40/30/30 on it's ear!

As I mentioned in my first post, I am currently following The Zone Diet. I hesitate to call it a diet, only because of the negative connotation associated with being on a diet. I consider it a way of life. I didn't go on the Zone because I wanted to lose weight, mostly I was curious how my body would respond to decreasing my carbohydrate intake.

Well, it's been 7 weeks and I must admit that I am totally impressed. I was a real skeptic going into this. I come from the age-old high carb, endurance athlete dogma. Cutting back my carbs and continuing to train for endurance events didn't seem compatible to me. I'm not ready to say that I have been completely convinced otherwise yet, but I'm liking what I'm seeing so far.

As stated earlier my results with the Zone came very quickly. I was shedding fat faster that I realized possible. Within just a few weeks I had gone from about 10.5% body fat to approximately 5% body fat. I am following a 1 block per day Zone diet,3 x 4 block meals and 3 x 2 block meals. (For you non-Zoners, 1 block is 7 grams of Carbohydrates, 9 grams of Protein and 1.5 grams of Fat) That translates to a mere 1638 calories per day. A far cry from the 2000+ calories I was used to consuming. Because I was shedding fat so quickly, I recently started following the Athlete protocol, so, now I multiply my Fat blocks by 4x. So, instead of having 18 blocks of fat per day, I am now having 72 blocks of Fat per day. That now brings my total caloric intake to 1962 calories per day. The ratio of macronutrients is now 41% Fat, 33% Carbs and 25% Protein. 6 months ago, if you would have told me to increase my fat intake to 40% of my total calories while reducing my carbs to 33%, I would have laughed in your face. Now, seems like it's working for me.

So, how do I know it's working. Well, like I said, I have shed fat at an unbelievable rate. The number of people who are commenting on how good I look and how "ripped" I look absolutely blows me away. When I see myself in the mirror, I have to take a double take. Don't get me wrong, I'm still fairly skinny at just shy of 150#, but there' s no fat there and I don't look weakly. The other thing that I am seeing, and this is the most important, is continued improved performance in the gym. Today I PR'd on the workout named Fight Gone Bad. My previous best score was 300, today I scored 327. Last Sunday for my CrossFit Endurnce workout I ran 7.05 miles during a 45 minute Time Trial. This Wednesday I completed the workout named "Nancy" in just over 14 minutes using the prescribed weight of 95# for the overhead squats. The last time I tackled Nancy, I used only 65# for the overhead squats and still took 12:20 to complete it.

Definitely, I'm getting stronger and more powerful. The 45 minute Time Trial was a solid effort, but not an indicator of a running PR. I need to find an olympic distance triathlon, 10K or maybe half marathon to really test it out. Stay tuned for further results.

Some Background Info

Education: I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Go BADGERS!) with a Bachelor of Science degree in exercise science. While at the UW I also completed an internship in athletic training. Upon graduation from undergrad I received my commision as an Ensign in the United States Navy and proceeded to San Antonio, TX. In San Anton' I attended the U.S. Army-Baylor University Graduate Program in Physical Therapy (now a clinical doctorate program).

Athletics: In high school the only sport I participated in was wrestling. I always intended to go out for football and track, but for various reasons never did. Not playing football was always a big regret of mine. I was a decent wrestler, but my problem was that I only took it serious during the season and did nothing in the off-season. After high school I tried my hand at division III collegiate wrestling at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, but my interesting in division III partying was greater than my interest in wrestling or academics for that matter.

I took some time off from school and spent my days mostly smoking, drinking and delivering office furniture. I grew tired of that after a few years and enrolled back into school. While in school I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take Triathlon Training as a P.E. class. From there the door to endurance sports was kicked open. I immersed myself in triathlon training and also marathon training. I spent the next 10 years getting all of my "fitness" from either swimming, biking and running. On occasion I would venture into a weight room, but that was usually short-lived. Over the years I have competed in 7 marathons, with a PR of 3:03:36 and somewhere around 30-40 triathlons, to include 2 of half-ironman distance.

6 months ago I discovered CrossFit, and was introduced to the real meaning of fitness. My wife and I have been training at Oceanside CrossFit, and we have been loving it. This is the most consistent we have been with exercising ever, to include our endurance sport training. CrossFit combines elements of olympic lifting, power lifting, gymnastics, calisthenics, running/sprinting and rowing into a high-intensity strength and conditioning program. In 6 months I have seen results that I never saw over 10 years of endurance sport training. I continue to train for endurance sports. So far this year I have competed in 2 marathons, to include the Boston Marathon and also an off-road triathlon, the Xterra West Championship.

CrossFit is my new training method of choice! I have been known to skip a long run, bike or swim or two in my day. It takes a pretty extenuating circumstance to get me to skip a CrossFit workout. I am fortunate in that at work I have plenty of liberty to sneak out for a long run, swim or bike ride, so my endurance sport training hasn't suffered much. Actually it has been boosted by my CrossFit training. I'll blog more about that later.

Nutrition Philosophy: Being an endurance junkie, I pretty much toed the party-line on nutrition: Lots of carbs, little protein, some fat. It served me well enough, but I'm fortunate to have a rather slim build. Even with that being the case, ever since high school I always carried a little extra around the waist that I wasn't satisfied with. I probably hovered mostly around 10-12% body fat and peaked out at 162 lbs (I'm 5'8" tall). I may have even peaked at around 14-15% body fat at one point during college. Too much Taco Bell and cheap beer will do that to a guy.

Over the last couple of years I have taken it upon myself to read about nutrition. From textbooks to bestsellers, I have read quite a bit and consider myself to be more knowledgeable than most, certainly not a subject matter expert. One thing I always railed against was the notion of the low/no-carb diets. Remember, I'm an endurance junkie. They never made sense to me, but I never really studied them. The CrossFit community strongly advocates the Zone Diet. For 5 months we resisted the urge to "zone". Even though I was seeing some good results with CrossFit, muscle development and fat loss, I was still carrying a little extra around the middle and my wife was not satisfied with her progression in the body composition arena. So, we bit the bullet and started to Zone. I have to say that the results have been impressive. I started at 154lbs and about 10% body fat. Yesterday I weighed 146.2lbs (I'm actually not trying to lose weight) and my body fat is probably around 5%, although that's purely a ball-park estimate. I have not noticed any appreciable loss in performance even though I am consuming at least 1000 calories less than I was previously.

The best outcome of being on the Zone is that our diet has cleaned up considerably. We do not go out to eat nearly as much. We used to go out to eat at least 2-3 times per week. We also do not eat nearly as much processed foods. In all honesty, these are things we were working prior to starting the Zone, but the biggest improvements have been made in the last 5 weeks. We're not psycho about "staying in the Zone". We have our weekly cheat night and if we go out with friends we eat like normal humans, we just try to control ourselves a bit. I gotta say, I'm totally impressed and blown away that I am sticking with this.

Okay, so that's a good intro and a good way to kick of this blog. Now, must try to consistently update this bugger.