Eating Behavior Psychoregulation As a Resource for Increasing the Achievements of Athletes

Abstract

The realities of today's sport indicate that the achievement of high sports results is not only due to high-quality technical-tactical preparation for the competitions but is also associated with a number of medical-biological character factors (Dmitriev & Gunina, 2020). For instance, one of the most important constituents of the training process in all sports events is a properly selected balanced diet, which takes into account the competitive activity specifics, the peculiarities of physical loads, the athlete individual physiological and psychological characteristics (Gunina et al., 2018; Malkina-Pykh, 2007). Therefore, every year the attention of scientists in the field of sport is more and more focused on the issue of athlete eating behavior management as a factor of increasing the competitive activity efficiency, which determines the urgency of this research topic. Besides, in the scientific literature, the psychological components of nutritional support in sport have received almost no attention. Available publications have mainly addressed the peculiarities of athlete nutrition in certain sports events (Polievsky, 2015) almost neglecting external and internal factors that influence the athlete eating behavior, which makes the presented topic especially interesting for study. The purpose of this study was to identify the psychological factors that determine the peculiarities of nutrition and diet in sports, and to determine the degree of their influence and methods of psychoregulation. Previous researchers have reported changing of CAL affect cycling power production (MacDermid & Edwards, 2010; Martin & Spirduso, 2001; Too & Landwer, 2000), lower limb joint angle, cadence (Barratt et al., 2011 & 2016; Candotti et al., 2007; Christiansen et al., 2013), pedal torque (Hull & Gonzalez, 1988), lower limb muscle activity (Watanabe, 2020), and V̇O2 (Ferrer-Roca et al., 2017; Morris & Londeree, 1997).