Dieting

When I say “Diet”, most people imagine less fat and very little food.  For so long, the mainstream version of dieting has been built around being skinny.  Dieting for skinny is pretty simple- don’t eat very much.   A diet in CrossFit is about health, and many things follow with health to include a healthy body weight, more energy, higher performance, and better overall vitals like blood pressure, cholesterol and many others.  This is much more complex than getting skinny and can definitely not be achieved by starving yourself.  It is substance over style dieting.

In general, we consider a diet to be the kinds of food that a person habitually eats.  Everyone has a diet.  Some diets are good, some diets suck.  When we do a diet challenge, we are asking you to change the kinds of food you habitually eat for, at least, the duration of the challenge.  In addition, we hope, and often see, that people start to habitually eat better.

The Old School Diet Challenge that we are currently hosting focuses on food quality.  Basically, we want our participants, for and entire month, to make BEST CHOICES.  Best choices include eating lean protein sources, healthy fats and eating vegetables and fruit as your source of carbohydrates.  The guidelines for this diet are structured to have both negative points for eating restricted foods and positive points for eating recommended foods.   The only restriction in volume of food comes in the form of negative points for too many servings of fruit as excessive sugar is bad for you even if it comes from a natural source.

What we want for you from a diet challenge is to change what you habitually eat.  We don’t want you to starve or only eat meat.  We certainly do not want you to cut out all the fat.  What we want is for you to eat nutrient dense whole foods and nothing else.  In addition, we want you to find new, nutrient dense whole foods that you love to eat, because once the challenge is over, your good diet should not be.

Keep in mind that we are trying to change your diet (what you habitually eat) because that is the road to excellent health and all of its benefits.