Nutrition, Strength Training and Why You Don't Need to Shrink with Renee Diment

CW: This episode contains open discussion about disordered eating, body image, and diet culture. Please take care if these are sensitive topics for you.

In this episode, Jess sits down with Renee Diment, New Zealand nutritionist, REPs-registered personal trainer, NZ Personal Trainer of the Year 2024, and founder of Beyond the Body, for one of the most grounding, refreshing, and genuinely practical conversations The Cyclist has had about food, movement, and what it actually means to look after yourself as a woman.

Renee opens up about her own story, a 10-year-old on a beach in Perth, looking down at her body and comparing it to the girls in Total Girl magazine. The friend with anorexia at dance class. The restricting that started at 11 or 12. The gym before school at 14. And how 13 years of working with women eventually taught her that fat loss was always just the surface-level goal, and what women actually needed was far deeper than that.

Her business is called Beyond the Body for a reason. She shares how her coaching evolved from helping women lose weight to helping women discover who they actually are. Their values, their why, their relationship with themselves. And how the biggest wins her clients have had weren't about the scales at all.

From there, this episode becomes one of the most practical nutrition conversations The Cyclist has had. Jess asks all the questions she's been holding for years, from someone who knows a lot about nutrition but has spent years lost in the noise of it all. Renee walks through the four phases of the menstrual cycle and how understanding them gives women better body autonomy, not as a reason to stop doing things but as a guide for listening in. She explains the 10-minute rule for those days when you genuinely don't know whether your body needs rest or a push.

On nutrition, Renee introduces the add-in approach: forget elimination diets, forget what you're cutting out, just start adding. Protein, fats, fibre, carbohydrates on every plate. She makes a case for carbohydrates that will make a lot of women exhale, pushes back on the protein obsession dominating social media right now, and makes the case that fibre is actually the thing most women are deficient in and nobody is talking about it enough.

She talks about the fuck-it mode that follows restriction, why sharing a pizza with friends is genuinely better for your health than ordering the salad, and why your body is not broken, it just needs the right support and understanding.

And then there's strength training. Renee is passionate about this in a way that is completely unrelated to aesthetics. Building muscle protects your bones. It helps your body metabolise food. It combats stress and supports your nervous system. A 70-year-old client who broke her pelvis in a car accident recovered in months because of her training. That's the real reason to lift weights. Not Greece, not a bikini, but your 90-year-old self.

She wraps by saying that you do not need to shrink yourself to fit into a box someone else created. You are enough as you are. And when you truly allow yourself to believe that, everything else becomes possible.

Renee is coming back for a gut health and nervous system episode, because they ran out of time and there was still so much to cover. If you want that episode, let them know in the comments.

Find Renee at reneediment.com

Follow and connect

Instagram: @wearethecyclist

Website: wearethecyclist.com

Hit play. And maybe eat something while you listen.