Nutrition Plan

What's the plan?

Nutrition at King CrossFit is fairly straightforward and very effective. We encourage all to eat real unprocessed food, organic if possible. We advocate a 40-30-30 split of Carb-Pro-Fat. This is not a diet but a lifestyle, and quickest way to begin is to pick up Dr. Barry Sears classic text "Mastering the Zone. Nationwide, CrossFit's top performers utilize some variation of this plan for no other reason other than it works.

What Types of Food?

From Crossfit.com:

Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.

I mentioned about eating real food at the beginning, this is of paramount importance. Food is the most potent drug you will put in your body, so don't skimp here! Lets break down the CrossFit dietary perscription a little further.

"Eat meat and vegetables nuts and seeds, some fruit"

We suggest consuming quality grass-fed meats and pesticide free vegetables. Consuming grass-fed meats ensures that the animals were not kept in cramped dirty feed lots and fed among other things, corn, soy, potato chips, hormones, antibiotics, dead animals' remains and GRAIN! It was only about a hundred years ago that we began this practice; before industrialization these animals for thousand of years had subsisted on a diet of vegetables and leafy greens. What we listed above are not the things cows and other animals are meant to eat by nature, but what their growers-producers force them to eat. The result is grain-fed meats have a much higher content of saturated fat, and disproportionate levels of Omega 6 and Omega 3 fatty acids. Since this is the meat most of us buy in grocery stores, it's effect on our collective health has been devastating.

The same is true for the vegetables that we eat. The biggest study ever of organic food was completed in 2007 ^[1]and found that organic fruit and vegetables contain up to 40% more antioxidants than conventional equivalents. The more we have fought against the environment, the more we have damaged the food, cheapened it's nutritional value, and destroyed the land and waters around it.

"little starch and no sugar."

Starches and sugars have the nasty habit of spiking a hormone called insulin in the human body. Insulin is released into the body when we eat, and it's job is to store energy in the cells. One of the goals of the Zone and Paleo eating plans is to keep these spikes from happening. Ever feel sleepy after eating a spaghetti dinner? Ever experience the mid-afternoon swoon at work when you came back from the sub shop? Insulin is to blame. Our goal is to re-train the body to use fat as a fuel source rather than simple sugars. This rule gets us a long way towards accomplishing this goal.

"Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat."

Here is an article from the CrossFit Journal about the glycemic index, it's got an handy list of low and High glycemic foods to help you make better choices.