Embrace the Suck by Stephen Madden

Author:Stephen Madden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

6

Diet and Body Image

It’s telling that a book about CrossFit would contain a seven-thousand-word chapter on fatigue, pain, and nausea and a chapter half that length on nutrition. Because while mountains of ever-changing information about diet and nutrition and their relationship to health and performance are published each year, the basic tenet of nutrition in the CrossFit world is one I’ve already mentioned: don’t eat shitty food. If you absolutely had to embellish that nugget, you could add this: eat just the right amount of the good stuff. As CrossFit founder Greg Glassman puts it in the very first sentence of his brilliantly succinct “CrossFit in 100 Words,” “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.”

These are words we all could live by, CrossFitters or not. Because whether you want to lose a few pounds to look good at a wedding or get all Biggest Loser to regain your life, nothing works like a calorie-restricted diet based on plant foods and lean proteins. This isn’t anything new: high school wrestlers, body builders, models, actresses, and magazine editors with upcoming TV appearances have known for generations that if you need to drop a few pounds quickly, you stop eating carbs, be they processed, like pretzels, or even whole grain, like brown rice, and tuck into a limited amount of salmon, skinless chicken breast, kale, lettuce, and tomatoes—but not potatoes, bread, cereals, even carrots and apples. Take it easy on the salt and drink a ton of water. Maybe you use a little bit of olive oil and vinegar to add flavor, but nothing processed, and nothing with sugar. Just have to have a drink? Try red wine but stay way away from beer.

For someone who has spent a lifetime being traumatized by being a fat kid, you’d think I would have been more concerned about all this stuff. But when it comes to diet, I’ve always been way over in the liberal arts wing of the fitness world, approaching sports and my various workouts with a combination of rationalization and I’m-just-an-English-major ignorance. Exercise was all just part of a complete life. No need to get carried away by obsessing over my diet. Besides, I worked out so much, I could eat whatever I wanted, right? Those arguments work up until about age twenty-five; after that, I bought progressively larger pants and tried to not go too nuts with my bête noir: sweets.

When I went through my CrossFit certification class, I was shocked by how much time the instructors spent talking about diet. You’d lose weight, they told us, which would certainly make pull-ups easier, and you’d feel good, too. You would develop something we are all proud of but went largely unspoken: the CrossFit Body. Muscles, ripped and hard. CrossFitters spend a lot of time and effort developing their muscles, so it’s little wonder that a whole lot of skin is visible in most boxes.

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