Peloton Instructor Tunde Oyeneyin Shares What She Eats In A Day
If you're a Peloton user and want energy, motivation, and an exhilarating experience with someone who won't let you quit, you choose a Tunde Oyeneyin ride and pedal as your bike to nowhere takes you places you never thought you'd go. If you think lifting 2-pound or 3-pound weights while sitting stationary on a bike for 10 minutes straight sounds easy, Oyeneyin will teach you otherwise. And while she's an expert at making you feel empowered while you sweat, Oyeneyin, like other Peloton instructors, has also become a social media influencer, with a growing following and a beauty products partnership with CVS.
Oyeneyin is a woman who never gives up and sometimes you will even hear a little bit of her journey from overweight teenager to fitness goddess whose arms are the envy of Peloton riders across the globe. She realized she needed to change her life and her body. "In eighth grade, I was a bridesmaid in my aunt's wedding and the dress she chose for us didn't come in my size. They found me another dress, but I didn't want to wear that one and I just fell to the floor in the bridal store dressing room crying," Oyeneyin said. "My mom ended up sewing together two of the dresses that didn't fit to make one dress. That was when I knew I needed to make a change," she told TODAY.
Oyeneyin also knows that exercise is only part of the equation when it comes to weight loss, as diet can play a more important role than fitness.
Tunde Oyeneyin makes eating clean her mantra
As a teenager, Tunde Oyeneyin took herself from a 200-pound girl who let the scale dictate how she felt to a world-class fitness instructor who incorporates a clean diet free of overly processed foods into her wellness lifestyle — at least for the most part.
"I look at food as fuel and I [ask] what is my tank saying that it needs? And sometimes my tank says it needs a burger. Most of the time it doesn't, but sometimes it does," Oyeneyin told Delish.
A regular day for the Peloton star consists of starting her morning with water to hydrate, but she also likes some variety in her diet while hitting all the major food groups throughout the day. "I try to have vegetables at every meal, some fruit, and then some lean protein [like] shrimp, chicken, nuts. Nuts are a huge part of my diet," she said.
How Tunde Oyeneyin keeps the cravings at bay
Although Tunde Oyeneyin reaches for that hamburger and also a little ice cream every once in a while, she has also found a way to resist those little cravings on a regular basis.
"If my body is saying it wants the ice cream, sometimes I'll just give it the ice cream," she told Delish. "But on a day-to-day I have these little health hacks that help to suppress that craving. If I can survive three minutes without actually reaching for the thing, usually the craving will die. And then if it's still there after 30 minutes, I'm like, 'OK, let's do it."
That doesn't mean COVID-19 and quarantine didn't make her reach for what many call junk food every once in a while, as she sometimes mentioned during her Peloton classes. "I want people to know that even though I'm in the fitness world, I'm human too," Oyeneyin told TODAY. "I struggle just like everyone else. You don't just lose weight and then just magically stay there. It's a lifelong, forever journey."