Clean Eating August and Onwards

By DJ Dave

I’m sure it is not just me who has noticed that after such strong interest in Clean Eating July, the community has fallen pretty quiet on the nutrition front. I am very keen to know how people are going with their nutrition – of those who participated in Clean Eating July, have you kept it up or was it just a month long experiment?

I guess the point of this post is purely to try and spark some conversation and feedback on people’s experiences of Clean Eating July. I will first point out that for me nutrition has very much been a work in progress, and I understand that everyone’s experiences and journeys will be different.
I will start by telling you about my experience. When I started the month long challenge I bought in at the ‘advanced’ level, however I was still eating muesli every day for breakfast. Had I been more honest with myself, I would have bought in at the beginner level, eliminating all grains and sugars from my diet. 12 days into the challenge I finally gave up my muesli breakfast, and started the month long challenge again on that day. I can now claim to have ‘clean’ eating and am now looking to refine and fine tune my diet. Giving up muesli (nutritional ‘goat’) was actually really easy; one day I just stopped. So how did this happen and why haven’t I fallen back into my old ways?

It started with daily readings of the posts on Primal Island, seeing how well everyone else was doing in achieving their goals - they can all do it so why can’t I! I found Cam’s post particularly useful for two major reasons – Cam’s attitude towards temptations, and the all-important food diary. If you missed Cam’s blog on temptations I definitely recommend reading it http://primalislandtas.blogspot.com/2011/07/temptations.html

Food Diary
I will be the first to admit that I didn’t like the idea of a food diary. It sounded like something that would be pointless and take up lots of time – I was wrong. It takes me under 2 minutes to fill out my total daily food intake. It is a very powerful tool; I can easily see how much my diet has improved over the past two months and by writing it all down, I am now being accountable for my food intake. Drummond often talks about the importance of being accountable as an athlete, for example recording your max efforts on strength days in order to chart improvement. If you are serious about your nutrition, or you are simply curious, there is no easier way to see what’s going on than to keep a food diary. I use excel for my food diary. Use your iphone, use your computer, get a pen and notepad. Find something that works for you, the options are endless.

Temptations
I think that Cam has covered off on temptations really well, so I’ll throw something else into the mix; alternatives. If you have alternatives for temptations, you will not succumb to them. Plain and simple. Have a quick think about your nutritional goats and other temptations, and think of an alternative for each one. If it helps you, write them down.

Strategies
It takes me an hour and a half on a Sunday to set up clean eating for the whole week. I will make a slow cooked beef stew/curry, a batch of omelette muffins, scotch eggs, and a huge frittata. Doing this covers all breakfast and lunches, and usually 3 dinners. With dinner I will always have some steamed veggies and or salad (both in most cases) and if there are leftovers they go in my lunches. It works really well for me because the ingredients of the above mentioned food are all very cheap and cooking in bulk is very economical. One thing I noticed when moving toward clean eating was that it is more expensive then my old groceries routine – I don’t think anyone will contest that real food is more expensive than processed food. There are many ways to keep costs down however, such as slow cooking cuts of meat such as gravy beef (delicious and cheap) rather than buying expensive cuts all the time, cooking in bulk and sticking things in the fridge, and looking out for specials! Keep an open mind and experiment with recipes: make eating fun and rewarding – I tried kangaroo for the first time last week - $4.88 for 540gm of steak – why have I not tried this sooner?

This is a great starting point to find primal recipes http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-recipes/ everything I’ve cooked from here has been delicious and the list of recipes is sure to help you think of your own creations. One thing I look forward to each day with great anticipation is seeing what the meal of the day link is on the CF42 site! I am not suggesting people follow my strategy – what works for me won’t necessarily work for you. The point of writing down my strategy is simply to show that a little bit of forward thinking will really help your clean eating journey, and will help you from falling into those ‘temptations’ tough spots.

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

Performance… The all-important performance.
I have noticed some big improvements in performance through clean eating. I don’t ever feel ‘heavy’ or ‘slow’ after eating. I am sleeping much better than I was, I find it easy to get to sleep and when I wake up I feel instantly ready to train (I train at the 6:15AM sessions). I used to have ‘off days’ quite regularly, where I would get to training and feel like I had nothing to give, no intensity to find. I have not had an ‘off day’ in the last month. I am lifting heavier and can hold intensity for longer. My recovery is also a lot better. I am not feeling nearly as fatigued by the WODs as I used to, and I seem to have a lot more energy, physical and mental. I think that for me, the most pronounced and obvious change from switching to clean eating has been in the recovery phase of training.

Drummond, Anna and Russell have given us all the resources and support we need on our journey to clean eating through literature, discussion, lectures, websites, links and one on one support. I definitely recommend you use what is around you and available to you – if you have a question about nutrition ask it! If you want help or recommendations with recipes post on the blog! We are really lucky as a community to have coaches of this calibre who really want to see us gain the best possible results with our overall health and wellbeing.

The principles of paleo nutrition will stay with me for life, I have been completely converted. I would love to hear from others on how their experiences with clean eating may or may not have affected their training in lives in general. What has worked for you? What have your challenges been?
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I am simply trying to gain some feedback from other athletes on their clean eating experience. It would also be great to have any feedback the coaches may have on whether they have noticed a change in the performance of athletes during their clean eating trial.