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STHER LOFGREN is
a 27-year-old professional rower whose
career began in high
school, blossomed at Harvard
University, and reached an alltime high last year, when she
and seven other women won gold
at the London Olympics in the
women’s eight. To reach this level,
she works out twice a day: once
at the crack of dawn, and again
after a full day at her job, where
she works as a brand and marketing consultant. She views the food
she eats as fuel for her body rather than as a form of pleasure.
“I love delicious things as much
as the next person, but eating to
boost my performance as a rower has made me very attuned to
what my body responds well to
and what slows it down, and that
helps me continue to make good
choices,” says Lofgren, whose favorite foods are ripe fruits, fresh
vegetables, Greek yogurt and highflavor grains.
She avoids gluten and limits her
red meat intake to once or twice a
week. The former, she says, causes
“gluten hangovers,” which she
swears she experiences after pizza
dinners or late-night beers. The
latter, she says, is “just not good
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LIFESTYLE
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for you.” Lofgren doesn’t forbid
indulgences, though — wine and
Starbucks pastries are semi-regular staples.
Lofgren laments the polarized
levels of healthiness at restaurants,
stating that most places either
tend towards gourmet or junk.
“You are supposed to want to
be a foodie who slaves away for
hours to make a meal that requires salt imported from Austra-
I love delicious things,
but eating to boost my
performance has made me
very attuned to what my body
responds well to, and that
helps me make good choices.”
lia made from dried baby tears, or
else you must be someone who is
speeding through a Burger King
drive-through,” she says. “My
solution is somewhere in the middle — I’ve found a few things that
I can pre-make or quickly make
and eat, happily, with little variation, every day. And then some
nights I go all in on a foodie-type
dinner, which I’ve found is best
inspired when you’re
cooking for a fr Y[