This morning we had our Reverb Clean & Lean nutrition seminar at the gym!
We learned why eating real food is so important, how to spot real food, and kicked off our 6-week Clean & Lean challenge! (it’s not too late to join 20 other challengers and crush your new year nutrition goals!)
Check out below for the video, a quick summary, and our whole foods cheat sheet:
Who is this for? Anyone who wants to:
- Feel better
- Have more energy and more stable energy
- Lose body fat
- Improve metabolic health
- Reduce risk of chronic disease
- Maximize fitness
CrossFit’s nutrition prescription:
- The first two sentences of CrossFit’s “Fitness in 100 Words” are:
- “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts & seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar”
- “Keep intake to levels that support exercise but not body fat”
- What you put in your body is even more important than all the time you spend training in the gym!
- Allocate time to plan your nutrition accordingly!
- This is as simple and elegant as it gets, and it works!
Recent study comparing whole foods vs highly processed foods
- Compared two groups eating the same amount of protein, carbs, fats, and calories
- Group one mostly whole foods
- Group two mostly highly processed foods
- Highly processed foods group gained 2 pounds of body fat and saw their blood pressure and cholesterol get worse in just 3 weeks.
- Food quality has a dramatic effect on how you look/feel/perform, and your health!
How to Spot (not) real food: red flags
- Any added sugar whatsoever
- More than a couple ingredients and/or ingredients you don’t easily recognize
- It can sit on a shelf for a long time
- It didn’t exist 5,000 years ago
- It has a big marketing budget behind it
How to Spot real food: green flags
- Easily recognized as fresh: meat (and dairy), vegetables, nuts & seeds, fruit, or (minimally processed & limited quantities) starches and grains
- Doesn’t have an ingredients label
- Could have been eaten by humans 5,000 years ago
- Refer to our Reverb whole foods cheat sheet when in doubt!
Serving sizes
- Protein (meats + dairy): 1 palm
- Vegetables: 1 fist
- Carbs: 1 cupped hand
- Fats: 1 thumb
- A starting point for a balanced meal, depending on your body weight is:
- 1-2+ palms of protein
- 2+ fists of veggies
- 1-2 cupped hands of carbs
- 1-2 thumbs of fats
- Notice, the protein and veggies have a “+”. If you’re hungry, add more of those first!
6 week challenge
- Everything tracked in the My Coach app!
- Daily lessons
- Daily tasks
- Social interaction with the crew!
- Most important part of the challenge:
- Your 1:1 nutrition coaching check-ins with your coach – start, middle, and end of challenge.
- Personalize your 6-weeks so you have an achievable plan to focus on
- Discuss your specific challenges and strategies to overcome them; keep you on track
- Prizes
- Sticking with it to the end no matter what % you “succeeded”: challenge t-shirt!
- Additional prizes for best consistency and best composition changes
Strategies for success
- Planning ahead
- Initial kitchen cleanout and re-stock with real foods
- Have a weekly plan, then execute it!
- Batch prepping
- Cooking larger batches and saving leftovers for the next few days
- Cooking a bunch of meats and then having your veggies, nuts & seeds, fruits, starches stocked so you can mix and match and throw together a good meal at any time
- Meal Prep companies
- Local meal prep companies that do the prep work for you; great to have a ready-to-go meal in your back pocket that you can pop in the microwave and done!
- Collaborate during the challenge!
- Post what’s working for you, try what’s working for others, experiment, learn, and succeed together!
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Message us with your biggest nutrition question!
