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.