Kelly Frankson DOT COM

After having several personal training clients ask questions about diet in the last week- if it’s important, what I eat, why should they care if they are happy with their weight- I decided that I would share my thoughts on the issue.

First off, regardless if care what you look like, if you want to gain weight, if you want to loose weight, or if your body stays the same weight no matter how much crap you eat, diet is important for a healthy lifestyle and being able to sustain athletic performance.

Crossfit workouts are tough, no question about it, but your bodys ability to cope with the stimulus that it provides is heavily dependent on the fuel that you are providing it. Im not going to pretend to be a nutrition expert, because Im not. But I do know there is a direct link between when Im eating healthy and when Im performing at my best. When I go through spurts of eating crap, guess what, my workouts suffer too-I become winded and am not able to recover as fast.

While I was focussing on Crossfit, I ate based on the principles of the ZONE (www.zonebasics.com/gettingstarted)
90% of the time focusing on keeping the balance between carbohydrates and protein and ensuring that the carbs are coming from good sources such as vegetables rather than starchy sources high on the glycemic index such as bread and pasta. The other 10% of the time I ate what ever I want. My theory being everything in moderation.

Now that Olympic Weightlifting has become more of priority, I still eat based on many of the priniciples based on the Zone, but I ensure that I get atleast 110grams of protein a day (my lean muscle mass) and have sufficient “good Fat” intake.  Recently, I have also started fooling around with the idea of intermitant fasting.  Stay tuned for an article on that shortly.