People are motivated by widely differing things. I, for instance, don't care about longevity. If it were pointed out to me that my diet would leave me with type 2 diabetes in 20 years, or give me cancer, I'd remain nonchalant. I've had some outrageous fun, mostly in South America, and if I could train two or three years with Royler Gracie in Rio de Janeiro, hit a qualifying time for the C.R.A.S.H.B's and have Concept 2 fly me to Boston, and total elite in a USAPL meet, I'd die happy in three or five or ten years.
Perhaps it's my outlook on life that makes me wildly motivated by performance. However long I live, I want to feel and function well.
My problem a few years ago was that I seem to be lucky in that I can perform fairly well on a somewhat worse than standard American diet. I honestly don't remember what I used to eat, but I know it included donuts and protein bars, 31 grams protein, 31 or more grams sugar. Lifting a few times a week and training Brazilian jiu-jitsu seemed to override my diet. I was gaining strength and losing fat.
When I started CrossFit, I measured my performance against Mike D as we were at a similar level, and we tended to alternate WOD times day-to-day: usually the guy who went harder yesterday would come in second today.
At some point, probably one of those annoying 30 day challenges, Mike D decided to try the Paleo diet, and I decided not to. Two weeks in I was consistently beating Mike, and I did what I do in those situations: I laughed derisively and suggested he eat a few bowls of oatmeal. But at the three and four week marks, Mike was outperforming me consistently. Like everyone his body just needed a few weeks to adapt to metabolizing fat, aka diesel fuel, instead of sugar, and then he was off to the races.
I was at first reluctant to follow Mike because I thought the Paleo diet was both fanatical and faddish. Who the fuck doesn't eat donuts?
But once Mike showed me how much I myself might be able to improve my performance, I decided to give it a go. The possibility of performing better was enough to get me going. As a trainer, I've learned that's not true for many people. I don't know if I can do any better than paraphrase Robb Wolf. Try the Paleo diet for thirty days. If it doesn't work, Sprite and Twinkies will still be there. I've noticed too that some people are reluctant to try, citing conflicting studies on nutrition, or the lack of long reaching research into the Paleo diet. I don't get it. You have the ideal lab, your body, and in 30 days you can do a valid study of your own.
Remember, the Sprite and Twinkies will still be there.
Now sometimes, and this was the case for me, the Paleo diet stops working. This will almost certainly be your fault, and in my case it was my fault. In the next edition will look at trouble-shooting Paleo pitfalls. Until then, I want to explain that following the Paleo diet is idiotically easy. I can do it, you can do it. I'll leave you with an annotated recipe I actually made today, so you can see just how idiot proof this can be.
Paleo "Spaghetti"
First, get a bunch of ingredients. You can probably do this at a store, or better, a farmers' market. That's all too complicated for me. I did it like this:
1) Get as many awesome friends as possible. I'm extremely antisocial, and I was able to do this by getting involved in CrossFit.
2) Have one of your friends with extra vegetables drop off a bag containing spaghetti squash, tomatoes, and garlic. Some other stuff might help, but its absence doesn't hurt.
3) Stab the fuck out of the squash so it doesn't explode, and put it in the oven for an hour at 375 degrees. I really liked this part best because it seems like absolutely everything gets baked at 350.
4) Get on the Internet and look up some easy marinara sauce recipes. Don't worry, you're not going to follow any of them. Just get the gist of what's going on and wing it.
5) Chop the garlic and onion until you get bored.
6) You're supposed to have a sauce pan. I don't even know what that is so I used a skillet. You're supposed to put some olive oil in it. I didn't have any so I used coconut oil. It's probably not a big deal unless God really is Roman Catholic, and the Italian kind too.
7) You're probably used to turning the stove way up and power-cooking the fuck out of everything. Here you want to be really calm. Turn the stove on low and just accept you're going to get bored.
8) Put the chopped garlic and onion in the skillet. You should probably watch it. I played a few games of one-minute chess on the Internet in between stirring the mixture.
9) I was told to blanch the tomatoes and remove their skins. That's not the kind of thing I do. Fuck it.
10) Crush the tomatoes and add them to the skillet when the onions and garlic are slightly browned or I guess caramelized even.
11) Stir this occasionally, or just go back to playing Internet chess.
12) Realize there is no protein in this. Brown 300 grams of ground beef. It's important to measure the beef so you know how much protein you're getting. In principle you should have weighed the squash, but don't bother. I found out a kilogram of squash is going to give you right around 100 grams of low GI carbohydrates, so don't worry about it. You're having fun. You can weigh everything again tomorrow.
13) Remove the squash from the oven. It's possible that you're supposed to let it cool a while. This is where I find my extensive background in welding helpful. I have permanent scars on my forearms from molten steel. I'm not getting my ass kicked by a 375 degree squash.
14) Cut the squash in half and scoop out all the seeds. Then start scraping out the meat which really will look like noodles.
15) Dump the beef in the sauce. Dump the sauce on the squash.
16) Eat half of it now. Save half for after your 8,000 meter row.
I haven't eaten spaghetti in years, so I really don't know if this was anything like spaghetti. I know it was good, and it won't kill me.
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