Wednesday 3.1.2023
“CYOA”
For Time:
100 Wall Balls (20/14)
300 Double Unders
80 Ring Dips
Nutrition of the Week:
Intuitive eating vs Tracking
Consistency over time is the most important factor when it comes to improving your nutrition. But what about intuitive eating? Shouldn’t you just be able to know how much you should eat by listening to your body? Sometimes, clients will feel guilty if they aren’t ‘perfect’ or like they are being ‘obsessive’ when it comes to tracking macros. Then they will try intuitive eating and struggle because sometimes they will fuel appropriately and sometimes, they won’t. The truth is, it’s really hard to know what your intake is if you aren’t tracking it. It’s also difficult to tell if your sleep, energy, recovery, and performance are improving if you aren’t tracking that either. You can’t draw any connections between nutrition and performance or really get anything dialed in without that data. A lot of us came to CrossFit for that reason-we track performance over time using the whiteboard and by repeating workouts so that you can see if you are improving your work capacity.
Research also supports the idea of consistency over time bringing you success when you are trying to make change (in this study, weight loss). The study shows that you get the best results when you are tracking your food consistently. The participants in this study who were MOST successful were NOT perfect, in fact, the group with the most success tracked over 66% of the total days possible. I think this is really encouraging, because it means that if you are tracking even just 5 out of every 7 days, you can still make progress. I also think intuitive eating can be great for some people, but not while also chasing body composition or performance goals. This is why periodizing your nutrition over the course of the year to match your training is usually the best approach because you can build in periods where you don’t have to track as closely. I’ll talk more about that next week! Here’s the link to the study: The Effect of Adherence to Dietary Tracking on Weight Loss: Using HLM to Model Weight Loss over Time – PubMed (nih.gov)