What Do RPE and Intuitive Eating Have in Common?

A challenge many endurance athletes face is connecting nutrition to training quality and long term progress. To help understanding and application, I find it's useful to draw a parallel between training and fueling.

Training with data and RPE

While many experienced athletes can self regulate effort reasonably well, also training with power is more effective for most athletes. While power does not replace feel, RPE and power data work very well together. Power gives you an objective reference and helps you get more quality and specificity from the same amount of time on the bike. It supports consistency, rhythm, and progression across weeks and months. And over time, because you have that reference point, you learn what the a specific effort actually feels like.

The fueling parallel

Just as we use power data alongside RPE, we now have tools that allow us to pair internal cues with objective guidance around fueling. This does not remove autonomy but it instead reduces guesswork and helps you plan instead of react. Using predictive nutrition planning technology helps to calibrate how you feel with what your body actually needs for energy. And, most importantly, it helps ensure that the work you are doing in training can translate into real performance capacity.

Why nutrition planning is important

As training volume increases, many athletes underestimate total energy needs due to lack of knowledge around nutrition and energy needs, lack of hunger or appetite with heavier loads, or due to intentional calorie restriction. The consequences of unintentional or intentional underfueling often show up subtly at first. Occasional low energy, inconsistency in performance and recovery, occasionally flat legs. And eventually fitness that never quite translates into consistent or predictable performance.

Common fueling mistakes

Endurance athletes often struggle to meet daily protein targets consistently; even athletes who eat an otherwise nutrient-dense and healthy diet. Plant-based athletes and athletes who also eat many high fiber foods can be at risk of lower protein and lower calorie intake driven by early fullness.

Carbohydrates are frequently mismatched to training load. For many athletes, carbohydrate intake stays relatively flat even though training load changes. This can lead to harder or longer days being underfueled, while lighter days are sometimes also over-restricted. Both scenarios compromise consistency and adaptation.

Athletes often try to balance performance with body composition goals. Without guidance, this endeavor often turns into chronic underfueling. Even if it is not always intentional, old restrictive habits can quietly reappear, especially during high volume training or as event season approaches.

Leveraging intelligent, personalized technology to optimize fueling

While eating should not be stressful, it is often made to be that way. When counting calories or macronutrients, weighing food or tracking food becomes about high precision instead of for planning or learning, it can feel overwhelming and become problematic. New apps like Hexis go beyond tracking and act as a daily guide to personalized nutrition and fueling to support training, adaptation, and performance.

Unlike historical nutrition tracking apps, the value in Hexis is around awareness and planning with the ultimate goal of feeding your body what it needs, in the amount it needs, when it needs it. Some athletes truly do this intuitively and adapt intake well as their training changes. However, most athletes need guidance to build that skill. Hexis helps by scaling energy, carbohydrate, and protein needs with training load, highlighting gaps before they show up as fatigue or stalled progress, and supporting recovery, strength, and power alongside endurance.

Over time, the goal is fewer decisions, not more. Patterns emerge, routines form, and go-to meals and snacks become habitual. As learning improves and intuition grows alongside training and performance, the mental load decreases.

Using a nutrition app requires a key mindset shift for some athletes. The effort to pay attention matters more than daily perfection. Use Hexis as a guide, not a judge. Just like training with data, the goal is not to stare at numbers forever. It is, instead, to make better decisions now so your intuition can fuel your body improves. That is how fueling apps, like training devices, become a tool for understanding your needs and feelings, allowing for better performance rather than being a source of stress.

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