Nutrition plays a critical role in fitness.

Understanding and optimising our nutrition can amplify our training goals, whether it is fat loss, muscle gain, or just overall better training and recovery. But it can be confusing, media pushes these fad diets at us like its the next best thing since sliced bread (unless you’re keto or low carb). Have you found it hard to keep up with the newest trends or find a sustainable way to follow a diet in your daily life? Keep reading to uncover a simple method to optimising your nutrition without having to eat less food!

If you are looking for a ‘diet’ to follow, the best one for you is the realistic one, the one you can stick to, that doesn’t consume your all your mental energy in the process, it’s the one that is sustainable for longer term, not short 6-8 week stints, with the yo-yo effect afterwards. A good diet doesn’t make you feel like you are trapped in a certain way of eating.

To keep it simple, just how Greg Glassman did in 2002, what we will always encourage at CrossFit Dauntless is to:

Eat meat (or more specifically protein), veg, nuts & seeds, some fruit little starch, no sugar. (Pg 1. What Is Fitness? (CrossFit Journal - Oct 1, 2002))

The more whole foods (specifically fruit and veg) you can add into your diet, the more nutrient dense your diet becomes and the better you feel, perform and recover!

We often place most of our emphasis on exercise and forget that nutrition and our eating patterns play a critical role in our body composition. What emphasis do you place on nutrition and the food you consume in your day to day life? I sure know that there are many times where it’s the absolute last thing that I am thinking about. Not often is nutrition even the first thought, let alone approach, people take when deciding to become a healthier version of ourselves, most of us here probably started with exercise.

“I need to get fitter”.
Why?
“To lose weight”.

If you are going to take anything away from this post it should be to focus on the QUALITY of the food you are eating (rather than the quantity you may OR may not be consuming). I encourage you to fuel your body!

In doing this I hope you feel empowered to EAT MORE of the GOOD THINGS!
That’s right, ADD MORE FOOD to your daily eating. Try it, see how you go!

If you are someone who needs a goal or a number target to hit. I encourage you to aim for 600-800g total weight of fruit or veg each day.
As an example, in one day this could look like:

80g Banana
50g Grapes
120g Apple
30g Leafy Greens
100g Potato
80g Carrot
120g Corn
50g Blueberries

*cores and peel don’t count towards total weight

Great nutrition lays the foundation for health and fitness.

So for the rest of January, I’m not asking you to do crazy clean eating attempts. What I want is a focus on is including more fruits and veg into your diet!

Yelana.

CrossFit - Theoretical Hierarchy of Development

CrossFit have been releasing publications for almost 20 years now, these publications include plenty of SIMPLE information relating to optimal nutrition for health & fitness. The CrossFit - Theoretical Hierarchy of Development (Pg8. What Is Fitness? (CrossFit Journal - Oct 1, 2002) and image above) show the foundations of the pyramid with a solid base of nutrition, with everything being optimally built on that.

Nutrition, the building block of fitness.