Centric Fitness

Time to re-start my system and break the sugar addictions for good. I was challenged by a client to give up sugar for her Lent that starts today. I LOVE being challenged and I love being 100% fully committed to something. This challenge will be hard in the beginning due to my love for dark chocolate and sugar! I am still trying to figure out if I am really craving it? Or just eating sugar and dark chocolate because its a bad habit. I will keep you posted as I progress over the next 46 days. I will be staying Paleo, just getting cleaning it up even more.

I will be following Whole30 Success Guide for my 46 days. The Whole30 Success Guide was created by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig.  ”Whole9’s original program designed to change your life in 30 days. Think of it as a short-term nutritional reset, designed to help you restore a healthy metabolism, heal your digestive tract, calm systemic inflammation and put an end to unhealthy cravings, habits, and relationships with food. Since 2009, thousands of people have used our program as a jump-start to changing the way they eat for the rest of their lives. To get started on your Whole30 program, check out our new Whole30 Success Guide.”

In my post, Paleo Changed My Life I described how I was exercising to earn cheat meals and how that made me feel. I also described how I learned about The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson and The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf. In this post I am excited to share with you how my 30 day Paleo Challenge went and what happened with the rest of 2011.

As I mentioned in my last post I pretty much tried every way of eating: Atkins, Body for Life, challenges at gyms, marathon training diets, vegetarian, and extremely strict 13 week figure competition diets. Like all diets, they did work. I did lose body fat, inches and scale weight. Sad thing is that after the diet ended, so did the great numbers that I worked so hard for.  Lucky for me and my clients following my nutritional advice I discovered Paleo!

I wasn’t nervous heading into my 30 day Paleo challenge due to some of the crazier stuff I’ve tried in my past. Heck my family and I survived my 13 week competition diets. Strict low-fat, no sugar, chicken, fish, egg whites, mood swings, starvation, fatigue and insane workout schedule was more than enough to prepare me for my Paleo challenge. I was allowed to EAT real food and eat till I was full! Great whole foods like grass-fed beef, bacon, whole eggs, green leafy veggies and some fruit and nuts. Use healthy organic fats like Ghee, Olive & Coconut Oil. All I had to do was give up all my low-fat organic bread, pizza, rice cakes, crackers, chips, pretzels, candy, peanut butter, and milk chocolate. On paper it seemed easy… the reality was much different!

The hardest part of the challenge for me was going to be cooking. I hated to cook and took every shortcut I could find. My old breakfast was an easy meal to prepare – egg whites and oatmeal with peanut butter in it. Lunch was frozen organic vegetarian pizza’s. For dinner my husband joked that my night to cook meant takeout. So to say I hated cooking was an understatement!

Side note – July, 2009 I competed in my first figure competition. As I mentioned before the diet was super strict. However the diet wasn’t the worst part for me. Instead it was the horrible advice I followed on the day of the show. My trainers told me to eat all the sugar and candy I could on the day of the show, “to help make your veins really pop”.  At the time it made sense, plus it gave me a ticket to load up on sugar. However telling someone to eat all the sugar they wanted all day after being hungry and junk food deprived for 13 weeks is pretty insane. For 13 weeks I dreamed of all the candy I was going to eat and I thought my dreams had come true when I was finally allowed to eat candy for a whole day. Sadly that dream turned into a nightmare when I started sugar bingeing after the show ended.

Knowing my battle with sugar and candy over the past 18 months I decided that my 30 day Paleo challenge must include a serving of 85% or higher organic dark chocolate every day. I didn’t believe that I could really make it through the challenge without it. I was already giving up pizza, my number one food so how could I also give up sugar? I knew the “rules” I set up for myself ahead of time would be easy to follow. I am great when I am locked into something. Every day I would measure out a serving of dark chocolate and put it in baggies to keep me accountable.

The first 21 days of the challenge were the hardest for me. I was tired and felt like I was eating too much all the time. I was eating 3 meals plus 2 snacks a day. I was also concerned my fat intake was too high from all the bacon I was eating every morning. My energy dropped and my workouts suffered. I just wanted to come home, eat breakfast and lounge around. However that wasn’t an option. Like everyone, I had to take care of my family, train my clients and COOK! Aggghhh cooking, as I already mentioned I was not a fan of that! The reason I was feeling so terrible was because my body was detoxing and healing from the inside out.  I was switching my body to burn my own fat for fuel instead of the carbs I would put in my body every few hours.

The best advice I received was to plan meals, shop and cook ahead of time. When you are prepared it is really hard to fail. An excuse such as, “I have nothing to eat so I will just go have some chocolate covered pretzels for lunch” wouldn’t cut it. When my husband was home I had him grill a bunch of hamburgers, chicken, and steak so I was ready every day.

At the conclusion of my 30 days I knew I was 100% hooked and would continue to follow a Paleo/Primal nutritional lifestyle. I felt better, my body fat was going back down, my stomach wasn’t bloated every night and it was so easy! My skin was clear, my nails and hair got stronger, my attitude and outlook were greatly improved. As I mentioned in my post, Paleo Changed My Life I set mini goals of how I wanted to look for each event throughout the year. After my 30 days I forgot all about them. I didn’t need them anymore because I knew that I was going to eat Paleo and stay in the best “non-show” shape of my life. I went from a person who ordered out way too many times a week to someone who cooks breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Going out to eat now is rare, especially because we know the food we have at home is so much healthier.  I love planning and cooking for my family knowing they are getting the best whole foods at every meal.

From what I’ve discovered most people find CrossFit, then the Paleo diet. For me it was the opposite. The better I felt, the more I wanted to learn. I spent insane amounts of time researching Paleo and reading people success stories. I was blown away that I wasn’t the only one having life changing experiences following a Paleo diet. It was during my research on the Paleo diet and lifestyle that I discovered my new passion – CrossFit.

Being a personal trainer I was already having great success training my clients with functional movements and high intensity training for months before learning about CrossFit. Through research I learned the CrossFit prescription is “constantly varied, high intensity, functional movement.” Turns out a pretty great fit for me since that was already my style of training.

In my next post I will share my passion for CrossFit and getting Level 1 Certified the same time as  Bob Harper from NBC’s The Biggest Loser!