Welcome to The Fittest Foodie blog!

We're two professional athletes with a big love for cooking and baking, who want to share with you how we fuel our active healthy lifestyle!

Welcome to the blog! I'm Lindsay Webster. This idea has been brewing in my mind for a little while now, and I’m so happy it’s finally coming to life! Anyone who follows my personal athlete account on Instagram probably knows that I do a whole lot of cooking and baking. It’s been a huge passion of mine, bordering on obsession, for years now. Every week, I’m getting new inspiration for recipes to invent and try. I’m so excited for a place to share how Ryan and I use them to nourish our workouts and adventures as professional athletes.

Photo by Jim Campbell

To fill in anybody new, my husband, Ryan Atkins, and myself are both Canadians and professional multisport and obstacle racing athletes. I love mountain running, and spent my most recent race season competing in Europe in the SkyRunning World Series. I managed to win the overall title (just yesterday, actually! I’m sitting on the plane ride home writing this blog!). I also snagged the title again this year of Obstacle Course Racing World Champion. It’s been a good year! Ryan is also the current men’s Spartan Race World Champion, and has spent much of his race season also competing in gravel cycling events. He’s making quite a name for himself in the cycling world! We also mountain bike, rock climb, cross country ski, backcountry and skimo ski, go camping in tents or our camper van, and just have a general love for the outdoors and a healthy, active lifestyle.

Food is a big part of that well-rounded lifestyle. Cookies fuel our workouts as well as our souls! We eat everything, though we love vegetarian meals too. If you’re a vegan, dairy free, or gluten free, have no fear, I’ll be sharing recipes of it all. My favourite thing to bake is bread! I have a big veggie garden, which will supply a lot of the produce you’ll see me cooking with, especially during the summer months. You’ll also probably end up with some content of our chickens, who I think are just the funniest (chickens have big personalities!). I’m really hoping for sheep in my near future (Ryan holds out hope for a goat and a mini horse), but for now, I’ll remain content with our adventure cat, Nimbus, and our best training partner, Suunto the big fluffy malamute. There might be a new member coming soon ;)

My love for cooking really started about twelve years ago. Rewind to when Ryan and I were just dating, and renting an old farmhouse with our two best friends, Kelsey and Matt. They’re also incredible athletes, so you can imagine how much a house of three active males and one female consumed. We’re all great cooks (though Kelsey, your “soaking method” of dishes leaves something to be desired), and we divided that task evenly. As I started exploring making recipes from scratch and realizing how much I enjoyed it, I started to cook for us most nights. When I transitioned away from my job in marketing to becoming a full-time athlete, I still had more time on my hands in a day than I was used to. I decided to go through culinary school at college, not really with a future career as a chef in mind, but just so I could learn more about culinary techniques.

So, why the blog? Besides the obvious reason of my love for cooking and wanting to share it, that is. Someone at a race said to me ones that he thinks there’s a “fad” in the running world, where females post videos of things they’ve baked but that they “obviously aren’t actually eating.” Ugh. Well, I can’t speak for them, but on my part, everything we make is consumed. I really want to contribute to changing this horrible stigma that we have to restrict, and can only eat fruits, vegetables, or have to be the picture of healthy eaters. I love to exercise, but let’s be honest, part of the reason I do it is so I can eat what I want. Yes, I bake lots, but I’m not sitting there eating all 15 cinnamon buns in one go. I’ll freeze some, bring them on long workout days, put one in the car to munch on my drive home after a really hard session when my glucose is depleted, or share them with friends on a hike. I want to show everyone not just how to make these yummy recipes, but that as part of a healthy lifestyle, you can eat everything. I want to show you how we do it, some science behind glucose and when to fuel, and also some culinary science I’ve learned. It doesn’t matter if you’re a pro athlete like us, a recreational athlete, our moms who just got back from a day of hiking together, have a job that demands a lot of energy, or my neighbour who gets her exercise by shovelling the snow off her driveway (she frequently shovels ours too, lucky us!). You only live once – I don’t plan on spending it avoiding wine and tasty food!