Why You Aren’t Getting Fitter: Part 2
By Dylan Porras

Have you ever asked yourself why you aren’t getting the results you want?

Have you ever felt like you’ve been putting in a ton of work but it’s not showing?

In Part 1 of this article, we revealed the #1 Reason (in my humble opinion of course), Sleep. 

In this article, we look at reason #2…  Nutrition!

Let’s dive in. 

REASON #2: Nutrition

You Can’t Out-Train a Poor Diet!

So what is a poor diet?

According to Crossfit’s founder Greg Glassman, proper nutrition is defined as:  “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.”

It’s simple but not easy. Let’s break it down a little bit.

Try to stick to foods without a label with as few steps to get from the farm to your refrigerator.  Unless you pick it by hand and consume it while standing over the garden, nearly all food is processed, so be careful of attributing “buzz” words to whether food is healthy or not like organic, processed or natural (do you think baby carrots are picked in that shape?!? Lol).  Foods with minimal processing and few added ingredients tend to be those most packed with vitamins and nutrients – the building blocks of a healthy system.

“Keep intake to levels that support exercise but not body fat.”  Essentially, if we are eating more calories than are body uses up to perform its required functions, whatever they may be, the body will need to store these calories (and they won’t be stored as sexy muscle). 

Discovering the correct formula for calories requires daily monitoring for a period of time until you, quite literally, discover the approximate amount you can recreate will relative accuracy and consistency. The last word, consistency, is key to success.  If eating an apple a day produced fitness, you could not eat a snickers bar 6 days a week and 7 apples on Sunday.  We recommend hiring a coach to help you with this and you can learn more at https://www.aFewSimpleDisciplines.com

Avoiding Sugar and Starch is perhaps the most important part of Coach Glassman’s definition for proper nutrition.  According to a paper called “The Deadly Triad”, that Glassman’s uses as the foundation for his nutrition guidance, hypertriglyceridemia (high blood sugar) leads to disease. So while we all desire a sexy body on the outside, it’s also important we have a sexy body on the inside, and that means avoiding Cardiac Heart Disease, Type II Diabetes and other preventable diseases.  Since sugar and starch raise blood sugar levels, we should avoid consuming these with any high degree of regularity.

Now you may ask yourself, how do I know if I’m eating the right foods or the right amounts? 

As coaches, we know you cannot answer this without objectively recording and analyzing data.  This means recording your nutrition intake and your activity levels, recording the resultant output (physical appearance changes, body weight and composition changes, energy and mood changes) and making objective changes to your nutrition and activity levels in order to get you closer to your results. You might even consider a blood test to measure hormone and nutrient levels. 

Nutrition is perhaps the most complicated component to healthy living.  These general guidelines should help get you started and point you in the general direction but each person is different and it is our recommendation that you use a coach to help you hone in on what works best for you. 

“A healthy outside begins from the inside.” – Robert Urich