one and two are live now.Fuel Her Fire 2.0 is open — 12 week progressive half marathon programme with bi-weekly check-ins. £299. DM HALF to @poppy.nfc on Instagram.