Eat to perform.

Feb 18th


" Exercise is king, and nutrition is queen"


Jack LaLanne



WOD "Annie"



50-40-30-20-10 reps for time: situps and double unders


Time: 8:28( blister formed on butt from the friction of the abmats)

Not much of a workout if that all it is. Need more.
45 min. on rollers

Old Jack Lalanne at 93 years old, has some good validation when it comes to fitness and living the part. Invented many of the gym equipment we have today, like the "Smith machine" leg extention, and pully machines. Jack once owned 200 health clubs then was sold and is now the Bally's total fitness organization.

Jack has always been fit most of his life, but over the years he also spent a great deal of time and devotion to proper eating. He did not promote and special diet, that crops up by the week, he just promoted the injestion of just plan real food. It was just that simple. If it was in a box, package, can, or frozen he did not eat it. He did promote the use of juicers to make drinks out of fresh vegtables and fruits, Jack would say," if man made it, don't eat it" " if it tastes real good, spit it out" .

What I use for a diet has always been based on what was required to perform at the level of physical tasks at the time. When I was running long distance races, some lasting, 12 hours or more, I ate mostly carbs or high density foods. There was not a lot of data out there as to a proper diet for that type of physical activity so it was trial and mostly error to get the right food so you did not fall apart. Now running or exercising for hours each day allows you to eat any kind of diet you wanted and never get fat. Some days I ate a bag of choclate chip cookies as a snack. Now was that good nutrition? Hell no! If I had followed a solid diet based on natural foods I believe my performance would had been better, but more over, my recovery would have been much faster. However, like most runners in the 70-90's , we all believed we eat anything we wanted as our exercise would insulate us for the health problems, like type 2 diabetis, high blood pressure and high cholisterol. Well we all now, we where dead wrong in some cases.

When I got into weight lifting and discontinued the excessive cardio, started to gain weight( what a suprise!). I realized I had to drasticly alter my eating habits and maintain a defined body fat and weight standards I never had to do before. I must have read scores of books on diets and nutrition that was out at the time. Even today, I still read the latest diet book, even just for a laught. Here is what found in regard to diets and eating for performance;

• Over 10% body fat male and 15% body fat female.......you are heading for fatness.


• No sugar if you can avoid it! biggest effect in developing diabetis and instant weight gain. however they put sugar in almost every thing that is processed, packaged or prepared for you. Kill them with kindness. Hidden sugar such as mannitol, are passed over as sugar that is used in precess foods. You want to be lean, get rid of all the sugar in all your diet.


• the more you force your body to produce insulin, the faster you age.


• Don't start a crash or one of the speical application diets like Atkins, or South Beach warrior diets and in most cases you will only follow it for short time periods. They are all based on the same outlook; restriction of food based on some catchy discipline. Just eat real food.


• You don't need a lot of expensive worthless supplements. Maybe a multi vitamin and some whey protein.


• Weight loss systems such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig will work for a short time and those systems have gotten a little smarter and developed to look at managing eating habits, eating volume, and body fat compostion. But they want you as a long term or repeat costomer, as that is how they stay in business. They sell food and advise so you have to be in bed with them forever. Just recently Christy Ally, who was the poster girl for Jenny Craig celeb weigh loss of 75 lbs, has put the old feed bag back on and has gained a bunch of weigh back on her fat ass. She was fired from her contract, as it is not good for their diet business, but its just an up glaring example of the success of that busines.
  
• Fasting, no carb diets and lap band, will make you loose a ton of weight fast, but you just loose too much good muscle in the process. Those are drastic measures to loose a lot of weight, in some cases to save your life, and that should be the only reason to go that way.


• You don't need to eat too much prior to training but you must injest something to balance blood sugar especially if you are training first thing in the morning. However, the post meal is the prime time to eat to recover. Lots of protein.


• We eat too many grains and starches in our diets. Now that the prices of wheat is up, you have reason to cut back. Well they taste good as carbs convert to simple sugars when eaten and they are pushed on us by Agro-business via the food pyramid. Your friendly goverment, who sleeps with big businss, wants you to eat more corn, wheat, soy, rice to help out the farmer and the food processing business. I don't eliminate them from my diet, I just eat good quality, non precess grains, and moderate volumes consistant with my calorie requirements that day.
  
• I eat a very high protein diet mostly all day, starting with breakfast. The first meal is whey protein drink made with water. As I train with high intency most of the time, muscle breakdown being the end result, requires good protein for repair. Something I failed to do in the past. ( I was thin-fat at 150 lbs) . once again, the volume is based on work capacity of that day...work hard, eat hard. No work only eat to your resting metabolism.


• We eat too much period. Eat for performance based on output of energy. Work hard-eat hard. start to measure and weigh what you are eating and you will be shocked as to how much calories each day you are taking in. We tend to gage our intake by the containment area such as plates, and bowels.


• Drink water based also on energy output losses. cold conditions require just as much water intake as summer if not more.


• If you can't prononce it don't eat it