In the CrossFit environment, where intensity and frequency of exercise is so profound, proper nutrition can make or break an athlete. People are slowly discovering a better definition of health and nutrition. As a result, public opinion on fad and alternative dieting methods reflect these changes.

A good example of this progression is CrossFit’s definition of proper nutrition:

“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.” —Greg Glassman

Anyone new to CrossFit will probably give this recommendation a shot; more so from a health standpoint rather than to drive performance, strength, and athleticism. I tried following this advice, but the restrictive nature of this nutritional method proved too difficult for me and, after two months, I stopped caring for it.

Because grains, dairy, and nearly all starches are outlawed by CrossFit’s dietary dogma, we are forced to consume carbohydrates via a ‘little starch’ and vegetables. I’m not too sure how many of you have looked into the carbohydrate content of broccoli or asparagus, but for every 100g of each, there are 7g and 4g of carbs, respectively. I encourage you to measure out 100g of each vegetable and then assess how this paltry 7g and 4g correspond to your daily carbohydrate requirements. You would literally have to eat 500g broccoli for 35g of carbs alone, and 1kg of asparagus to get 40g of carbs. Not a fun diet to be delving into if you need fuel for strength and performance.

CrossFit’s Paleo Inflexibility

One of the leading researchers of the paleo diet, Rob Wolf, was initially involved in the original nutrition tours that CrossFit hosted. His research matched Greg Glassman’s ideas in nutrition and quickly became a go-to diet for anyone looking to accelerate their performance in CrossFit. Both believed that processed foods had no place in society and pressed athletes to adopt a whole-food based approach in order to reduce illness, disease, and other negative effects from modern day food and agriculture.

To a point, they’re right. Diabetes, hyperglycemia, hypertension, and other diseases are often a result of too much of the wrong food. However, when optimal performance and strength are desired, a diet such as paleo becomes much more irrelevant and other avenues for appropriate fueling must be explored.

I’m not really slamming paleo. I can certainly see the benefits of somebody using this diet, and I’m not here to debunk anything. I believe that this type of diet goes hand-in-hand with differing ethical viewpoints, such as vegetarianism and veganism, for example. I completely agree with Wolf’s statement that paleo and vegan diets are really rooted in the same viewpoints, yet are merely an oppositional stance on nutrition at each end of the spectrum—neither should be seen as the “be-all and end-all.”

The Benefits of Flexibility

Due to their desire for optimal performance, many athletes have swiftly moved from the paleo regimen to a more flexible approach. This type of diet is something I prescribe in the form of our flexible dieting program. We set amounts of daily carbs, protein, and fats. More and more people are becoming aware of the inefficiencies of low-carbohydrate diets, and it’s becoming more accepted (and proven) that carbohydrates are indeed necessary for growth, recovery, and performance.

Clearly, everyone is different, and we have all developed our own tolerances to different foods and viewpoints, so why blindly accept that a trendy diet is the best method for you? I’m not preaching to the masses about flexible dieting, but I do want to highlight the fact that there is more than one diet for your goals. It’s a question of what your goals are, and what eating habits you want to live by.

Embrace Your Carbs

Our bodies are a product of science, and I’m a scientist by education, past profession, and self-interest. If you’ve read my past articles, you may have seen my pieces on the energy systems of the human body. It has been proven that the body reacts and uses carbohydrates, fats, and protein for fueling every process.

If you have any interest in your sporting potential or the ability to squeeze every ounce of fuel and progress from your discipline, then adequate fueling is a necessity. I challenge you to eat 1kg of asparagus and look at me with a happy, smiling face. From a strength and performance perspective, there are only so many carbohydrates you can get from your diet without tapping into easier options like oats, grains, starches, and dairy choices.

There are numerous ways to live life with healthy nutrition, but you need to decide what you want to get from your nutrition. Keep in mind that carbohydrates are always king for progress, and eating all the asparagus you can get your hands on won’t cut it.

The post The Benefits of Flexible Dieting appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Once on our mission, we often see some quick progress within the first few weeks of creating a calorie deficit. But when you can’t remove yourself emotionally from the small picture, things start to fall apart. You start to focus more on “why the hell did the scale go up this week?” Things become a bit frustrating, even when we smashed the nutrition this week.

I’m here to convince you that fat loss is never (rarely) linear. This is what you want fat loss to look like:

This is what it actually looks like:

The Progression Isn’t Linear

My cut started on the 17th of March, and you can see increases and decreases in that graph. It’s definitely linear over time, but not week-in week-out.

There’s so much more to weight loss than just the number on the scale, and there’s a ton of other factors in play. We’ve become so obsessed about reading into the scale that when it goes against our wishes we become frustrated, and maybe give up. We need to stop using the scale as our only frame of reference.

When you start to look at biofeedback mechanisms such as hunger, how your workouts feel, your energy levels, your sleep, and really going deep into how your body is feeling and reacting, you begin to realize that the big picture is the best way to assess if what we’re doing is working. When you read the number on the scale, you’re analyzing only one variable. In fact, there’s tens if not hundreds of variables at play, so focus on the bigger picture is crucial.

There Are Ways to Smash Plateaus

Don’t get me wrong, plateaus are going to happen. It’s your body’s way of maintaining balance, and it is a survival mechanism to ensure you don’t do yourself any harm. Sudden plateaus can actually be a sign that your body is in a healthy state. It’s working healthily, changing your body mechanics to ensure you’re not losing weight too fast or hard, and protecting you in the process. Every cloud has a silver lining right?

There are ways to smash those plateaus and to ensure we keep downward progress of losing weight or getting lean. We just have to play the game that is our body—a complex system that wants you to hold as much energy reserves as possible.

Plateau Destroyer #1: Eat More

Yep you heard me, eat more.

Metabolic adaptation plays a huge role in your hormone output, and ultimately, your body’s ability to burn fat or lose weight. When you sit in a calorie deficit for a considerable time, your body wants to fight for survival. Hormone output is lowered, body mechanisms slow down (such as fat loss), and energy output is lowered. This is all in order to preserve as much energy as possible in the lower-calorie state.

Sadly, further lowering calories while your body is in this survival state will only accentuate this plateau, and possibly even damage your metabolism in the long run, hindering your pursuit of body composition goals. Instead, we have to manipulate our metabolism through eating more food. Yes, more! We do this with a controlled caloric increase.

The best approach, and my favorite method to increase calories for an individual like this, is through a structured re-feed. By definition, a re-feed is an increase in calories for one 24-hour period in order to bring your current calorie consumption close to maintenance, if not over. Typically this is achieved using an increase of 50-100g of carbs (200-400 calories).

This increase results in increased hunger throughout the day, increase in body temperature in the night and day, or can result in increases in hunger the following day. Through these biofeedback mechanisms being activated, and we know that metabolic function has returned to a normal healthy state.

There are “cheat meals” you can use to have a similar effect, but in my experience, they can often result in huge calorie gains because they’re not very structured. You’ll provide a metabolic spike, but I always advise a controlled increase from a weekly structured re-feed.

Plateau Destroyer #2: Control Volume of Training

The variety of issues that arise from under-fueling your body, surprisingly, can also arise from over-training in your sport. Hormone issues, especially adrenal issues, and various other symptoms are a more and more common sight in gym-goers and clean eating fans every day.

Little do they know that going to the gym exhausted is doing nothing beneficial for them, and that badge of honor they think they wear should be stripped off. You’d be much better served waiting to get over exhaustion before attempting to wear your body down through training.

I know it’s hard to keep up with training, but recovery is a huge part of the process. By wearing your body into the ground day-in and day-out without recovery, you’re also putting severe fatigue onto your adrenal gland, ultimately affecting your hormone output. This reduction in hormone production only ends up damaging your metabolism, ruining your hormones, and affecting your desired physique.

Plateau Destroyer #3: Know Your Body

It might sound really cheesy, but by far the best and easiest change to make is to simply listen to your body by monitoring a few body hints.

Try and dial in your hunger recognition and learn what it feels like to actually need food, as opposed to boredom or other triggers. Don’t let your blood sugar dip beyond healthy levels, but just learn to realize when you’re hungry or full. By being aware of this biofeedback mechanism, you learn when you need more food and can react appropriately. Hunger is a sign of a healthy metabolism, so don’t ignore it.

The same goes for monitoring your sleep. Sleep quality is a brilliant indicator of recovery. When we sleep, we want cortisol to be low, and then high when we wake up (cortisol assists us in waking up). When we overtrain, we increase the amount of cortisol hormone in our body and, as a result, will sleep poorly. Having a decent quality of sleep is a sign of good recovery and good hormone output.

Using feedback mechanisms like these allow you to assess whether what you’re doing in your nutrition or training is helping or hindering.

The Whole Food Factor

One other recommendation would be to really understand what foods you’re eating and how they’re affecting your body too. If you’re training and not eating so much whole food, you won’t be reaping as many benefits as on a whole food diet. The type of food you’re eating can affect your physique and water retention, especially if you react badly to gluten, dairy, or other modern-day allergens. Bloating and decreases in performance can be affected by such foods, so a food test would be beneficial to anyone having issues with digestion or constant bloating.

Please, Be Patient

Overall, there’s many reasons why you may not be progressing as you like in your fat loss endeavors, but I’m here to encourage you that fat loss is rarely linear and that patience is the route to success.

When patience fails you, it’s worth assessing whether you’re overtraining or under-fueling. A few tactics exist to shift those plateaus, like cheat days or re-feed days, but really getting to know your body, and learning how to react accordingly, will help you understand what’s keeping you from progressing.

Use a few of these tactics and you should see some progress through your plateaus. Be patient, but keep smashing those goals. Most importantly, keep your eye on what’s happening with your body. It’s complex, but gives you a ton of information.

The post Get Past the Dreaded Fat Loss Plateau appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It’s a funny time of year, if you’re a CrossFitter. All day Thursday (or Friday, depending on where you live) is filled with trepidation and a bit of a cold sweat, wondering what will be in store for us in the next Open workout.

The CrossFit Open is five weeks of worldwide competition, where every CrossFit athlete in the world can compete in the same workout. For some, it will be an effort to rank high enough to be invited to Regionals, and if you’re good enough, to go to the Games. But for most of the other half million or so participants, it’s an opportunity to gauge yourself and your fitness against the world.

Even if you’re not obsessively refreshing the Leaderboard for the next month like the rest of us, there’s value to be gained from what I’m about to say. There’s a plethora of advice out there about how to prepare for the Open, and no small amount of it is geared toward nutrition. A central theme of this advice is that it’s time to start eating clean. To be ready for the Open, it seems, you must get rid of alcohol and junk food, and immediately begin eating only whole foods. Maybe even go strict paleo.

But if you aren’t already doing those things, now is not the time to make wholesale changes to your diet. Here’s why.

Unintended Consequences

When most people start to “eat clean,” they tend to avoid starchy foods, and switch to leaner, less carb-dense choices like vegetables and sweet potatoes. The weekly pizza nights are out, and high-calorie evening snacks are replaced with celery sticks.

This is a brilliant strategy for weight loss, but why is that? Because you’ve suddenly created a huge calorie deficit. A deficit is fine if our goal is improved body composition, but it comes at the expense of optimal performance, recovery, and gains in strength. Does that sound like a winning strategy for the Open?

And these unintended consequences hold true for people in any training environment, as well. If you’re happy to just lose weight and not worry so much about strength and performance, a calorie deficit is the place to be. But if you want to recover optimally and grow muscle, the opposite is true. If your training regimen requires high performance, suddenly removing the easiest and most efficient sources of energy (grains, starches, and other carbs) isn’t going to help you.

Competition Nutrition

For CrossFit athletes, the start of the Open brings with it a switch from training to competing. Even if you harbor no illusions of going to the Games, doing an Open workout is a lot more competitive than the daily WOD you do every other time of year. You’re being judged by one person, and all your mates are around you doing the same. Spectators are watching you and shouting your name. It all adds up to an atmosphere that takes over, and you naturally push to 100%.

At the end of it, our muscles and central nervous system are crushed by the sudden increase in intensity, and the unusual challenges brought by most Open workouts. We find ourselves getting intimately familiar with our little patch of the gym floor. At this point, your body is destroyed, and it desperately needs calories (and carbs) to rebuild. Because after all, next week you have to do it all again.

Simply put, recovery and performance do not happen in a calorie deficit. Carbs are a necessary part of recovery; vital to restore blood sugar and drive nutrients to our muscles. Without carbs, we limit the amount of glucose available for our workouts, and instead tap into less efficient fuel sources, such as body fat and muscle protein.

This isn’t to say you should throw caution to the wind and eat all the junk food you like before the clock starts! What I am saying is that a Snickers before bed might just be the few additional carbs you need to perform your best the next day. Eating clean has a time and a place, and most times of year it’s fine to think twice about that bowl of ice cream. But during the Open is not that time.

Fuel For Your Goal

The perfect time to clean up your diet and address your body composition was some time after last year’s Open. Then, all those carbs you piled on through the holidays would have been part of a natural building phase for this year’s Open. But if you’ve waited until now to try and go paleo, you may as well wait a few more weeks until you’re out of competition again.

(Source: J Perez Imagery>)

It is absolutely desirable to fuel your competition with clean, whole foods. But the transition to a stricter diet almost always comes with an unintentional decrease in calories, and that means you won’t be giving your body the fuel it needs to perform these next few weeks. Keep an eye on your goals, and realistically assess whether you’re in a calorie surplus or a deficit. You can’t have it both ways; either you’re fueling for strength and performance, or you’re cutting for body composition and weight loss.

It’s your choice. So what do you say, want to charge up for the next Open workout?

Need to know how to refuel?

Trio of Post Workout Protein Smoothies

The post Competitors: Don’t Start Eating Clean for the CrossFit Open Now appeared first on Breaking Muscle.