we see somebody. they come in. they work hard. they're hitting the workouts with a good amount of intensity. they're consistent. they make gains. they make gains. they make gains. they plateau. they regress. what's going on there is something we call, "failure to thrive" and what that is is a nutrition-related issue
easy zone diet, when we use constantly varied, high intensity, functional movement and combine it with a meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar kind of paradigm what we get is a jet stream of adaptation. which i think is in no small part responsible for what's going on here today.
if you are training people, you got one oar in the water if you're not talking about nutrition. nicole: greg developed this nifty little pyramid here. at the bottom of it we've got nutrition, metcon, gymnastics, weightlifting and throwing, and sport. each level builds on the level below it. if your nutrition sucks, these things will not be where they could be if it were more solid.
greg: paleo is the easy paradigm. meats and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar. if it's in the aisles of the grocery store, just don't eat it. there's a better way than paleo, even and that is to not just look at the quality of the foods, but to simultaneously look at the quantity. all you need is one hand and one eye. now if you have one of each, you're in good shape. you can follow the zone diet. simply divide your plate at every meal into three equal sections on one-third of the plate you put some low-fat protein. now what about the other two-thirds of the plate?
you fill it with low-glycemic load carbohydrates. here's the good part: you have to add back fat. and the more elite athlete you are, the more fat you have to add back. we're fans of the zone [diet] because it does give me accurate and precise prescription for caloric intake and—more importantly—the exact levels of macronutrient that i can start at. not that you're optimally going to be effective at 40-30-30 or 5 blocks of protein, carbs, and fat but that i know what it is that you have been eating and can then make knowledgable, enlightened decisions as to how to tweak your diet and look at the effect. when we move from paleo to something zone-like, we actually develop--
we put the nutritional prescription on a quantifiable basis. we're turning nutrition from religion to emperical science. and i learned the lessons as to what happens when you tweak these knobs. nicole: optimized performance. you need to know exactly what you're putting in your body, exactly how much of it, and exactly the results that you're getting out. you know nutrition's not an either/or kind of a thing. it's not quality or quantity, it can and it should be both. greg: and there's a whole camp of physicians, nutritionists, exercise phys guys that understand that excessive consumption of refined carbohydrate is the real 800-pound gorilla of metabolic derangement that is killing americans by the millions. gary: you have to match calories in to calories out.
if you take 20 calories a day and stick it in your fat tissue without burning it, you will gain 20 pounds in a decade. 20 calories a day times 365 days in a year times ten years divided by 3500 which is roughly the amount of calories in a pound of fat you end up with 21 pounds in a decade. even if you're the guinness world record holder in calorie counting, you have no idea how much you're expending. we're just guessing. considering this, the key question isn't why do some of us get fat, the key question is if this is how we maintain our weight, why don't we all get fat? or half of us look fat and the other half look anorexic because the mathematics works both ways, right?
greg: what's causing heart disease is not dietary fat intake, but excessive consumption of carbohydrate. we're eating right now about 150 pounds of sugar per man, woman, and child, annually. i'll give you another easy way to eat if you want to get to the same end point. these are all just models for effective nutritional strategies for avoiding heart disease, death, and misery. if it's got a food label on it, it's not food. like how many grams of fat, and sodium. if it's got that on it, it isn't food. nicole: if you're not sure what's in it, if cockroaches won't eat it, like twinkies, you probably shouldn't either.
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