Nina Voit, the woman who listens to the body before the numbers

For three weeks, Tour de France riders subject their bodies to a series of physical demands that few human beings would be able to endure. They eat to generate watts, drink to withstand the heat, and recover with almost industrial precision. Yet, amid the nutritional plans, precisely measured energy gels, and carefully counted grams of carbohydrates, one question remains: what does the body actually do with everything we give it? To answer this, 3bikes spoke with Nina Voit, an expert in nutrition and digestion, author, and founder of *Du Bon Sens dans Mon Assiette*. Her journey began neither in a laboratory nor on the side of a Tour de France road, but through a personal challenge that forced her to completely rethink the way she lives, eats, and listens to her body. This profile kicks off our four-part summer series dedicated to the cyclist’s invisible body. Before talking about carbohydrates, energy gels, the gut, and recovery, we first needed to understand the woman who invites us to look at performance in a different light.

By Jeff Tatard – Photos: © Du Bon Sens dans Mon Assiette

The Invisible Body of the Tour de France

On TV, cycling seems simple. A man pedals. He accelerates. He suffers. He attacks. He wins or he gives in. The images show legs, faces, gaps, mountain passes, and power output. Commentators talk about form, strategy, equipment, gear ratios, and watts per kilogram. But the bulk of the battle takes place elsewhere—in a realm the cameras cannot reach. Inside.

In a body forced to decide, second by second, where to send the blood, how to maintain its temperature, which reserves to mobilize, and which functions to slow down. In a stomach that must accept food while the muscles demand priority. In an intestine required to absorb considerable amounts of carbohydrates even as heat, dehydration, and the intensity of the effort compromise its functioning.

The Tour de France, therefore, is not just a cycling race. It is a full-scale physiological experiment. That’s why we wanted to meet Nina Voit. Not simply to ask her how many grams of carbohydrates a rider must consume per hour. Nor to draw up a list of good and bad foods. But to understand what happens between the moment we swallow something and the moment the body succeeds—or fails—to process it. Because that is precisely where its work begins.

A German accent, a deeply French story

There remains a slight German musicality in Nina Voit’s voice—a subtle trace of her childhood and the early years she spent in Germany before moving to Paris to work. At the time, she was leading a life that many would have called successful. She was moving quickly through life, working tirelessly, pouring all her energy into her career, and holding onto that very modern belief that the body will always eventually keep up—simply because we demand that it do so.

She acknowledges this today with a mix of clarity and humor: “I worked so hard and mistreated my body so much that I think I did just about every nasty thing possible to it—except for drugs, which weren’t really my thing.”

The body can take a lot for a long time. It compensates. It adapts. It absorbs the too-short nights, the meals eaten too quickly, the stress, the tension, and that tendency to constantly put off the moment when we finally agree to listen to ourselves. Then, sometimes, a day comes when it won’t negotiate anymore. For Nina Voit, that day came when she was 28.

The day everything changed

She temporarily lost sight in one eye. Tests followed. The diagnosis came: multiple sclerosis. Intravenous corticosteroids helped her regain her vision. The symptoms subsided. Life could almost go back to the way it was before. In fact, that’s how she reacted at first.

She downplayed it. Her vision had returned. The crisis seemed to be over. The disease seemed abstract, distant, almost theoretical. She admits to having experienced a form of denial, as if the fact that she no longer immediately felt the problem was enough to make it go away.

But two doctors—one French and the other German—conveyed the same message to her almost simultaneously: she must change. Change her diet. Manage her stress better. Rethink her lifestyle. Incorporate physical practices and take into account a psychological dimension that she had largely pushed aside until then.

That moment didn’t provide her with a miracle solution. It imposed a responsibility on her. “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

She uses this saying to describe the beginning of her journey. Not because a single doctor, a single book, or a single method would have changed everything, but because she was finally ready to seek answers. And above all, to look at her body in a different way.

First, survive; then, understand

In the beginning, Nina applied herself. She adjusted her diet. She changed certain habits. She observed her reactions. She tried to understand what improved her condition and what, on the contrary, seemed to weaken her.

Then came curiosity. Why do certain foods seem easy to digest one day and much harder the next? Why can two people eat exactly the same thing and react in completely different ways? Why isn’t a diet considered balanced always enough to restore energy, digestive comfort, or a sense of vitality?

Nutrition led her to biochemistry. Biochemistry led her to the body’s overall functioning. Then she discovered Asian medicine, particularly traditional Chinese medicine, whose approach to interpreting the body fascinated her.

She met the man she still considers one of her primary mentors—a man who had lived and studied in Asia for many years. She compared modern knowledge with ancient traditions. She continued her training, earned additional specializations, and gradually transformed her personal quest into a professional calling.

Nineteen years after her last flare-up, Nina Voit does not present her journey as universal medical proof or as a replicable model. She simply recounts what it has brought about in her: a new relationship with the body, based on observation, understanding, and the rejection of automatic responses.

No longer just asking, “What did you eat?”

In conventional nutrition, the first question often focuses on what’s on your plate. What do you eat for breakfast? How much protein do you consume? How many carbohydrates? Do you drink enough water? Do you eat enough vegetables?

These questions are obviously necessary. But Nina Voit believes they aren’t enough. Because two people can eat exactly the same meal and yet derive neither the same energy, nor the same digestive comfort, nor the same benefits from it.

“No matter what dysfunction we observe, we often come back to the same question: Is the body actually able to process what it takes in? You can eat perfectly well on paper and yet fail to properly assimilate anything.”

This idea lies at the heart of her approach. Food doesn’t just need to be swallowed. It must be digested, absorbed, transported, processed, and utilized.

The journey from the fork to the cell is immense. The stomach must do its job. The pancreas must release its enzymes. The liver must play its part. The intestinal wall must allow the right elements to pass through while maintaining its barrier function. Nutrients must enter the bloodstream and then reach the tissues that need them.

The quality of what goes in matters. But the body’s ability to use it matters just as much. In elite sports, this difference becomes staggering.

What athletes already understand better than others

Athletes often pay closer attention to their diet than the general population. They know that a poor meal can compromise a training session. They quickly feel the consequences of low energy, insufficient hydration, or heavy digestion.

Their bodies respond immediately. An ill-suited diet doesn’t just cause abstract fatigue. It results in heavy legs, an unusual heart rate, a missed workout, incomplete recovery, or impaired performance.

Nina Voit readily acknowledges this: “Athletes generally have better habits, simply because they’re more interested in their bodies and their performance. They realize fairly quickly that when their diet isn’t up to par, their performance can’t keep up either.”

But she also observes a contradiction. The more scientific sports become, the more tempting it is to reduce the body to a series of measurable values: weight, watts, heart rate, grams of carbohydrates, milligrams of sodium, hours of sleep, and glycogen levels.

This precision represents an extraordinary advance. But it can create the illusion that there is a perfect, stable formula applicable to everyone. Yet the body is never stable.

The rider arrives with his entire history

A cyclist never lines up at the start with just their weight, power output, and glycogen levels. They arrive with their accumulated fatigue, their sleep patterns, their training load, their stress, their travel, their recent illnesses, their relationships, their worries, and sometimes major upheavals in their life.

Nina gives a deliberately striking example: “Imagine a perfectly prepared favorite. He’s young, he has the necessary physical attributes, and his entire training program was built around this race. But over the course of the year, he’s gone through a divorce, a death, and a move. On paper, he’s ready. In reality, his body has already had to absorb a considerable strain.”

The body doesn’t neatly separate these stresses. It doesn’t have one compartment for training, another for grief, a third for work-related stress, and a fourth for too few hours of sleep. It all adds up to what physiologists call allostatic load: the biological price the body pays for constantly adapting.

A difficult day, therefore, never tires just the legs. It can affect appetite, digestion, sleep, immunity, hormones, mood, and the ability to recover. It changes the body that will be at the starting line the next day.

That’s why Nina Voit emphasizes a key point: nutrition must not only meet the demands of the planned exertion. It must also take into account the actual condition of the person who will be performing it.

Traditional Chinese Medicine as Another Language of the Body

Nina Voit makes no secret of the major influence of traditional Chinese medicine on her work. She finds in it a different way of describing the body, through concepts such as heat, cold, circulation, deficiency, excess, dryness, and dampness. These concepts do not directly correspond to the categories of Western medicine, but they offer her a complementary language for observing the body’s reactions.

She is particularly interested in rhythms, seasonality, the temperature of foods, and each person’s digestive capacity. In this approach, a food is not defined solely by its calories, proteins, or vitamins. It also has a texture, a temperature, a season, a digestibility, and a perceived effect.

This perspective may seem surprising in a sports world dominated by numerical data. However, it should not be interpreted as a rejection of modern science. Nina does not deny biochemistry, physiology, or the value of analysis. Rather, she questions their use when they are no longer grounded in the reality of the body.

“We sometimes try to meet a need with quantity rather than quality.” This sentence perhaps sums up her entire philosophy.

When Nutrition Becomes a Numbers Game

Modern cycling has made significant strides in its nutritional strategies. Riders now have access to precisely formulated drinks, gels containing multiple types of carbohydrates, personalized hydration protocols, and meals tailored to each stage.

The problem doesn’t lie in this sophistication. It arises when a physiological possibility becomes a universal mandate.

Because some professional cyclists can consume 100 or 120 g of carbohydrates per hour under specific conditions, many amateurs assume they must do the same. Because a protocol works for a champion who follows it perfectly, it becomes the new standard on social media.

But according to Nina, everyone has their own “boiler.” “Some people burn carbohydrates more easily. Others utilize fats more efficiently. Habits, genetics, training, stress, heat, and the state of the digestive system all influence the response. We can’t assume that the same amount will suit everyone.”

So the highest number isn’t necessarily the best. The right amount is what the body can actually absorb and metabolize without causing heaviness, nausea, bloating, or diarrhea.

This consideration will be at the heart of the third part of our series. Because between energy gels, energy bars, and real food, the body doesn’t experience the digestive process in exactly the same way.

Restoring Common Sense

The name Nina Voit chose is no accident: *Du Bon Sens dans Mon Assiette*.

In a world where dietary advice is constantly contradictory, where every week seems to bring a new diet, a new miracle food, and a new absolute rule, Nina advocates a return to observation.

Eat what your body tolerates. Adapt rather than imitate. Respect the seasons. Don’t impose a quantity simply because it’s recommended. Understand that a tired body doesn’t have the same capabilities as a well-rested one.

This notion of common sense does not imply a lack of knowledge. On the contrary. Common sense is not ignorance. It is knowledge that has once again become applicable to a real human being.

Nina likes to point out that certain ancient practices predated modern scientific explanations by a very long time. She cites, for example, farmers or athletes who naturally adjusted how they cooked their food depending on when they wanted to eat it. They knew neither the term “glycemic index” nor the concept of starch retrogradation. But they observed the effects produced by a firm potato, a reheated one, or a mashed one.

They learned from the body itself. What science would later explain, experience had sometimes already perceived.

An approach that rejects ideological battles

Nutrition has become a battleground. Vegetarians versus meat-eaters. Carbohydrates versus fats. Fasting versus breakfast. Raw foods versus cooked foods. Supplements versus natural products.

Nina Voit rejects these religious wars. She prefers to ask: for whom, at what time, in what condition, and for what purpose?

A food may be appropriate in one context and far less so in another. A strategy perfectly suited to a stage of the Tour de France may be absurd for a day spent in front of a computer. An energy gel can be a remarkable tool in the middle of a mountain pass and of no use whatsoever to a sedentary person.

It’s not always the food itself that’s good or bad. It’s often the relationship between that food, that body, and that specific moment. This nuance is becoming rare in a world built on slogans. Yet it’s essential to understanding sports.

Our body isn’t a machine, even when we treat it as one

In cycling, we often compare the body to an engine. We talk about fuel, efficiency, displacement, power, and recovery. The comparison helps us understand, but it has its limits: a machine feels no stress, no grief, and no lack of sleep. It doesn’t experience anxiety. It doesn’t change how it functions based on the season, its owner’s mood, or their personal history.

The body, on the other hand, is constantly changing. “Tomorrow’s body will no longer be exactly the same as today’s. It will have slept differently, experienced different things, and been exposed to different temperatures.”

This statement puts the human being back at the center of performance. It doesn’t rule out protocols; it simply requires that they be adjusted. The smartest approach to sports nutrition may not be the one that anticipates everything. It’s the one that knows how to modify what was planned when the body no longer responds as expected.

A treasure, especially when it becomes a tool for work

During our conversation, Nina said something that goes far beyond nutrition: “Our body is a treasure. And when it becomes our tool of the trade, we should treat it with even greater respect.”

For a professional cyclist, the body is indeed a tool of the trade. But it cannot be replaced. You can change a wheel, a frame, a sensor, or an entire drivetrain. You can’t replace a weakened gut, an exhausted immune system, or a metabolism that’s been pushed beyond its limits for too long.

Nina Voit uses a simple analogy: “Imagine a race car: just because the race is over doesn’t mean you can park it in the mud, neglect its engine, and fill it with just any fuel.”

Performance, therefore, doesn’t stop at the finish line. It continues in what the runner eats, drinks, and does in the hours that follow. In their sleep. In their ability to rebuild what the effort has broken down.

And above all, in how they view this recovery: as a secondary obligation or as the beginning of the next performance.

This profile is just the beginning

We could have boiled Nina Voit’s advice down to a few simple tips: Eat more simply. Avoid excess. Respect your digestive system. Adjust portion sizes. Prioritize quality. But that would have missed the point. Her work isn’t just about explaining what to put on a plate. It’s about reestablishing a conversation—one that has become difficult—between the individual and their own body. Listening doesn’t mean giving up on performance. Listening can sometimes help sustain it.

Modern cycling measures almost everything: watts, heart rate, sleep, temperature, hydration, and carbohydrates. But there remains one final realm that no sensor can fully capture: the way a living organism accepts, transforms, or rejects what is imposed upon it.

It is within this space that Nina Voit has developed her approach. And it is precisely within this space that we will continue our investigation.

The Invisible Body of the Tour de France Our special four-part series with Nina Voit Part 1/4 (July 17) Nina Voit, the woman who listens to the body before the numbers → Discover the profile of the woman who has revolutionized the way we think about sports nutrition. Part 2/4 (July 20) When the Gut Becomes the Weak Link in Performance → Why the digestive system alone can determine the outcome of a stage. Part 3/4 (July 24) Tour: Gels or Real Food: Does the Body Really Tell the Difference? → What science really says about carbohydrates, digestion, and absorption. Part 4/4 (July 31) Does recovery really start on your plate? → Glycogen, sleep, microbiota, protein… what really sets you up for the next day’s performance.

=> To better understand Nina Voit’s world: COMMON SENSE ON MY PLATE