Clean eating in tough spots!

By Razor.

Anna asked me to create an article for the primal blog, so I’ve given this whole ‘writing’ thing a shot and managed to come up with what you are hopefully about to read. My article focuses on ‘primal eating in the bush’, but the real focus of the article is about how clean eating can be done anywhere at anytime!

I have loved clean eating July so far! However, as I started thinking about the months ahead and the coming bushwalking season, I started to wonder how I would cope. Whilst thinking about bushwalking, I started to consider what I would normally eat, out in the rugged wilderness of Tasmania. The following menu can be classified as a pretty average day for out in the bush;

Breakfast:
Porridge, huge amounts! With a few big lumps of brown sugar, (got to have all of those carbs if I’m going to get through the day right?) Coffee x2

Snack:
Mixed nuts with chocolate, lollies, dried fruit and muesli bars x3

Lunch:
Crackers with peanut butter, nuttella and wraps

Dinner:
Instant creamy pasta meals

Dessert:
Biscuits with a hot chocolate

Besides the coffee, I don’t think this list contains anything that even slightly resembles ‘clean eating’. So after a few minutes of brain storming, I came up with a new menu for the bushwalking trips I plan to do in the future. This is my new ‘clean’ bushwalking menu;

Breakfast:
Breakfast was the hardest one to think of, as I needed something that would be light and easy to carry. After a while I came up with the idea of carrying eggs, pre cracked into a zip lock bag which I could fry up with a huge lump of butter! This worked out well, I carried around the eggs, pre cracked, in a double zip locked bag in my back pack for a day and it was fine. This breakfast only weighed 200 grams which is lighter than the amount of porridge I would normally take so I was pretty confident I could take eggs for breakfast for a 3-5 day trip with no worries. Coffee - never leave home without it!

Snacks:
I could do the easy thing and say nuts, lots of them, but that would be boring. So I thought I would try thinking of a few different clean eating snack ideas. The best one was beef jerky, light, easy, salty, (good for rehydration after a long summers day) and yummy! Carrot sticks with almond butter is another good option, (actually stole that from Tans post! cheers Tan!) Carrots last ages and don’t get crushed. Another great snack was the small 100 mil long life containers of cream, they weigh little, last ages and take up about the same space as a couple of muesli bars.

Lunch:
For lunch I decided on a big block of cheese and tuna packets. They make tuna in these little sealed packets which is great for bushwalking as you don’t have to carry around the heavy tin. Cheese last ages, has lots of fat in it and is uber yummy! I also put in an avocado for the first day for a bit of variety. An assortment of meat can also be taken, liver paste and kabana will last for a long time in your pack, and they will also insure you don’t go crazy eating just cheese!

Dinner:
Dinner was the easiest. If you have a dehydrator or a friend that has one you can simply make any meal and shrink it down to size! I find bolognaise type sauces work the best, or curries. This is super easy, light and doesn’t take too long to heat up on a MSR stove. The variety of food that can be dehydrated is endless!

Dessert:
These days I would probably go without dessert, but I’ve included one just for the sake of anyone else out there who wants a dessert of some kind! Ash had the great idea of mixing double thickened cream with a hazelnut spread, (as you can see I love using the ideas of other people!) this makes an ice cream type paste which is apparently very nice. Paleo cookies are also easy to make, just look them up on Google, they usually include almond meal, coconut, milk, cocoa and eggs.

And there you have it! That’s my idea of ‘clean eating for bush walking’, light, easy and very simple. I hope this little article has shown you that you can do clean eating anywhere. All you need to do is write down your ideas and plan ahead. This doesn’t just apply for bushwalking, think about that trip up to Launceston, that business meeting where you know there will be 100 biscuits but not a steak in sight! As long as you think outside the box, (except for Drum, AS and Russ who can only think in the box, hehe) and write down your ideas you will be amazed at just how easy it is!

R'xd Inactivity

By Sandy

We eat and move aiming to better our bodies and lives for functionality based on principles of evolutionary adaptation. This is an ideal that appeals to me greatly given my background. However there is a aspect to my life I feel is very unhealthy and not actively or even passively pursued in terms of improvement. I feel I may also be in the majority of Crossfitters and active people as a whole.

This aspect is sleep. Sleep has been shown to be unnecessary for life. We can live without it but are we healthy without it (or more relevant) with inadequate amounts of it? How much sleep do we need - should it be a low carb, grass fed, unprocessed sleep just enough to sustain exercise or do we need as much as we can get. Diurnal rhythms, cortisol levels as well as in-numerous biochemical mood modulators such as serotonin, dopamine etc affect and are affected by levels of sleep. Interestingly enough many of the mood modulators (happy reward chemicals) are seen in very similar circumstance in food consumption. My mind/body will reward me for the deep fried mars bar dagwood dog super combo due to an evolutionary driven chemical push for survival in terms of topping up with such a potent (impotent) form of energy..

Our bodies/mind reward sleep or more accurately punish lack of it. Is this similar to satiety with food intake and should there be sleep/exercise performance associations similar to diet/performance that are encouraged at Crossfit (if they aren't already).

If concentration and co ordination have been shown to be significantly affected by it then why is it that I won't eat a little bit of rice but sleep on average 5 hours a night and wonder why I am always tired???

I would like to find out more on the effects of sleep and its influences on exercise performance and well being. I find this particularly interesting given that my day (and most of the night) time job is putting people to sleep. I should treat myself and be off.

Old Dog...New Tricks

Can a person redesign his approach to nutrition after being indoctrinated by ‘ well intentioned research’ for so many years?

That is the question I continually asked myself when I started Crossfit.

You see I come from a nutrition background where carbohydrates rule and to perform faster and better all you needed to do was is improve your eating

My breakfast consisted of 8 weetbix, lite milk, honey and fruit (the breakfast of champions). Lunch was usually a hot meal of stir fry chicken and vegetables and dinner was something light. In between if I was hungry I ate an abundance of fruit. This was my staple diet. I was under the assumption I was doing just great. After all this is what I was taught (and in fact had researched) to eat.

Life did not get better than this, pre and post workouts were pasta (tomato based of course) and plenty of fish for Omega 3’s.

No bad food, I have never opted for take away meals and don’t over indulge in chocolates or biscuits etc. Having said that if there was chocolate in the house I would eat every last piece! Yummy.

Crossfit and coffee go hand in hand and if attending I usually had a skinny cappuccino, which amused Anna and DW no end. (Whatever guys, have you seen my six pack - I am living the dream!)

Anna was always on to me to eat correctly. Why I thought? My philosophy is to stand naked in front of a mirror and if you are happy with what you see, then continue on your way or change it. It’s not rocket science, is it? Why would I need to change? After all I am a decent CrossFitter posting some good times. For example Diane 2.59, Grace 2.57 , Elizabeth 7.22. Remember I am 50 years old. So why change?

Ok, I get the chance to qualify for the 2011 Games and want an edge. My wife thought I was crazy when I came home and opted for bacon and eggs and advised her I was going Paleo.

For breakfast now its 6 pieces of bacon, 6 eggs , tomatoes and avocado, full cream milk coffee, lunch is steak and vegetables in coconut cream and dinner the same. I only eat real food. But to store Glycogen into my liver quickly I use fruit as my sugar for energy. My body loves this and I now recognise, demands it.

How has it improved my life? Well it took about 2 months to convert and get it right. The biggest improvement I have seen and what pleases me the most are that my times are way better. For example, Diane 2.43, Elizabeth 6.20 and although I haven’t done Grace yet I did get 21 reps of clean and Jerk 60kg in 1.30. Yes, I believe there is more to come. I am off to compete in the World Games next week and fingers crossed I will see good and hopefully even better results.

So at 50 you can teach old dogs new tricks. I now preach the gospel to everyone and anyone. I strongly encourage you to improve your health and well being by adopting this eating plan

Thanks to Anna and DW for showing me the way, at times I am sure they thought, he is never gonna change (they are still working on the skins!!!)

A Menu for weight loss?

By John

The idea that it's not just the calories that matter in weight gain and loss but the foods that we eat is starting to break into the mainstream.

On the 11 July 2011 Radio Nationals Health Report ran a segment on a recently published study on the long term effects of a variety of foods and lifestyle factors on weight gain.

Dr Norman Swan interviewed Associate Professor Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist from the Harvard Medical School in Boston who ran the study.

The US based study followed tens of thousands of people over many years. They looked at changes in diet, changes in lifestyle habits, changes in physical activity, and so on, and how that related to weight gain or loss every couple of years.

They found that some foods were positively associated with weight gain; some were neutral, and some were negatively associated, that is: the more you ate the greater the weight loss.

It turns out that any kind of starch or refined complex carbohydrate such as sugar was associated with weight gain, something that the Paleo community has known for a long time.

Also red meat (processed or unprocessed) was also associated with weight gain. There was no information on the origin of the meat (beef?, lamb?, etc - but being the US, I would guess most likely to be beef) or its quality (grass or grain fed).

They found that dairy (whole fat milk and cheese) were neutral with respect to weight gain despite their fat content and that foods that have higher fat content, like nuts, were associated with fat loss.

The interview tends to blip over the topic of fats and concentrates on the glycemic index and glycemic load of carbohydrates as well as the positive effects of higher activity levels and adequate sleep. Being a cardiologist, Prof Mozaffarian sticks to the orthodox view on heart disease, cholesterol, and saturated fats - it's so ingrained he doesn't even state it explicitly, it's just implied that it's bad for you.

At this stage the cognitive dissonance kicks in and Dr Swan praises the low GI carbs as a good dietary approach.

The bottom line message is at least heading in the right direction:"...avoid processed refined foods and eat things like fruits and vegetables, wholegrains, nuts and yoghurt and think about the type of carbohydrates that you eat and be active...".

The Paleo/Low Carb community has a differing view on fats and grains but the evidence against refined carbohydrates and starchy foods is clearly impinging on the mainstream. Unfortunately, it may still take many more years before mainstream nutritional advice and public policy start to shift.

Unfortunately, anyone listening to the segment is still likely to come away from it just thinking "low GI is the way.”

The full paper in the New England Journal of Medicine is unfortunately behind a paywall as it would be interesting to see the detail. As Andy Gibbons reminded us at the Nutrition talk last Friday: it's often more enlightening to read the full scientific papers which can sometimes paint a different story to the official summaries, abstracts, and conclusions.

Something that would have been interesting to know would have been the health outcomes over time of the people in the study taking into account their diet and lifestyle.

You might be amused to see that the first comment on the transcript refers to Gary Taubes.


References

Mozaffarian D et al.
"http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296" Changes in
Diet and Lifestyle and Long-Term Weight Gain in Women and Men. New
England Journal of Medicine, June 23, 2011;364:2392-404 (full paper is
behind a paywall - this link is just to a short preview)

Transcript can be found
"http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2011/3264734.htm#transcript"

Audio as mp3 is
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2011/07/hrt_20110711_0830.mp3

Nutritional Goats

By Drummond

In CrossFit we use the term “goat” to describe a movement which we suck at or have a strong distaste for. It is usually the weakest link in our athletic chain. It may be double-unders, overhead squats or even running.

The diligent athlete recognises that working your strengths is easy and that true athleticism is found by systematically destroying your “goat”.
But how easy it is to stay in the comfort zone and just work what you are good at.
The athlete must grapple with his or her ego, swallow their pride and find the required discipline to truly concur their “goat”.
I have seen tears, sweat and even blood on occasion from the athlete who is focused on task of illuminating that “goat”.
So why is it that we seldom give the same effort to seeking and destroying our “nutrition goat”?
A “nutrition goat” is that mid-afternoon chocolate bar, that piece of cake you just can’t say no to or that packet of biscuits after a stressful day at work.


A good coach can break the most complicated movements into progressions where mastery of subordinate skills must be achieved before proceeding to the more advance skills.
I would not teach you the squat clean before first giving you exposure to the front squat. I would not have you attempt a muscle-up before firstly showing you ring-dips.

This same logic should be applied to your nutrition.
I am not concerned with your omega 3/omega 6 balance if you are drinking 3 cans of diet coke a day. I’m not concerned by the type of potato you eat if you are having coco pops for breakfast.

Identify the weakest link in your nutrition chain, apply the required discipline and effort to your goats first and advance through the progressions. You’ll soon be on the journey to a clean diet.

Be yourself......

By Anna

"Why can't I train like that person? Gym stats always up, always on top of their game, always consistent, they never miss a session. Wish I could stop eating the leftovers from the kid's lunch boxes! No one else does that. I don't need that sandwich, I am not even hungry. Wish I wasn't grumpy with the girls this morning, my friends are always calm and kind. I know I need to do those jobs around the house or give my partner some down time, maybe tomorrow, just wish I could do it today......"

We all have different backgrounds, levels of knowledge, varied jobs, changing travel times, leisure hours, family commitments, friends, financial burdens etc. You might be doing a great job with your 'clean eating.' Your Mum/wife/husband/friend might cook and shop for you. Or you might get home at 6pm everyday after picking up the kids and have to cook dinner. You might be going to the gym six days a week. Your school/work times might allow for this consistency and you make the most of it. Or you might be a shift worker, live in the country, rely on public transport, have a young family or have had to start a second job.

This is not about making excuses. It is about finding happiness in your own journey and realising that we all are on a different path. Don't wish to be someone else. If there is something you don't like about your situation and you can - then change it. If you can't change it, learn to accept it and work with it the best way you can.

Everyone's journey is different. Some days are difficult and some days aren't.

Do what you can, where you are with what you have. No one can ask anymore - especially you!

There are no essential carbohydrates, even for athletes.

By Kurt Harris (Archevore)

WHAT IS YOUR OPINION ON THIS? PLEASE POST TO COMMENTS.

Despite current nutritional dogma dating from the 1970's, carbohydrate consumption is completely unnecessary for your energy (or any other) needs. Fat is the primary way we store energy in our bodies, and eating fat is the evolutionarily preferred food source in a food-abundant environment.* During aerobic exercise, the predominant fuel source is fatty acids, supplemented by glycogen stores.

It is possible to eat no carbohydrates at all and still do plenty of physical work. Any carbohydrates needed not provided from glycogen or food can be produced in abundance via gluconeogenesis. Glucose provided this way makes you literally burn fat, and keeps your insulin levels low.

You have about about an hour or more of exercise in your liver and muscle glycogen.

If you are a lean runner, you have enough energy in your body fat to walk about 800 miles.

You simply don't need to eat carbohydrates to exercise.

Try this:

Once you are adapted to low carb intake (it may take 6 weeks or more, so go slowly) your mitochondria, including in your muscles and your brain, will literally proliferate and be more energy efficient. Gradually start doing your workouts with less and less carb consumption prior to exercise, to the point where you are solely working out in the fasting state. By fasting state I mean no food for at least 12 hours. Now, most people think I am a lunatic when I suggest this, but hear me out.

I have talked about intermittent fasting as a complement to low carb eating to keep your insulin levels low. One reason they are complementary is once you are off the glucose/insulin hormonal yo-yo, your ability to tolerate fasting is increased immeasurably. On a very low carb diet you are literally never hungry, in that desperate way you are when you are carb-dependent. Intermittent fasting is absolutely the best way to keep your insulin levels as low as possible (more on why that is good in the future)

Working up to fasting workouts slowly, and once you have been on a low carbohydrate regimen for several months, you will find that your performance (running time, max lifting) eventually equals or exceeds what you could do before with a meal 2 hours before, as your body becomes more adapted to fatty acid metabolism and less dependent on glucose .

Now here is the good part. When you race, you have new mitochondria and your newly efficient fat-preferring metabolism. Add a moderate carb load and some GU bars if its a long race, and you will be faster than you were before. Glucose is now your nitrous oxide, not your primary fuel.

When you want to climb K2, you train in Leadville, Colorado, where the air is thinnest. Training at 10,000 feet is harder at first but more effective. Same with fasting workouts.



*When food was abundant in paleo times, it was often because there were large mammals rich in fat stores. Humans ate the fat, and it was adaptive for them to be satiated because food was abundant. No insulin response to make them store the fat, just use it for fuel and waste the rest. Conversely, when fruits were available they were much less calorie dense than their modern versions and in many environments only seasonally available. Fructose seems to work the opposite of saturated fat - the hormonal signal to the body is to store it and keep eating more. That may be why fructose is sent straight to the liver to be converted into triglycerides. Eating lots of high density fructose-laden food year-round in a food abundant environment is not something we are adapted to. The paleo enviroment we need to emulate is the one metabolically closest to our current condition of food abundance - high fat consumption.

John's Story

By January 2010 a decade of poor diet and exercise had caught up with me. I was carrying close to 100 kg on a height of 176 cm making me tip the BMI scale at a tad over 30. I was obese, I snored to the point of sleep apnea, and was tired and lethargic during the day. My clothes no longer fitted and family were constantly nagging me about losing that bulge around my middle. My public service desk job didn't afford much physical activity at work and apart from a bit of walking, I wasn't particularly active away from work. I was also painfully aware that my father had been diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes at around my age (I was 47 year old in 2010) and I felt sure that I was well on the way to doing so as well.

So I decided that I had to reverse direction not only for my own sake but also for my family's. I started out in the traditional fashion of trying to "lose weight and get fitter" by eating less and exercising more. Initially I was only aiming at walking 10,000 steps a day and just eating what I usually ate but just smaller quantities. There were three problems with this strategy: firstly, it was hard to find the time in the day to get to the 10,000 steps - it required over an hour of dedicated walking plus a fair bit of incidental walking during the day;
secondly, I found that by "just eating less" I felt hungry all the time and occasionally gave in my cravings and had extra pasta, or bread, or potatoes or worse; and thirdly, it just didn't work.

I, like many others thought that a calorie was a calorie was a calorie and all I needed to do was to consume less calories in order to lose weight. I needed to start tracking things a bit more closely so I threw out the old mechanical bathroom scales we had which seemed to have an accuracy of +/- 2 kg and bought a new digital bathroom scale. It was February 2010 and the new scales had me at 98.1 kg. I carried on for a while trying to eat less with a moderate level of activity and managed to get down to 95 kg and stayed there.

Late March 2010 I was listening to a podcast interview with Art De Vaney who just sounded amazing. He started talking about "evolutionary fitness" and how we just consume too many refined carbohydrates. He also mentioned a book by Gary Taubes: "Good Calories; Bad Calories" which went into the metabolic aspects of diet in detail. Art also emphasised the need to build up lean muscle mass and how that also played a role in the body's metabolism. I found Art's essay on Evolutionary Fitness on-line and immediately went out and bought two 5 kg weights. Something had clicked and suddenly I had something that made sense and appeared to have good science behind it.

Initially I was shocked by what I heard and read. I could understand that lots of sugar was bad but more saturated fats, more protein, and less carbohydrates - especially refined carbohydrates went against all "common wisdom". But I was getting desperate and the more I looked into it the more evidence began to surface, so I was willing to give it a try for a month or so.

So in April 2010 I started exercising with two 5 kg hand weights and restricting carbohydrates in my diet. I also got Good Calories; Bad Calories out of the library (twice - it's a big book and it took me a while to get through it all!). Without any specific prescribed dietary
plan I increased proteins and fats and green vegetables and decreased refined carbohydrates. It wasn't quite going "cold turkey", but it was close to it. Sugar and other sweets I found were one of the hardest things to give up. That, along with potato chips.

Results were dramatic and almost immediate.

By May I was down to 90 kg. I decided that I really needed to up my activity and increase my muscle mass so I joined the Kingborough Fitness Centre and started work on doing circuits of the weight machines on two or three sessions a week. By the end of June I had reached 85 kg and there I stayed for most of the rest of 2010.

June 2010 was a bad month as my father (76) was hospitalised with a really nasty life threatening infection after a course of chemotherapy for lymphoma. He ended up in intensive care for over a month and had to spend many months after that recovering in rehabilitation before he could go home. It really made me realise the importance of good health - without your health, what do you have? This whole episode gave me strong motivation to lose the excess weight I was carrying and maintain a healthy and active lifestyle. There are a lot of things you can't
control in this life, but weight and fitness and nutrition was something I could have some influence over.

During the first half of 2011 I had discovered that what I had been roughly following was called the "Paleo Diet" or "Paleo Lifestyle" - a variant of the "Low Carb Diet". Other figures in this movement such as Robb Wolf had their own podcasts and books which I looked into and used to fine tune what I was doing and what I was eating. Wolf advocates "grain free; legume free; dairy free" and goes into more depth about the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 saturated fats and other finer points on diet and exercise. I can't say that I follow his advice completely, but nowadays I get fairly close most weeks, although I have the occasional glass of red wine. One of the biggest changes I've made is the massive reduction in eating a lot of prepackaged processed foods. I am forever scrutinising the labeling on food packaging only to discover added sugar, or copious amounts of industrial seed oil, or other nasties.

So now my weight had stabilised at about 82 kg and I was getting a bit bored with the machines. Realising the limitations of the exercise machines but lacking the knowledge and confidence to do much with free weights I needed to head in a new direction. I saw a CrossFit Works flyer on the desk at the Fitness Centre. That rang a bell. Robb Wolf mentioned CrossFit in his podcasts and I had seen it occasionally mentioned here and there amongst the on-line Paleo community. Not really knowing what it was about I went along to an introductory session and now I'm hooked - every class is varied and fun and hard and sometimes quite scary. I know I'm making progress and to make or improve on an Rxd is such a great feeling. After a month and a half of CrossFit I'm now down to 80 kg.

It's all coming together now: the nutrition and the fitness and 18 kg lighter than when I started in January 2010.

7 times down, 8 times up!

By Tan

Before starting my CrossFit journey, I was leading an extremely unhealthy life. I was overweight all through my school years, until turning 20 and deciding that this wasn’t a healthy life, or a life I wanted for myself.

After losing over 40kgs in 2009, I got too used to the weight loss and spent the first half of 2010 living on a packet of chicken noodle soup a day, hoping to keep the weight coming off. Every day activities were a struggle, so when a friend in Brisbane excitedly informed me that a CrossFit box was starting up in Tassie, I was more than a little hesitant.

I’d heard her talk about CrossFit for months, but shrugged it off as it sounded insane! Burpees? Pull ups? Olympic lifting? Pfft, no thanks. I’ll stick to my yoga and chicken noodle soup; after all, it was working so well, right? But her excitement and insistence that I try this CrossFit thing continued, and I decided I’d go along to the first session just so I could say ‘I went, it sucked, enough about it already!’ But things went a little different than expected..........

.................So I came back again, and again, and again. I felt uncoordinated as I tried to skip, I felt weak using a PVC pipe for my lifts, and I felt slow in all my runs. Very, very slowly things improved, but my diet stayed the same and slowed my progress. I decided I needed to eat more, but this led to even more disordered eating. If I felt I ate too much (after consuming only chicken noodle soup for months, everything felt like too much) I’d have to purge it from my system immediately. This also slowed my progress, as my body wasn’t receiving the fuel it needed for energy and recovery...........

..........I’ve done so many things that I never would have imagined doing before CrossFit, whether it be travelling to Brisbane for my first CrossFit competition, or competing in a muddy but awesome obstacle course. I’ve met so many awesome people this past year, and feel privileged training with them at every session, and love that they put up with me some days (especially Stephy!).................

Changing my life for good!

By Eve.

Like most women I have had a long fitness/dieting journey. I have tried many things to get fit and lose weight. I only ever had to walk past a bakery to put on the five kilos I had spent 4 months losing on the Kate Morgan shake diet. I have never been massively overweight, but I have been massively unhealthy. Working as a nurse, doing shift work and being time poor was the excuse for eating out, not sleeping much, sporadic exercise that I was dedicated to for a few weeks then got bored and stopped. So I yo-yo dieted, yo-yo exercised and probably ate too many yo-yo biscuits as well – washed down with diet coke because that is so much better for you right???
Since finally bowing to Sonya’s pressure to check out this thing called Crossfit, a big change has come over my life. For the past three months Adam and I have been through the transition to a Paleo/Primal diet. We initially went cold turkey – I cleaned out the fridge and the cupboards and we were pretty strict. It was difficult and still continues to be. We have our massive fails at times but we get back on the wagon and keep going. To me, giving up is the biggest fail and being able to forgive yourself for the down times is important. But like many things in life and Crossfit as well, it is the mental battle that we have to overcome to get to where we want to be.
What keeps me going in the down times is the massive benefits that keep coming from my new lifestyle:
Health – I am fitter, stronger, I look better naked (you will just have to take my word for it!), have more energy and I fit in to a size 8 dress now. I sleep better, even my work performance is better and no horrible nurses back for me!
Lifestyle – I love going to Crossfit - my day feels incomplete without it now. I have met so many awesome people that have shown me that you don’t have to live an unhealthy life just because so many other people do.
Mental – I am less stressed, now I go to Crossfit and smash out a workout when I am angry instead of drowning my sorrows in a bottle of wine (though that still happens occasionally!).
I credit most of this to the change in my diet. I was so sluggish eating our “Western” diet and I never understood why. There is no turning back for me now because the results speak for themselves. Even though a lot of my family and friends say Adam and I are crazy doing all this – my answer for them is this. When you feel this good and keep getting the results that I am why would you want to go back??
So I encourage everyone who is trying out this new Paleo/Primal diet to stick it out, if u have a fail, forgive yourself and keep going – it is so worth it!

5 days a week, 6 hours a day!

By Jake

Going full on paleo is a huge challenge to everyone, some more than others. Everyone has their own personal issues that add to the difficulties of giving up all of your bread, your sugar and limiting your fruit. For me the added obstacle when going paleo/primal was the fact that I’m at school for 5 days a week, 6 hours a day with all of my mates around me digging into KFC and McDonalds while I eat from a lunchbox I brought from home. At first I was a little jealous of them, I wanted some of that. I mean what can one fast food meal hurt? Physically, probably not much, but if you allow yourself to cheat while your making the transition to clean eating you’re only making things a lot harder for yourself. After the first 2-3 weeks I started to get the hang of cooking paleo meals for myself, and there was no way I was jealouse of everyone else eating fast food because I knew what I was doing was better for my body and health, and chances are it actually tasted better as well.

While the end result of your diet is up to you, having good resources and support on hand is helpful. There are some great paleo/primal diet friendly sites out there, and two good starting points are Marks Daily Apple and The Foodie. These two sites are great, but if you dive into the forums on the daily apple, beware that these people take their diet to extremes. When I first started browsing the forums, I cut out a heap of foods, and basically looked into every single thing I was eating to the point of orthorexia. I was turning into this guy (worth a read). The forum is a great tool, but when you look at how everything you eat affects your body on a chemical level, you're only stressing yourself out. All you need to do is eat real, unprocessed food in reasonable amounts. Don’t worry about when you eat, or how much you eat, let your body tell you.

Favourite on the go lunch:
Mushrooms, onions, capsicum, zucchini, broccoli and either pork or chicken tossed in with a can of Ayam coconut milk and some curry powder. Not exactly a restaurant meal, but I can throw it up quickly in a skillet before school and it tastes great.

If your having trouble trying to find some of the stranger paleo food such as coconut oil, unsweetened coconut, nut meals, or of that sort of thing check out Eumarrah on Barrack street, and for Tasmanian grown produce head for the Hill Street Grocer.

One last thing I learned from eating this way around people my own age. “You can lead Grok to water, but you can’t make him drink (unless he’s thirsty).” Don’t try to convert everybody. Or even explain yourself. Its you’re choice, if you don’t want to eat something, don’t eat it, make yourself accountable for you’re own actions.

Good luck to everyone with your clean eating and dry July challenges!

Clean eating..... Not what I expected

By Sheree

Tired, grumpy, depressed, deprived, antisocial, hungry, bored.............
After a week of no yummy hot chocolates to warm the soul, no bacardi and diet cokes to numb a bad day and no gossip around the vending machine, I totally expected to be feeling some if not all of the above emotions. However I can honestly say I am feeling happier, healthier, stronger, less tired and totally satisfied.

The key to my successful week has defintely been organisation. With Alex and I both very dedicated to attending Crossfit, fitting in work, study, school, swimming, kindergym, shopping, cleaning, cooking, family, friends, criminal minds, offspring, feeding the ducks, walking the dog, building cubbies and playing superheros, it can all be a juggling act. These are of course in random order.

Here are the simple steps that have made my week one of clean eating a bit easier.
1. Gutted the house of tempting unclean foods eg. Chocolate, chips, marshmellows, various sauces and marinades.
2. Shopping for meat and vegies.
3. A few hours of cooking and preparing meals and snacks.

I have been amazed at how taking control of my eating habits has had a positive effect on the rest of my daily functions. This first became apparent Monday morning when I arrived at CFWX 15 minutes before class started. No skipping my morning cup of tea, no yelling at the kids for being slow and no road rage at the idiots that were potentially earning me a burpee fine. My house was tidy, my fridge was full and I push pressed 30kg!!!! Could clean eating life possibly be any better???

And to finish up my post just a couple of strange experiences from my week......

I have this new obsession with photographing my meals. I don't think I have ever taken a photo of food before but all of a sudden bacon and eggs and steak seems photo worthy.... Weird!!
Also I found myself talking to some random outside bakers delight about the fact I have cut sugar from my diet (as she was purchasing these new berry choc chip muffins). This is very bizarre behaviour for me. I don't normally talk to strangers...... Unless of course I have been consuming alcohol which I promise you I hadn't.

Looking forward to seeing what week two may bring. Keep up the posts guys this blog is awesome support :-)

Temptations

By Cam

Anna has asked me to talk about the challenges of food temptations and what we can do to control them. I am not an expert on this matter, but have simply been on a trial and error basis for the last 1-2 years and more so in the last 8 months.
Without going into detail, cravings for poor foods are triggered by the fact you have been eating poor food.
After the ingestion of a carbohydrate rich meal - blood glucose levels increase rapidly - once the body detects these elevated blood glucose levels it releases insulin. Once blood glucose levels reach normal again, it takes insulin a little bit longer to reach normal again. It is this lag time in normalization of insulin levels which gives us those sugar cravings after carbohydrate rich meals. This is because blood sugar levels are normal but we still have insulin present in the blood and that insulin needs something to do - without sugar to store, it gets bored! So it has the effect of asking the body for more sugar. That's why we get hungry even though we just ate a few hours ago - and the fact that we can't access our fat stores (the best energy bank ever).
All actions have a consequence and all actions start with a thought process generated by the brain. When it comes to temptations with food, it stems deeper from what you have been putting into your body previously as you can see from above. A bad eating habit like all addictions leads to the continuing of the habit. Sugar is an addiction and a very powerful one; do not be under any misconceptions about that. I have found it harder to control my urges for sugar/food than I have to give up cigarettes. Society is addicted to sugar and the response this provides us.

So how do we deal with these cravings in everyday life?
I have noticed some say to clean the house out of all bad foods. In my opinion, this can have a good and bad effect. Yes you’re eliminating all temptations in your house, but what happens when you take a step out that front door into reality, when you enter work, drive home, stop at the shop to get the paper. I have always lived with my environment the same. I still have two packets of cigarettes in my top draw, so every time I go to get socks and jocks in the morning; there they are. Every time I open that draw and then shut it without giving in, it is a win for me. I still get cravings for cigarettes even though I know how disgusting they are, I cannot control them coming, but I can control my response.
I have had my failures, and there have been many. My weight has fluctuated for years. This is the most important aspect of giving up an addiction, how you pick yourself up after the failure. We have heard Drummond say “You are only one good meal away from being back on the right path” and this is very true. It’s this point of the failure that is the hardest to make the right decision. The turning point where you can go one way or the other because you may feel down on yourself for failing - but turn that guilt into a positive. Tell yourself “Ok, yep I had a mini fail, but I will come back from this” Record this, own it and look back on it; record your feelings. Also listen to your body at this point and feel the effects of the food you have cheated on, and I guarantee no matter how much you enjoyed the taste, the bloating, sick feeling, heaviness and tired feeling isn’t as enjoyable. Record this in a food diary, I can’t recommend these enough. If you have to write it down, you have to acknowledge your action and if that’s a bad action, then you feel guilty.
At the end of the day it comes down to you making the right decision, no one else can control this. Have a friend you can call or message when you think you might be heading towards a fail, I have done this with Anna and it helps greatly. If you fail, pick yourself up and dust yourself off and tell yourself you can.

“No matter who you are, no matter what you do, you absolutely, positively do have the power to change.”
Bill Phillips

The African Way

By Alice

Some of you may know me and some of you not. I only started Crossfit in April/May but have been well educated about the community and the Paleo diet for a good six months! Thank you Adam. I have recently been on holiday in Africa for two and a half weeks and whilst there I saw first-hand, hunter gatherers and clean eating. But I also saw the effect the western world and its processed food is having on these people and not for the better. African women have beautiful figures and beautiful bottoms but due to the introduction of big chain fast food companies and supermarkets many Africans are now developing large not so beautiful midlines! Men included. African village people in more built up areas or towns still live in grass huts and have their own gardens and farm goats, pigs and cattle to make a living. Unfortunately these are the people that often end up spending their money on candy, crisps and fast food because they believe these are fabulous and if you can eat like this you are richer or better person! Many people are losing land and cannot afford to live because of this. Market stalls that contained coconuts, bananas and fresh produce have been replaced by Twisties, Sweets and Kitkats. I visited the local supermarket a few times and I have never seen a bigger packet of biscuits it was larger than my airplane carry on bag! I think it was a 1500g pack. Africans have been hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years and as we learn in Anna’s nutrition classes we are not built to eat these foods, yet the powers that be are shoving it down our necks all over the world. South Africa has the 4th largest hospital in the world surrounded by shanty housing and around 2million annual patients! (500,000 people live in Tassie!)
On a happier note I was lucky enough to visit and experience more traditional cultural villages inland Mozambique and Zimbabwe, where they still hunt for food, majority with spear or traps and some still in loin cloth. They grow their own vegetables and these are the happiest people I have ever met. They live by the phrase ‘Hakuna Matata’ (There are no worries). They have dirt floors and thatch their roof from grass or coconut palm leaves, money means nothing but good produce and hunting means everything. When they catch a large animal they gather from far and wide to consume it! They call themselves “meatatarians”. The only time they travel to see a health professional is to vaccinate their children. This is usually a 10hr return walk!
If I have taken anything away from this trip it is to not take anything for granted. People or produce. Appreciate the people and land around you. Drummond previously mentioned that we are lucky to have such quality local produce. Eating this produce not only improves your quality of life but also promotes a cycle. The more you give the more you get. The more we give to our local farmers and purchase their produce hopefully in turn there will be more available…….. Or grab a fence pale - fix a spear, don some wallaby skin and hunt your own!

My favourite meal whilst away: Beef sausage, Pork sausage, Beef sirloin steak, African fowl (chicken), Ostrich, Water Buffalo, Kingfish, Warthog and Stir fry vegies. Yummo!

My Journey Through Health and Fitness

Last paragraph of Brett's Testimonial.....thanks mate!


I am not an expert by any means and am still but a small puppy in a world of big dogs but my advice to anyone looking to get fit or lose weight would be that progress is the key. If your goal is to lose weight don't jump on the scales everyday. Eat real food, train hard and surround yourself with people who know what they're doing and learn as much as you can from them. But most importantly, DON'T GIVE UP!!! Getting fit and healthy is a journey, there is no question about it. Don't lose focus because you are not seeing results in the first week. It may take months but never, never, never give up! The human body is a perfect design and if your body composition or fitness levels are not portraying this it is because something is not balancing. A life of health and fitness never ends. There is never an end point and there is always something you can improve on but most importantly have fun and learn from the bad times. "Smooth seas do not make for skilful sailors.”

Hunting and Gathering on a Sunday Morning

By Emily

I have actually helped kill and butcher a pig before now but these days my SoHo lifestyle lends itself to more conventional means of acquiring food, like shopping at shops and markets.

Tania reminded me yesterday of the Farmers Gate Market, which is on every Sunday at the Melville st carpark. Wicked suggestion Tan, it was a great place to buy 'clean' products - I bought a whole shopping bag of green leafy veg (kale, spinach, bok choy, coriander) and some radishes (I eat them like apples). I also purchased a bunch of purple carrots that piqued my interest, the stallholder said they tasted a bit like sweet potato (and no they had not been dipped in purple food colouring!).

As mentioned yesterday I have been keen to try some kangaroo, none to be found this morning but instead I bought some wallaby sausages from the Bruny Island Game meat stall - when i asked him what was in them he said "wallaby meat, additional wallaby fat and seasoning" - I've never seen a fat wallaby but he assured me some are definitely fatter than others and it's these he turns into sausages - couldn't sound much cleaner! I also got sucked into buying some Bruny Island cheese ('Oen' the one wrapped in vine leaf). I had to break out the credit card but it probably works out cheaper than a tub of icecream and is certainly kinder on the pancreas! On the way home i stopped in at Salad bowl (another great place for purchasing clean supplies) and grabbed 2 bottles of full cream elgar milk ($2.80 with a 60cent refund when you take back the glass bottle) and avocados (currently 2 for $2).

So where do you guys go a gathering? Anyone aware of any great specials this week that we should all stock up on?

Tips for a successful July.

1. The right attitude is all important. If you feel you are depriving yourself by cutting out something, then you will never truly embrace 'clean eating'. See the change as a positive action that is going to make you healthier. You don't need what you don't have.

2. Clean out your pantry/fridge and re-stock with 'real food'. Real food goes off. It doesn't keep for weeks/months without spoiling.

3. Cut out sugar in all forms - fruit juice, cordial, mixers, honey, golden syrup, lollies, table sugar, too much fruit, cakes, biscuits etc.....

4. Don't have 'treats' or 'tempting' foods in the house. You will eat them!

5. Eat good fats. If you are dropping carbohydrates/sugars out of your diet, you need to replace them with something. Protein is self limiting and hence, you will need to increase your fat intake. Cook with butter, lard, gee, coconut oil. Limit vegetable oils/canola oils/sunflower oils etc.

6. Don't worry about eating at 'meal times' as such. As your body gets used to using it's fat stores, you will eat when you are hungry. This may be at different times than what you are used too.

7. Don't eat low fat or diet foods. They contain sugar to make them taste better.

8.Look into cheap cuts of meat that can be curried/slow cooked or braised. A slow cooker is a non expensive kitchen friend that every home should have.

9. Think about going cold turkey rather than cutting back. An addiction is still an addiction whether you have a bag of lollies a day, a packet or a few.

10. Share your stories and ideas.

Stay tuned!