Rest Day 12/25/11
1 mile Run; 5 min rest
For Time: 100 Burpees; 5 min rest
For Time: 100 Air Squats; 5 min rest
For Time: 100 Sit Ups; 5 min rest
CrossFit 718 January Paleo Challenge!
Would you like to look better and feel stronger? Now’s the time to get serious about what you put into your body. Everything that goes in has a drastic effect on how you perform both in the gym, and in real life. So isn’t it about time you started taking it seriously?
Starting on January 1st, 2012, we challenge you, our athletes, to go one entire month with nothing but CLEAN eating. What do we mean by this? We mean one month of no bread, rice, grains, legumes, dairy, wheat, sugar, alcohol, gluten, or potatoes. That’s right, NONE of those things are good for you. What will you eat? Lots of meat and fish, nuts and seeds, vegetables and fruits.
Why can’t I eat these things?
Short answer? They aren’t good for you. Slightly longer answer? All of the things listed above are dietary changes that have come into effect within the past few thousand years. While they may contain some good things that you want to eat, they also contain some things that aren’t compatible with our biology. Gluten, lectins, sugar, and protease inhibitors are just some of the things that may be harmful to your body. What can happen? Auto-immune, leaky gut, increased LDL cholesterol, decreased HDL cholesterol, high blood glucose levels, and increased triglycerides are just some of the things that may already be happening to you because of the food that you eat.
But doesn’t meat contain a lot of fat? Isn’t that bad?
Yes it contains a lot of fat, but no, that isn’t bad. One of the biggest fallacies of the past 50 years in the US is that fat is what makes you fat, and what causes heart disease and stroke. For decades now, the government and the doctors have been preaching a high carb, low fat diet to make people healthy. It has worked in that most people are scared of fat, yet over 2/3 of the country is overweight or obese. And we’ve been told that gaining weight as we get older is natural. How many 50-60 year olds are in good shape eating the standard american diet? Fat is not the evil monster you may think it is. There should be more fat in your diet than carbs. Saturated fat has also gotten an extremely bad wrap, and yet they fail again and again to prove in studies that it actually is bad for you. I urge you to look it up.
Don’t I NEED carbs to live?
Again, short answer is no. Even if you stopped eating carbohydrates altogether, your body has ways of creating the glucose that your brain needs to survive, and your body can run on alternate fuel sources almost BETTER than glucose when there isn’t any present. That being said, am I recommending that you stop eating carbs all together? Not at all. Eat as many veggies as you want to, and chow down on some fruit when you get that sweet tooth. You’ll get plenty of carbs that way, and as CrossFitters, you’ll definitely need them. We work out hard, and so we do need to eat our sweet potatoes and carrots.
But didn’t our Paleo ancestors live short and painful lives?
The average age of our caveman ancestors was shorter, yes. However when people talk about “average lifespan”, they don’t take into account the fact that the infant mortality rate was so high. If you remove those that die in their first year of life, then the average goes up significantly. And if you take into account that they didn’t have medicines or antibiotics, then you have a much clearer picture of what was going on. Keeping in mind too that the common diseases of today, heart disease, cancers, things like that, just weren’t an issue for them. The other thing to keep in mind here, is that we aren’t trying to literally eat the exact same diet that they ate. That would be impossible. The animals that they ate have evolved or become extinct, we could only eat seasonal veggies and fruits, and none of that is possible anymore. The point of this diet is to take certain principles and use them to generate hypotheses, to see if we can’t eat a healthier diet and live a stronger and longer life.
So take this challenge with us. We’re sure that you’ll feel better, lose plenty of weight if that’s your goal, recover from workouts faster, be able to train harder, lift stronger, and just generally look better and feel better about yourself. Come to our Paleo Challenge Meeting on Friday, December 30th at 8pm at the box and we’ll outline just what’s happening and how you can take part. Be prepared to be a better you in the new year!
Absolutely, new year approaching, new start so why not change your life forever this year and extend your prospects too by adopting a real-food stone age style evolutionary diet.
Merry Christmas Everyone. I hope you are all enjoying a fun day 🙂
See you tomorrow.
MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone! I hope everybody has had a fantastic weekend. 2011 has been incredible and Crossfit 718 is a huge reason why. Excited to see what we can do in 2012.
Merry Christmas! Todays workout is as follows 21-15-9 Beer/ sweet potato casserole/ Cupcakes