CrossFit Athletic Group

The idea from this post came from evesdropping on a conversation outside of the gym where a very fat dude with a Gatorade Zero in his hand was talking about cutting out red meat to help him lose weight. This poor bastard has unfortunately been misled on many accounts, but it got me thinking about Dr. Romanov and his emphasis on hierarchy when teaching Pose; if you don't know where you are on the hierarchy, making corrections will be very difficult.

This list reads from top to bottom, with top being the most important and bottom being the least important. The concept is that each layer needs to be taken care of before the layers below it are even considered. The target audience is the parents in the Champions Club and the surrounding ecosystem, not the kids. Of course, Dylan or Lulu's hierarchy would probably not be too different than their parents', but being involved in all the sports might skew things a bit.

Also, this is based on nothing other than my own observation. I would gess the general order of it is pretty accurate, but the finer rankings of 2 and 3, of 6 and 7, etc. would definitely be up for debate. Alsoalso, I'm not including sleep, stress, or community factors in here; that's a different list.

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1. Low carb - how low, exactly? Not sure, but you'll know you're in the right ballpark when you're seeing the changes you want. All longterm effective diets and lifestyles lead away from bread (any kind), grain, pasta, and sugar. Carbohydrates, in essence, tell your body to store things. Does your body look like it's been storing things?

2. Water or milk; that's it - no alcohol, pop, sports drinks, smoothies, ice cream that melted to the bottom of the bowl so you tip it over and sip the rest (which is basically what a smoothie is)... and I have suspicions about coffee or tea if it's been bought from a store. Drink things that came from the sky or a cow's tit.

3. Enough protein - Is "eggs for breakfast" singular or plural? A "chicken" salad or a mound of chicken on your salad? Protein, among other things, tells your body to release things - a simple way of making sure you are keeping your carbohydrate in check.

4. Enough/healthy fat - Are you wasting the egg yolk? Are you ordering the all white meat turkey sub? Are you drinking candy-ass skim milk? Do you add nuds and seeds with your meals? Fat does not make you fat, it makes you full. If you aren't hungry, you usually don't eat, plus controlling hunger goes a very long way towards the next point on the list

5. Timing - this is relevant in both relation to your activity (game, workout, race, etc.) or just your overall feeding window (fasting/time-restricted eating/eating at night). Arthur has recently shown what can happen if the timing is too soon; Cec has recently shown what can happen if it's too far away.

6. Sources of protein - Beef or birds? Salmon or tuna? There's definitely a difference, just probably not enough to offset the things above on the list, especially in the short-term. Hot dogs, sausage, lunchmeat, and hamburger patties from McDonalds are probably the least of your concerns. And for the record, the only way eating steak will lead to a heart attack is if the actual steak gets LODGED in the lining of your heart.

7. Sources of fruits or veggies - yes bananas and potatoes have more carbohydrates than blueberries and broccoli, but I will bet at least one Banet that nobody ever got fat because they ate too many potatoes or bananas. Also canned and frozen veggies are just fine.

8. Organic/grassfed - Was your ground beef been living a nice and wholesome life until it got murdered? Are your eggs from only the most prestigious chickens? Have your tomatoes been sprinkled with Tibetan Holy Water? Food is free in nature; when it's being sold I'm assuming there is something human-influenced involved in the process, regardless of what the label says.

9. Supplements - by definition, something is incomplete if supplementation is needed, diet included. They can make a difference in 3rd-wave adaptations and competitive situations. Pre-post workout stuff, fish oil, tumeric, Once-A-Day's, Iron, Vitamin-S, creatine are in this category, as well as candy bars.

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The first thing I initially wrote after the Timing point was "definitely a 1st-world problem here" but as I went up and down the list I figured that could be said for just about everything except for the Low Carb point (which says something about something). It helps me to remember how fortunate I am to be able to not only pick the exact food I want to eat, but also decide exactly when I want to eat it. That is a gift I take for granted all too often; scarfing down an entire Hot-N-Ready pizza can be seen as disrespectful when looking at it through that lens.

Lastly, I wrote this whole thing on Friday but waited till today to publish it, partly because a big part of me wants to switch points 1 & 2, but mostly because there was another sticking point I was trying to think around, and it sounds like this:

Me: "Listen dude, I don't know for sure but I really suspect dropping the alcohol would be a gamechanger for you"

Dude: "Alcohol isn't the problem, honestly. I don't drink."

Me: "How much did you drink last night at the Tigers game?"

Dude: "Well... I mean that was just a special occasion. I had two."

Me: "Did you drink last weekend at all?"

Dude: "Well, yeah, we went out to eat with friends. But I honestly don't drink much!"

Yeah, the whole frequency thing. How far in the past does your last ham sandwich have to be to say that you're a low carb eater? Does that Slupree after you son's baseball game mean you drink more than water or milk? Cec's soccer team had a nutritionist come in and give a talk about how one serving of alcohol can have an effect on your bloodstream for 5 days; whether he was trying to scare college girls out of drinking or not, the point is the effects of a bad nutrition choice lasts a lot longer than you may think, and probably disqualifies a lot of us from checking things off that hierarchy list.

Much like CrossFit, a lot of your ability can be judged based on your worst performances; the better your worst workouts get, the fitter you are. So are you as bad as your worst meal? Probably not, but you're probably closer to that than being as good as your best meal.

In other words, I still don't have an answer.