Nutrition

Eating – by William Walshe

If I was to embark on the entire nutritional odyssey all over again, this is what I’d do and the order I’d do it in.

Essentially, what I’m outlining here is an extreme summary of the most important things I’ve learned from the CrossFit Nutrition Forums and Robb Wolf’s blog, with the ordering reflecting what I’ve personally found to have the biggest impact on me. Depending on where you’re starting from and where you want to end up, some of this stuff may be more or less important to you.

I’ve attempted to structure this so that each level builds progressively on the one before it (though this gets pretty murky towards the end).I’d recommend taking some time to get used to each one and making sure it’s habitual before moving on to the next.

How long it takes you to implement these changes will depend on the complex interaction between how much you fear change and how badly you want to improve your health and performance. Whether this is a week, a month or six months is largely unimportant. The important thing is to improve your diet over time and gradually move up the hierarchy.

Level 1 – Add some good stuff to your diet

Keep eating whatever other crap you want, but add in some vegetables, fruit, nuts and meat. Replace the occasional mars bar with a salad here, an apple and a handful of almonds there. Baby steps.

Level 2 – Ditch some of the heavily processed crap

At the very least remove sugar from your diet. Sugar is not food, and unrestricted consumption of it will eventually kill you. The only variable is how long this will take.

Level 3 – Eat Protein

Every meal, eat something that used to run, swim or fly. Or some eggs. Alternatively, get used to being hungrier than necessary and not recovering from exercise very well. If you’re a vegetarian…I’m sorry.

Level 4 – Ditch ALL the heavily processed crap

Move towards not eating anything that your grandmother would not recognise as food. Food does not come from boxes. Food comes from fields, trees and the ocean.

Be especially wary of anything being sold as “health food”. The balance of probability is that it isn’t healthy. Real health food has words like “beef” and “broccoli” on it.

Level 5 – Stop being such a damn alcoholic

This one is tricky; if you quit drinking in Ireland you pretty much quit having a social life. This is unacceptable, but so is getting smashed drunk 3-4 nights per week. A good fecking session once or twice a month is probably OK.

Just don’t do that thing where people try to use junk food as a hangover cure, doesn’t work.

Level 6- Prepare all your own food

If you made it, you know exactly what’s in it. No more excuses for crap slipping into your diet. If it has a food label, it’s probably not food anyway.

Level 7 – Go Paleo

Ditch ALL the grains, ditch the legumes, ditch the potatoes, ditch the dairy produce. Your carb sources are fruit and vegetables ONLY.

Level 8 – Enter The Zone

3 meals and 2 snacks per day. A meal is a palm-sized portion of protein, twice that amount of veg, a piece of fruit and a handful of nuts. A snack is about half that much.

Level 9 – Take fish oil

Lots of fish oil. This stuff is just ridiculously good for you.

Get a decent brand like Carlsons and start off with 5ml per day. Add another 5mls every 2 days until your digestive system informs you that you’ve had too much. You’ll know when this happens.

Level 10 – Weigh and measure your zone food

No, this doesn’t qualify you as having an eating disorder. It means you give enough of a crap about your health and performance to sacrifice an additional 38 seconds when preparing a meal. Yes, it’s inconvenient, but so is taking 1 minute longer than you have to to complete Fran.

Level 11 – Keep a food journal

Only had one cheat meal in the last month? Prove it!

Level 12 – Mess around with fancy stuff.

Congratulations, you now officially have a solid handle on the basics of feeding yourself and it’s time to start experimenting. Mess with your protein/carb ratios on the zone to see where you feel best. Find out if you have any food allergies. Do a nightshade elimination diet and see if you’re sensitive. Reintroduce some non-Paleo foods and see what happens. Experiment with intermittent fasting. Try a cylcic-low-carb approach for a while. Try a couple of the more sensible supplements (ZMA, multivitamin, probiotics, digestive enzymes, creatine etc) and see what happens. Tinker.

Final step – Remind yourself why you do all this

Any long time zoner will tell you what happens when you weigh and measure paleo foods for a couple of weeks, then leap off the wagon and wash down a pizza with a litre or 2 of coke. In short: the body rebels.

The metabolic derangement that the average person accepts as normality feels indistinguishable from illness to someone who has experienced health. Make a full investigation of both sides of the fence, and decide which one you prefer.

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