Important dates for the Paleo Challenge:
Thursday, September 4 (tomorrow): $20 buy in/sign up starts (cash only at desk)
Saturday, September 6 @ 12:00pm: Challenge Meeting (very strongly almost mandatory urged attendance)
Monday, September 8: Logging starts
Wednesday, September 10: First WOD test day, September 17: Last testing day and to buy in
Friday, October 24: Last day for logging and re-testing
$20 Buy In/Sign Up starts tomorrow (Thursday)!! Cash only at the desk. We will be using the Paleo Scoreboard like we have before which will keep your daily logs and your test scores and re-test scores. More on that later!
So let’s get into the why of the Paleo lifestyle and how a Paleo Challenge works.
The way most people eat in modern society is basically like strapping ourselves into a chair and injecting a little bit of lethal injection, slowly chipping away at our life until we die in a disgusting mess of fat, disease, and general filth. Dramatic? Maybe, but not too far off.
Heart disease, Type II diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, various autoimmune disorders, CANCER, all are diseases who’s prevalence in our world today directly correlate to a diet high in processed food, additives and preservatives, GLUTEN, and sugar.
This is not made up my friends. This is science.
When thinking about the Paleo Challenge and whether you should do it or not (you should) I first urge you to think of it not as a diet but as a lifestyle. Diet too often is linked to weight loss or gain. While what we are doing is controlling what we put into our bodies it is about much more than weight loss. In fact weight loss is a byproduct (a great one) of following a Paleo lifestyle.
So if we aren’t trying to lose weight what is the point? The point is we are trying to rid our body of crap that causes it distress. Inflammatory proteins, mainly GLUTEN, fake additives and preservatives, and processed sugar all are bad for us, and not just bad for us but killing us. The Paleo Diet aims to rid the body of inflammation, toxic sugar increases in the blood stream, and create a more balanced and efficient energy system in the body.
So now what do you eat? The simple way to look at it is the chart above or the outside of the grocery store perspective. If it is grown or an animal then it is Paleo. If it is boxed or bagged and put on a shelf for days, weeks, or months, then most likely not paleo. If it is created or processed, or has fake crap or sugar added to it, NOT Paleo. Meat, vegetables, some fruit and nuts. All things that can be grown or made naturally. How cave men ate is the popular way people talk about the Paleo Diet and it’s pretty much it. We don’t take it to such an extreme (cavemen didn’t have skillets to make scrambled eggs but eggs CERTAINLY ARE Paleo) but thinking along those lines is also a simple way of looking at it.
If you still don’t quite get it then let’s see EXACTLY what we CANNOT EAT on the Paleo Diet:
1) Gluten: Gluten is a protein that is found in all wheat based products. Bread, cereal, crackers, literally anything made from wheat or wheat derivatives. Gluten is extremely inflammatory to the GI tract. Don’t eat it. Things that contain gluten usually are very high in carbohydrates which leads us to…
2) Sugar: sugar sucks. It feeds cancer cells. It makes us fat. Seriously. Sugar, no matter where it comes from, turns into glucose once in our blood. Glucose in the blood causes an insulin spike and storage reaction in the body. Sugar stores as body fat. So yes eating a bunch of sugar before bed is about as bad as it gets for your weight/aesthetic health, but also is bad for our general long term health. Messing with your insulin levels not only is bad for things like staying awake at your desk but also leads to hypertension, heart disease, and type II diabetes. And yes cancer cells are proven to directly feed off of sugar compounds.
This is a key component of the Paleo Diet. We are GREATLY reducing carb intake. Carbs are not bad, in fact they are integral to high intensity exercise, they are just bad in extreme doses and when ingested at the wrong time. If you cut the amount of sugar you eat (fruits included) in half on a daily basis you will lose weight, feel better, have more energy, sleep better, and your long term health will be positively affected.
3) Preservatives/Additives: If the thing you are eating can stay on a shelf for longer than a day or two do you think that is good to eat? Grab a box of cereal, even the “healthy” kind, and look at the ingredients. How many can you not pronounce? This is another easy way to determine something’s paleness. If you can’t pronounce an ingredient it probably is created in a laboratory and therefore is a non-natural additive or preservative…and therefore NOT paleo.
The Challenge: The challenge works pretty simply as the goal and focus is promoting a healthy and clean lifestyle. This includes food intake and fitness and you will receive points/lose points based on your following of the rules. The reason Paleo is such a popular thing in the CrossFit world is all of this cleanliness leads to incredible performance, so we do a series of strength and WOD tests at the start of the challenge and re-test at the end. One of our tests is your 1 rep max back squat and it isn’t uncommon for people to increase it by 30-40# after a 45 day Paleo Challenge. The most epic improvements is usually from “Fran”, the 21-15-9 from hell where I have seen people go from not-RX to a 3 minute improvement and doing it as Rx. Amazing.
This last part is truly why I say Paleo is for everyone and IS NOT about losing weight. There are always the people out there who tell me they are totally cool with their weight and don’t want to lose any. Well Sarah and Stacey both follow the Paleo Diet to a T and I think we can all agree they don’t fit the mold of people who would be “dieting”, but the performance aspect of it is what draws many athletes like them to it. So basically the Paleo lifestyle is for anyone who cares about health and fitness, and pretty sure if you are reading this you fall into this category!
Get ready for a truly awesome 45 days. I know for some who have done a Paleo Challenge in the past that this is difficult but the reward is beyond worth it. Even better is yours truly will be a full participant in the challenge and will be documenting my ups and downs publicly for you all to see and most likely laugh at.
THURSDAY
Strength: Bench Press
4-4-3-3-2-2
WOD: For Time
75 KB sumo deadlift high pull 70/53
75 Wall Ball 20/14
Row 750m
*24/18 wall ball
SkWAT Team: No extra work
