The recent waves of videos by Matt Chan in the CrossFit Journal brought the focus back to a key part of the CF prescription – proper nutrition. Matt’s videos cover Zone fueling techniques for competitive athletes. Most importantly, it focuses on the amount of food to eat. The many Paleo blogs and CF sites also address the quality of food.
Then, as athletes, we need to decide what works best for ourselves.
I think the Paleo/Zone movement covers the quantity and quality of nutrition well, like Pat Sherwood’s many videos. I believe the third critical component of eating is the timing of food.
1) Quality: Paleo
Paleo advocates that we should eat food we were designed to eat, which are unprocessed meat, veggies, some fruit, nuts and seed and no sugar. Endless sources cover Paleo diet nowadays and no scaling is needed for CrossFitters except maybe some Zone adjustments:
2) Quantity: Zone
While Paleo says eat all you want of the approved categories, Zone’s prescription on measuring food can help maximize performance in and outside the gym. Plenty of articles on the topic, most important for CF is Glassman’s original summary and Barry Sears’ 8-part video for Crossfitters.
3) Timing: Intermittent Fasting (IF)
You can eat 3-5 times a day prescribed in the Zone diet. There is also a step beyond that which takes us to fasting. Beyond the increasing evidence of improvements in biomarkers and athletic performance due to IF, it is likely that our paleo ancestors rarely had a full breakfast before some movement, hunting or chasing a game. Let’s just say breakfast can happen at noon instead of 6am. It still should be the biggest meal of the day, but hopefully after our first WOD.
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