It’s Paleo Challenge Week 2!
This is where it’s going to start getting tough (I know it probably already is). Now that the novelty of it is wearing off and your body is in flux in terms of your non-performance energy system, you might be feeling…like complete crap. This is normal in terms of it happens to a lot of people who start Paleo for the first time or are restarting after a long break. However it is not “ok”. This is supposed to help our performance not hurt it. Yes it’s going to be hard and a lot of this is psychological. The usual 10am protein bar that tastes like candy is tough to refuse. So is the lunchtime sandwich and the weekend pizza binge. But this is also when your body is starting to notice you are severely changing what you have been giving it in terms of macro nutrients as calories, so you are fighting it physically too.
Something to think about here, and also clear up a bit from how this is presented to you, is where dietary fat comes into play. While we talk about the breakdown of our total calories being 40% fat, 30% protein, 30% carbohydrate, it is important to understand that fat has slightly more than 2x the calories as carbs and protein. So while you might be scrambling to find a way to get the calories you need to feel like a normal human because you have gone from 250-300g of carbs a day to 100-150g, adding quality fat will help. Also understanding that fat takes much longer than carbs and protein to digest will help too. If you are sticking with the recommendation of pooling your carbs to 50% or more within 2 hours before and after your workouts, then doing the opposite with fat will help stave of hunger and general feeling of wanting to kill everyone around you all day. Eating a small amount of quality fat 4-5 times throughout your day and not in that window of time around your WOD will slowly digest all day, help in transportation of other nutrients, and give you sustainable long term energy outside of your time at CFL.
Remember these are all general guidelines. Everyone is different with different goals. Excess dietary fat is going to store as body fat if not used, so if weight loss is your goal you don’t want to be mindlessly crushing fat all day every day. However fat and protein can be relied upon throughout the rest of your day to make up for your calories you aren’t getting from carbs anymore.
1 gram of fat has about 9 calories. 1 gram of carbohydrate has 4 calories. 1 gram of protein has 4 calories. So if your morning used to have 50g of carbs and you are an evening WODer and trying to cut those carbs by say 25g, then thats 100 calories you need to replace to fuel the engine. You want to replace it with protein and fat, but with 2x the protein if you are trying to keep them relatively even at this time of the day.
Stick with it. 5 weeks from now, 10 weeks from now, it will all pay off
TUESDAY
Strength: Push Jerk
Find a 1 rep max in 5 attempts
WOD: For Time
75 KB Swings 53/35
45 CTB Pull-ups*
75 STOH 75/55
*15 Muscle Ups for CTB Pull-Ups
