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!