This Is What a Champion Powerlifter Eats for Breakfast
Meghan Scanlon weighs a buck 25 and can squat over 360 pounds and bench more than 230. We're real curious: What kind of magic juice is she drinking?
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Meghan Scanlon
Claim to Fame: Meghan Scanlon has one main goal: Help as many people as possible find their strength under a barbell. She has her own online strength and fitness business, MegScanLift, through which she helps athletes of all kinds reach their goals. She’s also an Assistant Fitness Director at Healthworks in Coolidge Corner. Scanlon is a competitive powerlifter in the 57kg (125 pounds) weight class of the USA Powerlifting Federation, where she holds numerous American and state records and is currently the 57kg National Champion. At Nationals this past October, she squatted 175kg (385 pounds), bench pressed 107.5kg (236 pounds), and deadlifted 175kg (385 pounds).
Right now, she is training five days a week for the Arnold Fitness Expo in March, where she will compete in both powerlifting and Olympic lifting, which generally features faster movements and lifting the weight overhead. From there, her focus will be on the World Championship powerlifting meet in June. As if that wasn’t beyond cool enough, Scanlon has also run 10 marathons and completed three Ironmans—who says you can’t do it all?
What She Ate: Scanlon usually preps her meals the night before, and she’s been on a big peanut butter kick lately. She alternates a gluten free pancake with dark chocolate chips and peanut butter or two rice cakes with peanut butter, honey, and dark chocolate chips. During her workout, she’ll drink intra-workout carbs in the form of supplements, and afterwards, she’ll load up on a protein rich meal, which she says can either be a simple shake or an omelet with turkey and avocado. Typically, it takes her three meals and 3-4 hours to complete her “breakfast.”
Why She Chose It:
“Competing in a weight class sport adds an extra element to my nutrition plan,” she explains. “I need to have proper nutrition to fuel my workouts, to recover, and to also be at weight come meet day.” Usually, Scanlon weighs a little more than her weight class (57kg), so when it comes time to prepare for a meet, it becomes of the utmost importance to fill her diet with mostly nutrient-dense foods while she is dieting down to make weight at the meet. In a weight class sport, it’s most advantageous to be the smallest lifter in your weight class lifting the most amount of weight.
“I think it’s important to make your diet and nutrition work for you,” Scanlon says. “There is no diet, or nutrition plan that fits all—just like exercise. Some people don’t like to eat breakfast, and if that makes their life less stressful and their nutrition throughout the day better, I see no problem with it. Many times we get caught up in the minute details of what we are eating rather than looking at the whole picture first. Take a hard look at your nutrition as a whole and work to change the one thing that would give you the biggest bang for your buck and go from there.”
