So I’ve been having some issues with my hip and I haven’t squatted heavy since… the end of February? It’s been a while.

A little background, while trying to loose weight I was trying to get stronger and starting doing a 3×5 rep linear progression program for squatting. Basically squat 3sets of 5reps 3 times a week and add 5lbs to the bar each time. This ran out at about 185, where I had I begin adding 2.5lbs to the bar each time. I stalled at 200lbs.

Then I got hurt and haven’t lifted for almost 12 weeks, that’s long time off.

Last week I starting eating more, I mean a lot more, and began the linear progression again, started at 160 and added 10lbs to the bar for each workout. Today I squatted 200 for 3 sets of 5 and it felt easy.

It’s amazing what eating properly for the task at hand will do.

So last week we had a dinner for a fellow at my gym who’s off to deployment in Afghanistan.  Good luck and stay safe Lugo!

A funny thing happened at that dinner, we all got to talking and no one seemed to realize just how heavy and out of shape I was a year ago.  So here’s my story and how I did it.  Remember this is just a year ago and I only started Crossfit Jun 1st of 2009.

January 11, 2009 – Cassie’s B-day!

A year ago my niece Cassandra was born. Aside from this being a wonderful day, there’s a wonderfully horrible picture of me at the hospital.

Still, I didn’t do much about my weight for a few months as you can see. This is me a month later.

Until I looked back at these pictures I didn’t realize how tired and bloated I looked.  I felt it too. It hurt to just walk up and down the stairs sometimes.  I’d wake up with awful ankle pain and I was just weak. I was addicted to junk food: a normal TV viewing snack would be a half  bag of Doritos and/or way too much ice cream. Sometimes donuts or pastries would pass for breakfast. I don’t know how I ate like that.

And it wasn’t my wife’s fault at all (as she points out); I always snuck the junk into the shopping cart, despite her best efforts.

Fast forward a few months. I decided to make a change in my diet. I starting hitting the salads more at lunch and generally trying to cut back on junk food.

I look a little better but not much. Changing my diet just wasn’t doing enough, but I didn’t change it enough, I was still heavy on the starchy carbs and breads.

June 1, 2009 – Crossfit!

I decided to start the Crossfit work outs (WODs) on June 1st so I would have a definite marker and reference date. Those of you who know me know I can be a little more than OCD about that kind of thing. I was 227# and I started doing the WODs at home on my own.  I slowly gathered the following equipment to create my own little garage gym:

• 300lbs Olympic weight set
• Pull up bar made from 3/8” black pipe and installed by my dad and me. Also ordered a set of JumpStretch.com resistance bands for assistance with pull ups.
• Squat stands built by my dad and me.
• 25# dumbbell.
• 10# medicine ball.
• Jump rope.
• I live 1/4 mile from an all weather 400m track. Thanks Fair Lawn High.

What is Crossfit? Crossfit is a training methodology combining running, basic gymnastics (pull ups, ring work),  calisthenics (push ups, air squats, lunges), functional compound barbell movements (squat, deadlift, press), and olympic weight lifting movements (snatch, clean, jerk).  Smash all these exercises together and make the workout timed and you have a very high intensity workout that not only trashes you but makes you stronger and burns fat like butter.

An example of a Crossfit workout:

Fran:

• 21 pull ups,  21 thrusters (a front squat directly into an over head press) at 95#
• 15 pull ups, 15 thrusters
• 9 pull ups, 9 thrusts.

Doesn’t sound too hard right? Try doing it all in 5 minutes or less!

I followed the Crossfit.com WODs without missing for two months. When I started, I couldn’t do a pull up and 10 push ups hurt a lot. Running was actually painful on my joints. At the same time I tried to implement a grain-free Zone diet.  The Zone attempts to setup a caloric balance of 40% carbs, 30% protein and 30% fats as well as being low calorie. The the Zone “prescription” attempts to give to a caloric goal based on body fat and activity level.

This was me after two months on the Zone, I was down to about 205# or so.  I was eating mostly fruits and veggies, chicken, milk, cheese, some steaks and other lean meats as well as hoards of almonds (the Zone’s stable fat source). I looked and felt better but it still wasn’t perfect.  I was hungry all the time, I mean ALL THE TIME!  I’d eat and be hungry an hour later.  Something wasn’t right.

Why not just Gold’s or Bally’s or some other “Globo Gym”?

In August I found my gym, Guerrilla Fitness: Crossfit Montclair. GFCM is a Crossfit affiliate gym which means they train only in the Crossfit methods. “Why not just go to a ‘Globo Gym’ and do the workouts, or do them at home?” you say.  Well for one it gets REALLY cold in the winter here in NJ, and even though I still do limited weight training in the garage, it’s just too damn cold to workout outside!

Secondly, you just can’t do Crossfit style workouts at a Globo Gym. Have you ever walked away from your station just to go to the bathroom at one of those places? By the time you get back someone has taken your station and has started their own workout.  Forget trying to do a workout for time that utilize a pull up bar, plyo box and barbell.  Every workout will be ruined.  Aside from that, most Globo Gyms don’t like people doing Olympic lifts (snatch, clean and jerk, etc), ad consider them “dangerous.”

So I pay a lot more to workout at facility with like-minded individuals, coaches who actually coach you during the workouts (how much does Person Train cost at a Globo?)  and a community that shares their experiences with each other.  Not to mention working out in a class based session makes you push soooo much harder to than you would on your own.  The first day I went to GFCM I was gassed, whipped out, DONE! I pushed harder than I ever did or would on my own. That is worth the price of admission.

Not to mention all the great people I’ve met genuine, nice, honest people. Everyone there wants to see the other person go faster, lift more and succeed. You will NEVER say that about a Globo, where iPod wearing “curls for the girls” ass hats don’t give a rat’s ass about that new person record you just put up in the squat or 400m run. GFCM really has something special and a group of great coaches and members.

Ok so here I am at about 205# during my first month at GFCM: notice the sweat ;-D.  I’m loving it, but my weight loss has stopped. What the hell happened?  Through Crossfit I got turned onto something called the Paleolithic Diet. The book is based on the research of Dr. Loren Cordain.

The Paleo Diet, a.k.a CaveMan diet a.k.a grains, dairy and processed foods are bad for you.

I learned about Crossfit’s many seminars, one of which is on nutrition. The nutrition seminar was given by Robb Wolf a former biochemist who worked closely with Dr. Cordain and many other nutrition experts. He now owns and operates NorCal Strength and Conditioning which has given him almost 10 years of real world, hands-on experience with different nutrition plans and training.

I got pointed in the direction of the Paleo Diet and I actually bought and read the book, It’s a good book, easy read, but a bit repetitive. All in all the Paleo diet boils down the following.

1. Eat your meat. Locally raised, grass fed or wild game is best followed by your run of the mill lean meats. This has to do with the Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio in the fat. Omega 6 is bad, Omega-3 is good. When animals eat grass and plants they have more Omega-3, when they are force fed grains and corn they have more Omega-6.
2. Eat your fish. Wild caught is the best.
3. Eat your eggs. Yes they are good for you, yolk and all. Locally raised, pastured is best, omega-3 enriched is good as well.
4. Eat your veggies. Leafy greens and broccoli.
5. Eat some fruit, not a ton, limit fruit to a few servings per day. Fruit has sugar, sugar can slow weight loss.
6. Eat your berries!  Blue, black, straw and raspberries are among the most wonderful foods. Eat them up by the hand full!
7. Eat your FATS! Olive oil, coconut oil (best for cooking), almonds, walnuts, macadamia, Brazil, chestnuts are all good for you.  Peanuts and Cashews are NOT NUTS! They are legumes.
8. Avoid grains, dairy and legumes.

So 1-7 sounds pretty standard, but what about #8. No grains, no dairy, and what the hell is a legume?

• Grains and wheat can wreak havoc on your GI tract. Most people are gluten (the protein in all grains) intolerant to some degree. What does this do? It can cause gut irritation which leads to a whole host of autoimmune disorders. Not to mention grains are super high in carbs and as we’ll see below carbs make you fat.
• Dairy can also cause some autoimmune issues in some people. For myself, once I gave up the dairy my sinus problems went away completely. Maybe I could have saved a trip to the O.R. if I had known this two years ago.
• Dairy also has a freaky response on your blood insulin levels. We’ll learn about insulin below, but long story short, dairy spikes the crap out of your insulin levels. This is ok if you want to grow, as in muscle or as in a child. But if you’re sitting on your butt all day long, those insulin spikes are gonna make your fat cells grow more than anything else.
• Legumes. What? Legumes are beans  (kidney, soy, green, black, re-fried), peanuts and cashews. Legumes have an abundance of what scientists call anti-nutrients. Anti-nutrients are chemicals that bind with nutrient receptors and block the absorption of important nutrients in your gut.  Some even contain proteins that are poisonous unless those they are completely denatured. Denaturing happens when you expose proteins to heat, hence why you have to cook the crap out of beans. Just stay away from them.

So basically the Paleo diet says that our bodies evolved to eat certain foods, meats and veggies. We forced ourselves to start consuming grains about 10,000 years ago. This is not nearly long enough for our bodies to adapt.

Since you are here to see how I lost weight I’ll leave it at that. I dropped the grains and I lost a few more pounds.  I dropped dairy and I lost about 10lbs in a month.

By the end of November I was hovering around 190#.  December was a pure Paleo month until the holidays hit.  I lost a few more pounds and got down to 180# by Jan 1. Most of this was helped by going pretty low carb, less than 5% of my calories from carbs.

Carbs are bad? But you need energy right?

I’m not going to get in to this too much but here’s the gist of it.

Fat cells (the stuff that makes us fat) grow when nutrients are forced into them. Insulin is the hormone that is responsible for this. Insulin levels go up when we eat all foods, but most of all carbohydrates. So there’s a boat load of science behind this but the long story short is, if you’re trying to loose fat, you want to keep your insulin levels as low as possible for two reasons, 1) you want to minimize how much new fat you store, and 2) fat cells can’t release fatty acids to be burned as fuel if your insulin levels are elevated.

I find that I do really well on a low carb diet. Some people don’t, you have to experiment and see what works best for you.

A year later…

So here I am now, a year later and 55+ pounds lost.  Right now I’m trying a different approach to eating.  Eat when I’m hungry, mostly protein and fat and some veggies. If I’m still hungry a little later, I eat some more.  Zone block and calorie and counting is great when you start but it gets old. We’ll see how I progress over the next few months.  My goals are to lean out just a bit more, try to hit about 10% body fat,  get my 3×5 rep squat up to 200#,  my 3×5 rep Press to 125# and  my deadlift up to 300#.  I’m hoping to hit this by the spring but we’ll see.

In the coming months I’m going to be doing the following:

• Crossfit Level 1 certification seminar.
• Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength Seminar.
• Max Effort Black Box Programming Seminar.

I hope to learn a ton and one day actually use all this useless knowledge to get myself to a place I want to be with my fitness and maybe help others along the way.

So that’s me in a year. I’m currently 177# and about 12% body fat. Remember this isn’t even a year of Crossfitting.  Stay tuned to my blog for more random articles, recipes and tidbits of knowledge.  Check back in June for a full year’s update.

The biggest thanks of all goes to my wife Carlea.  She’s put up with hours of me “blah blah blahing” about Crossfit, Zone, Paleo, you name it.  She’s dealt with my neurotic eating schedule and habits and crazy gym hours.  I couldn’t have done it without her support. She’s even dropped a few hidden pounds just from going mostly Paleo. She’s Italian and we haven’t had a pasta dinner in almost a year! I’m not sure how or why she hasn’t killed me yet but I appreciate it.

This article was taken from the December 15th post at heartscanblog.blogspot.com

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/overweight-hungry-diabetic-and-fat-free.html

Let me tell you about my low-fat experience from 20 years ago.

At the time, I was living in Cleveland, Ohio, and served on the faculty at a large metropolitan university-affiliated hospital, supervising fellows-in-training and developing high-tech cath lab procedures like directional athererectomy and excimer laser coronary angioplasty. (Yes, another life.)

I was concerned about personal heart disease risk, though I knew next to nothing about lipids and coronary risk prediction outside of the little I learned in training and what the drug industry promoted.

I heard Dr. Dean Ornish talk while attending the American College of Cardiology meetings in Atlanta. Dr. Ornish spoke persuasively about the dangers of fat in the diet and how he “reversed” coronary disease using a low-fat, no added oils, no meat, vegetarian diet that included plenty of whole grains. So I thought I’d give it a try.

I eliminated all oils; I removed all meat, eggs, and fish from my diet. I shunned all nuts. I ate only low-fat products like low-fat yogurt and cottage cheese; and focused on vegetables, fruit, and whole grains. Beans and brown or wild rice were a frequent staple. I loved oatmeal cookies–low-fat, of course!

After one year of this low-fat program, I had gained a total of 31 lbs, going from 155 lbs to 186 lbs. I reassessed some basic labs:

HDL 28 mg/dl
Triglycerides 336 mg/dl
Blood sugar 151 mg/dl (fasting)

I became a diabetic. All through this time, I was also jogging. I ran on the beautiful paths along the Chagrin River in suburban Cleveland for miles north and south. I ran 5 miles per day most days of the week.

It was diabetes that hit me alongside the head: I was eating low-fat meticulously, exercising more than 90% of the population, yet I got fat and diabetic!

I have since changed course in diet. Last time I checked, my lipid values on NO statin agent:

HDL 67 mg/dl
Triglycerides 57 mg/dl
Blood sugar 91 mg/dl

That was my lesson that fat restriction is a destructive, misguided notion. The data since then have confirmed that restricting total fat is unnecessary, even undesirable, when fat calories are replaced by carbohydrate calories.

Pretty bold words right?  For those that don’t know fructose is a sugar found naturally in fruit. Apples, oranges, bananas, etc all have fructose, but they also have fiber.

The evil scientists and chemists at the food companies noticed that fructose is an order sweeter than most other sugars. So they figure, we’ll use less to sweeten our food.  Problem is they’ve taken a naturally occurring substance out of it’s element and it’s killing us.

Here is a link to an hour long lecture given by Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology.

The basic gist is that fructose when consumed without fiber (i.e. in sports drinks as high fructose corn syrup) it displays many of the same effects as alcohol in the body. The good meaty stuff is at 45 minutes in where he describes what happens to fructose when it’s processed in the liver.

Ok so if you’re at this site odds are you’ve met me and asked “how’d you loose the weight?” Well this is my small attempt to put all the knowledge I’ve learned over the last 6 months into one place that’s easy for a newbie to digest. Come back soon for links and posts explaining some of the training and nutrition that’s changed my life. Most of what I’ve learned has come from three main places.

-Crossfit.com – Crossfit is the main training system I use. It’s all about constatntly varied, high intensity, functional movements. Routine is the enemy, machines are for chumps.

-Starting Strength Wiki- Starting Strength is one of a series of books writen by one of the best strength coaches in the U.S., Mark Rippetoe.

-Robb Wolf – is currently working on a book that’s all about the Paleo lifestyle and how to integrate many advanced dietary ideas into a normal and performance based lifestyles.