The 2012 Diet Challenge and Seminar

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

January 7th 2012 at 9am we will be holding our anuual diet challenge. We'll begin with our seminar where we'll outline what makes up a solid diet and give you tips and tricks to make almost anything work. We'll take measurements and weights from everyone that wants to participate and even pictures if you're up for it. After the seminar we'll do the challenge entry workout. It should last for about 2 hours so if you're ready to step up and make a drastic change to your body and performance, this is your jump off point. See you there!

Nutrition Spolight: WAM and CRAN

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

So you understand that to create a good meal you need 3 things; a protein from an animal, a carbohydrate from a vegetable, and a fat from a nut, seed, avocado, or olive. You know that you need to about a fist size piece of protein, a double fist of veggies, and a handful of fat. Using this formula can get you great results and with the right training, will get you down to low double digit body fat levels for men or the high teens for women; eventually though, to get draw dropping results, you’ll need to get everything completely dialed in if you’re not seeing progress. This means you’ll need to figure out how much you’re eating now, how much you may need to eat, and a plan to gradually step down in order to find your sweet spot.

WAM stands for weighing and measuring. It really is just a simple as being able to confidently say the following: “For dinner I had ___ grams of protein from ___ ounces of fish along with ___ amount of carbs from ___ and ___ cups of vegetables with ___ amount of fat from ___ nuts. The total amount of calories was ___.” Knowing your daily amount of calories and your protein and carbohydrate intake is crucial for a lot of people trying to get down in to single digit/ low teens of body fat levels for men/women. It can also be used to troubleshoot your diet if you’re progress/performance is suffering.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s sounds like A LOT of work. It is, especially if you are planning on making things more complicated than meat and vegetables. If you feel like it’s too much and you’re not sure if you can do it, stop reading and look at yourself in the mirror. If you can see blurry definition or if you can confidently say I am almost satisfied with my squat, press, Fran, Helen whatever time or weight, you may need to figure out how much of what you need and WAM is for you. If you are totally dissatisfied with your fitness level and feel like you have more than 5 pounds of fat to lose before you can see definition in your body, paying attention to portion sizes using your hands is more likely the better way to go. If that’s so, stop reading and do something relaxing or re read the paleo diet article and the first paragraph, you need much less attention.

First you need to figure out if you’re shooting more for performance or fat loss. For performance it’s a good idea to eat at your maintenance calories, fat loss will come through a calorie deficit from training. For fat loss you’ll want to eat at the upper end of your weight loss calories, you should be CrossFitting 4-6 times a week and have a long cardio session somewhere in the week, eat too low and progress will stop…hard. And what are those values associated with maintenance and weight loss? It’s going to vary between what your activity level is and is too in-depth for here but basic maintenance is about 15 calories per pound of body weight. If you dip too far down in daily calories, your fat loss will stop and your performance will dip down, hard and fast. This is where CRAN comes from; calorie restriction with adequate nutrition. You need just enough to keep everything going but not too much or your progress will stop. It will take time and practice but you’ll eventually find your way and your sweet spot.

From there you’ll need to break up your macronutrient levels based on your body type. It’s different for everybody and usually a person is a mix of two of them. They are called “somatypes” and it is usually an easy indicator of how well your body uses carbohydrates and mobilizes fat tissue. Your body type will dictate how much of which nutrients you get and what they’ll be.

After you’ve figured out how many calories you need daily, what percentage of calories you need from carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and then figured out how many grams you’ll need of each; it’s all leg work after that. I usually pick one or two vegetables to eat that week, one or two fruits, and maybe the days I’ll want oatmeal and just move those around. It makes things easier and takes the guess work out. I’ll use an internet resource to find out the quantity of carbohydrate of each vegetable and fruit and do a little math. Protein is pretty easy, most protein sources have 6-9 grams of protein in an ounce. I use 7.5 as an easy number and weigh my daily protein out and cut it up into quarters (I eat four times a day). I usually eat heavy carbs after my workout since that’s when my body tends to handle them best (trial and error works!) and I eat fat to fill in the blanks. It’s a lot of work but it’s well worth it in the end.

The diet seminar we have coming up (January 7^th at 9am) will go over all the things we just talked about plus we’ll crunch the numbers and come up with a sample meal. The big thing to take away from this is that there is a strategy to go with any goal, the punishment needs to fit the crime so to speak. If you have a lot of fat to burn, you need to focus more on quality. If you have a little body fat to lose you are obviously focusing more on quality, either that needs to be tightened up (90-100% compliance) or you need to focus on how much of that high quality food you’re eating. The end lesson is that all things are achievable, as long as your goals are within reach and your heart is completely in it!

Crossfit Ponte Vedra News and Events

The 2012 Diet Challenge and Seminar

Nutrition Spolight: WAM and CRAN