End of January Detox Challenge

A whole 30 days with no alcohol, grains(not that that was an issue anyway), sugar, tobacco, processed foods, little caffeine in the form of coffee and hot tea, and eating out. What a month! I feel great and have leaned out a bit and put on some muscle in the process. My times keep improving and so do my heavy lifts. So a lot of good came from this. I am going to continue with this system from here on out, minus the alcohol restriction. This will be on a limited basis and limited quantity (as I am now a cheap date) since I enjoy a cold beer or some whiskey every now and again. As a trade off for this, I will still keep sugar and "processed foods" out of my diet for the duration leading to the 2009 CrossFit Games Qualifiers in May at GSX in Ft. Worth. For those that don't know check it out: "2009 CrossFit Games". Hopefully I can keep them out for good as my insulin sensitivity is getting to the point where any amount of sugar just bombs me. This makes a good reason to keep it out of my diet.
I would encourage anyone to give this challenge a go for minimum 30 days and see what kind of results you can get. I promise you they will be positive. You will not only notice a better looking and feeling self, but everything gets better: sleep, workouts, and life in general!

4 Nutritional Challenges for the New Year

As probably seen in earlier posts, I have thrown down a couple of nutritional challenges to start of the year and potentially help everyone get into that realm of "being fit". Lets remember that we work out for 1 hour of a 24 hour day. That leaves us with 23 hours to complete the cirlce and actually make that 1 hour intense workout worth something! So with that being said, lets recap the first two and bring on the third and forth! As a note, you can tackle these one at a time in order from 1-4, or all together. I would recommend for the nutritional newbie to take things slow though, i.e. one step at a time.

NUTRITION CHALLENGE #1:
Eat protein with every single meal. EVERY meal! What kind of protein? A once living, breathing, roaming, walking, swimming, animal!
To spell it out even more: (in no particular order of relevence)
- Chicken, Beef , Pork, Fish, Shellfish, Eggs, Turkey, Lamb, Venison, Duck

NUTRITION CHALLENGE #2:
Drop sugar from your diet for a minimum of 2 weeks and see how you feel at the end. Once you realize how great you feel continue on with the NO SUGAR challenge. Of course its ok to indulge every now and again, but for the ones that have a soda or ten, a cookie, a doughnut, candy, etc. on a daily basis needs to stop! Try it and see what happens. The benefits will definitely outweigh any kind of negatives your pesky brain will come up with.

NUTRITION CHALLENGE #3:
Now that we have rid our diets of sugar and we are eating protein with EVERY meal, (yes this includes snacks) its time to take away the comfort food of our time: Breads, starches (minus the occasional sweet potato or yam), grains, cereals, wheats, pasta, rice, corn, and the like.
Here is a good article about the evil that are these!
"The Definitive Guide to Grains"
These things have been linked to all types of illness, disease, allergies, and just all around health problems. If anything, drop sugar and grains from your diet to create longevity of life! Once again, try it out for minimum of two weeks. After the two weeks, evaluate how you feel and carry one once you realize the benefit that you have just given your body.

NUTRITION CHALLENGE #4:
Once the first 3 challenges have been completed either one at a time or all together, its time to bring the final piece to finish our Nutrional Puzzle. Eat some GOOD fats with all your meals. By good fats I mean:
Olive oil, coconut oil, coconut meat, avocado, nuts, seeds, some nut oils, REAL butter, lard, EFA's (Omega 3's), Animal fats
Heart healthy fats that will help promote a healthy lifestyle. A plug from the FDA (although they are akin to the Anti-Christ in my opinion). This is now a primary fuel source for our body since we have ditched the grains and sugar, so you want to make the right choices. Not to mention they are more caloricly dense than carbohydrates (sugar and grains) at 9 calories per gram than 4 calories per gram respectively.
Read: "Definitive Guide to Fats"


Bringing it all together......
Once this has come full circle, whether it takes 2 weeks or 2 months, you WILL see a noticeable difference in how you look and feel and I would imagine that you will want to carry on this new lifestyle change from here on out. It will only allow you to live a longer, happier, and healthy life so why not?

Cold Remedies for the "Modern Man"

There are a couple of articles I would like to link in refernce to this post:

1. "Maintaining Your Immunity During the Holidays"
2. "Make Your Own Flu Shot, Or Just Stay Healthy in the First Place"
3. "What Happens to Your Body When...You Carb Binge?"

There is something that I noticed over the recent holidays. I got sick for a few days. I never get sick! This got me to thinking about what might be the cause of it so I am going to make an assumption on the issue. Around this time of year I tend to get more into sugar than normal, whether it be through pies, cakes, brownies, ice cream, candy, etc. After reading a little about sugar, it can cause an immune suppresion in the body. As can over-indulgence in alcohol, which also tends to happen around this time. Bad news. Especially this time of year when the Flu seems rampant. So, scan or read the accompanying articles and make your own assumptions, but I am going to attribute this recent sickness to too many sweets and too much drinks! Especially the 2 huge pieces of cheesecake that I ate for my brother-in-law's birthday a few days before Christmas. Well, I started "feeling bad", sore throat, congestion, runny nose, on Christmas Eve Eve (the day before Christmas Eve: not a typo). So I took meds and nothing really worked. NyQuil, my once favored drug of choice for a small cold, didn't do a thing but make me sluggish in the morning. Mucinex, which can dry out a 5x5 childrens sand box didn't work either. I had all the symptoms that these medications are supposed to take care of! After all the holiday hub-bub, I got back on track with my diet [lots of protein, good fats, fruits and veggies] and a couple of days later everything went away. So where am i going with all this? Well, it sounds like a good "prescription" for a cold or the flu is to just eat right (read older posts) and stay the hell away from mass quantities of sugar in the form of sweets and high density carbs.

Food for thought.....SUGAR = BAD

NUTRITION CHALLENGE #2:

Drop sugar from your diet for a minimum of 2 weeks and see how you feel at the end. If you say you feel worse I know you're lying!

Bringing in the New Year: 2009

Well it's time to end the 2008 chapter and start 2009. It's always nice to take some time and reflect on the years past to make some decisions for the upcoming one. So what is on the books for 2009? What, if any are your new goals or resolutions? I have decided to test myself for the month on January and clean up my act a little. I have other goals and resolutions as well but here is the main one that I hope to accomplish over the next month.

January Detox Challenge:
The goal of this challenge is to rid your life of anything that is "harmful". I will use that term loosely as there are many things that could be qualified as harmful to one person and ok to the next. So, things that I will be doing away with for January are as follows:
1. Any food that is processed. By this I mean any thing that comes in a box, jar, or has more than 3 ingredients.
2. Sugar
3. Tobacco
4. Alcohol
5. Eating out at restaurants
--What I will be keeping:
1. Whole natural foods; fruits, veggies, meats, nuts, seeds, good fats, fish oil. little starch in the form of yams/sweet potatoes.
2. A varied workout program to benefit from this "clean" living.
3. A positive frame of mind

I am doing this challenge for 2 reasons: 1) So I can see if I have the mental fortitude to undertake something like this for 30 days. 2) To see what kind of changes can be present without the influence of "harmful" substances such as alcohol and tobacco. So to all I say, give this challenge a try or cheer from the sidelines and wish the followers luck! I will keep an updated log along with this to track my progress.

January 2, 2009 - Start of challenge
January 6, 2009 - 5 days in and so far so good. I have made some amendments to allow for things that are in a container but are not laden with garbage. This would be milk, cottage cheese (not the Shepps kind) and some cocktail sauce I used for Oysters that Bevin and I bought at Sprouts. It was made from a tomato puree and not ketchup which has "HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP (HFCS)" in it. I haven't had any cravings for anything in particular. So, all is well for right now!
January 13, 2009 - 12 days in and all is good! No cravings for anything and all we have eaten has been great, wholesome, delicious food. We did eat out once but it will be an exception to the rule because it was Jason's Deli. We had the salad bar and only salad and veggies with a homemade olive oil dressing. For the protein there was eggs, and I just brought a steak from home. So, it was basically like eating at home, we just had to meet my little brother for lunch. Will probably do this again as its nice to eat outside of the house sometimes. NOTEABLE CHANGE: My weight has kept dropping and is now to 177....Don't know if this is good or bad yet as I have not lost any strength, so I figure its fat and water that is leaving. I hope so!
January 26,2009 - Well the month is almost up and I haven't had any issues keeping this challenge going. I am going to extend it 14 more days to Feb 14th to make a total of 44 days of clean living! Set a huge PR the other day on Grace @ 3:14. I can attribute that to this change and my consistant workout scedule.
January 30, 2009 - End of Challenge

Winter Weight Gain

Here is an interesting article on the effects of winter and our ability to hold on to so much of those holiday calories.

http://www.thefactsaboutfitness.com/news/cold.htm

Enjoy!

Continued...

(Credit to www.southernhide.com for the picture)

Here is a nice post about how many carbs one needs to survive during the day and into a workout.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/how-many-carbohdyrates-do-you-need.html/print

Nutrition Challenge #1

Eat protein with every single meal. EVERY meal! What kind of protein? A once living, breathing, roaming, walking, swimming, animal!

To spell it out even more:

- Chicken

- Beef

- Pork

- Fish

- Shellfish

- Eggs

- Turkey

- Lamb

- Venison

- Duck

Good Luck!

On Nutrition:

Why as humans must we pay so much attention and detail to our diets? Is it to help our training goals, to better ourselves, for longevity, or is it a combination of all of these? Being Crossfitters, most of us understand that a proper diet plays a big role in our day-to-day. A proper diet gives us the energy to get through a given day and still have enough left over for the workout when we get home. Nutrition plays a pivotal role in the effectiveness of our training regimens. It also gives us the proper nutrients we need to survive. So, what do I mean when I say a “proper” diet? Here is the FDA’s Dietary Guidelines version of a healthy diet:

-Emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products;
-Includes lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, and nuts; and
-Is low in saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, salt (sodium), and added sugars.

Is this correct? Dare I say no and go against 30 years of Government say so? If this is the proper diet, why are 34%1 (though I find this number low but its counting for just obese and not people who are “over-weight”) of Americans obese? Not that this is directly correlated, but there has to be something to it. Bottom line, we eat too many dense carbohydrates in the form of processed grains, breads, cereals, starches, and sugars and not enough protein or fat. In fact, there’s an increasing awareness that excess carbohydrates play a dominant role in chronic diseases like obesity, coronary heart disease, many cancers and diabetes. This understanding comes directly from current medical research.2 Break this diet down and it comes to a caloric split of 70% Carbohydrates, 20% Protein, and 10% Fat. All this needs is a bit of readjusting and some basic understanding. We want to turn this around to 40-50% Fat, 30-40% Protein, and 10-20% Carbohydrate all in the form of whole foods, nothing processed. In doing this, we let our body become a fat burning machine by making it rely on fat for energy and less on carbohydrates and concentrate on the major concern of insulin regulation. (It should be noted that there is also credit that needs to be given to the Zone Diet, created by Dr. Barry Sears. This diet has helped many to achieve amazing results through proper nutrient timing and hormonal regulation. The caloric split of this diet is 40% carbs, 30% fat, 30% protein. A diet that one could say is moderate in every way: Not too much fat, not too much protein, and not too much carbohydrate. I think this diet is good for people who need to learn proper quantities to eat, but unless you want to be a slave to measuring and eating 5 times a day it may not be the right path. It is also more of a maintenance diet in that it gives you just enough of every nutrient to live. One major problem I find is that you can eat anything on this diet as long as it’s in the right quantity to manage and regulate hormones. Not the path we want to go down since it’s these foods we want to get away from. I would argue though that “Paleo” food in “Zone” proportions would be a great way to tackle this diet as you rid it of any processed foods only making it that much better for you. To learn more about the Zone Diet click here . To learn more about the Paleo Diet click here.)
Insulin is a hormone released by the pancreas in response to increased levels of sugar in the blood. It causes most of the body's cells to take up glucose from the blood (including liver, muscle, and fat tissue cells), storing it as glycogen in the liver and muscle, and stops use of fat as an energy source.3 When insulin is absent (or low), glucose is not taken up by most body cells and the body begins to use fat as an energy source.4 So what causes increased levels of sugar in the blood and what does this mean? Too many carbohydrates, especially in the processed form cause secretion of insulin. By causing repeated insulin spikes and releases our body builds up resistance to this hormone. Once one becomes insulin resistant is when a whole slew of problems can begin to set in. These problems include obesity, hypoglycemia, diabetes, Insulinoma, Metabolic Syndrome, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome just to name a few. By keeping this regulated we fuel our energy from dietary fat and fat stores and create a healthy and lasting lifestyle.
There is an ongoing trend that dietary fat is what is causing us to be fat. Simply put, eating fat in turn will make me fat. As we have just seen, this is not the case as long as we control insulin. There are two types of fat: good and bad. The good fats are saturated, polyunsaturated (in small amounts), and monounsaturated. The bad fats are trans and hydrogenated. So, in our newly structured diet of 40-50% Fat, what kind of fats should we be eating? Plain and simple would be good fats: olive oil, coconut oil, nuts, avocado, and real butter. Those that are rich in saturated and monounsaturated fats. Fats to stay away from include vegetable oils, soybean oils, sunflower oils, corn oils, any hydrogenated (partially or the like) and trans fatty acids. The reason being is the polyunsaturated fats outweigh the monounsaturated fats and in the long term can end up causing health issues due to immune system suppression.
Let’s talk about saturated fat for a minute. In the past few years, saturated fat has been given a bad rap. Common misconceptions are that saturated fats increase the risk of heart disease and stroke, and negatively affect cholesterol profiles. Studies have shown that replacing fat for energy instead of carbohydrates the number of small dense LDL particles decreases.5 This comes from a good article posted by Men’s Health and a study that I have also read about in Gary Taubes’ book – “Good Calories, Bad Calories”. (Check out the link if you would like to know more about Saturated fats and why its good for you.) Our body likes fat. We are able to survive off fat. By this justification, it should be the mass amounts of carbohydrates that we consume to blame for bad cholesterol profiles and heart disease and not fat in our diets.
To complete the 100% of our daily diet, we must consume plenty of protein (30-40%) and an amount of carbohydrates that supports the kind of work we are doing. By protein I mean of the animal variety. “If you are fighting for survival in a 3rd world country then yes, beans and rice count as protein. Here t most assuredly does not. You need chicken, beef, fish, pork lamb, turkey…are you picking up what I’m putting down? If you think beans, nuts or Tofu count as protein then you are sadly mistaken.”6 Protein must also be eaten at every meal, which is especially critical if you are trying to lose weight. Good sources of protein would be: chicken, beef, fish, turkey, pork, eggs, and some milk. If you choose to use milk as a protein source do so in small quantities if your main goal is weight loss. Milk has lactate in it, a natural sugar, but much the same effect as processed sugar. Whole fatty milk should be the milk of choice. Why? Skim milk has no fat and since it has lactate this will create an insulin spike causing the body to store that lactate (sugar) as fat. Point: whole milk = good, skim milk = bad. As for carbohydrates, we must choose whole naturally occurring vegetables and fruits high in fiber: broccoli, cauliflower, onions, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, apples, oranges, berries. You get the idea, things that will keep insulin regulated. I hope I am driving that point home about insulin regulation. As for the comment about eating enough carbs to support the kind of work we are doing, here is what I mean. Majority of us are not marathon runners. Instead, we work behind a computer screen, take care of our kids or do something that is not overly exerting. Since we are now using fat as energy, fewer carbs are the norm. It’s hard for someone to eat an entire plate of broccoli but the good news is that in an entire plate there is only something like 15 net carbs. Point being that if we are getting plenty of fruits and veggies high in fiber, our carb count will be low and it will be hard to over-eat on any of them.
If you don’t get anything else from this writing, here are a few take home points I would like to address that are a must for a healthy diet and lifestyle:

-Eat protein at EVERY meal
-Want 40-50% Fats, 30-40% Protein, 10-20% Carbohydrates
-If you choose to Zone, you want 30% Fat, 30% Protein, 40% Carbohydrates in Paleo foods
-Eat protein at EVERY meal
-Eat whole naturally occurring fruits and vegetables
-Eat 3-6 times a day accordingly
-Eat protein at EVERY meal
-Fat is your friend: your main energy source
-DO NOT eat processed foods, grains, cereals, breads, starches, sugar

If you would like to get geeky on some of this nutrition stuff here are a few links you can check out:

-www.robbwolf.com
-www.modernforager.com
-www.marksdailyapple.com
-www.theiflife.com

Other info:

“Good Calories, Bad Calories” – Gary Taubes
“Mastering the Zone” – Dr. Barry Sears
”The Paleo Diet” – Dr. Loren Cordain

References:

1. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/07newsreleases/obesity.htm
2. “Glycemic Index”, CrossFit Journal November 2002
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
5. “What if Bad Fat is Actually Good For You?” - http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&channel=health&category=heart.disease&conitem=a03ddd2eaab85110VgnVCM10000013281eac____
6. Robb Wolf