(Processed) Carbs are the devil!

I have lost 120 pounds by doing things that might seem really simple. I stopped eating processed carbs, and I consistently worked out. There. No Magic. But you already knew all this right? There is no hack that you need, or special shortcut because check this out - if you could eat like garbage and your body still was healthy, it would mean your body was broken. Your body is doing exactly the thing it was designed to do! It is storing fat because you are giving it too much easy energy. So why don't you commend your body for a moment for preserving all that awesome energy and stop beating yourself up.

Disclaimer...I am not a doctor. Just giving you my experience. None of this is medical advice.

Ok, so not ALL carbs are the devil, got it? Vegetables are mostly carbohydrate. No one is saying that if you eat broccoli you are going to store excess fat. That is not the way it worked in my experience losing 120 pounds anyway. Listen, I know it is hard to lose weight, but most of the reason is not because you do not understand what to do, you just do not understand how to do it. A lot of that just comes down to psychology and habits, and learning to manage willpower effectively. I know that is not going to land on an instagram post, but you are smarter than that. That is why you are here, reading, and trying to learn how I got from 285 pounds down to 165. I did it like this:

1. I started doing CrossFit

2. I thought CrossFit was horrible, and I wanted to make it hurt less, so I started eating better.

Sometimes something we do in our lives can act as what is called a "forcing function" - it forces something else to change simply by it's existence. So when I started doing burpees, and wallball shots, and thrusters and pull-ups, and all that jazz, I realized that my diet was working in the opposite direction and I was not making it easier for myself in the gym. So rather than starting with my diet, I started with working out, and then I went to the diet...but I do not necessarily recommend this if you can find another forcing function. Read on for examples...

So one forcing function that is common is a major upcoming event, like a high school reunion or a wedding. You can leverage that to be able to fit into a dress or suit and ride that motivation wave. In order to get your 40 sized waist into a 36 size set of jeans, it's time to lay off the bread, pasta, cookies, cake, and basically anything that is made with flour. I like simple principles. So here are two of mine:

1. Eat Real Food

2. Eat Meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar

So the first one means that if it grew out of the ground, or it had eyes you can eat it. If something has been so processed that it does not bear any resemblance to the original thing, then you should not put it in your mouth. There is no nugget on a chicken. I like to eat steak, chicken, salmon, bacon, and make broiled spinach in a pan with some grass fed butter and a pinch of salt. cooked spinach has magnesium, which is awesome for all kinds of things, and other leafy greens have that as well. I hate eating raw leafy greens, so the good news is that cooked spinach actually makes the magnesium more bioavailable according to Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She is awesome. Highly recommend you listen to her.

The second one is the CrossFit diet. Many people who do CrossFit do not realize that if they are not eating the CrossFit diet, they are not fully doing CrossFit. As Coach Glassman says "You are rowing with one oar in the water" and you will enter a jetstream of adaptation if you just put the other oar in the water. I experienced this personally. When I first started and was 120 pounds heavier, I could not even hang on the pull up bar and I thought my arms were going to snap out of their sockets. I could not even run 1/4 mile, and everything always hurt after a workout. I would stuff my shins into a giant bucket of ice water in order to try to manage the shin splints on days where we had running in the workout. I am incredibly grateful to CrossFit La Verne for all of the incredible coaches they have and their care and warmth to me over the years. They brought me from being pre-diabetic to being the fittest I have ever been and I am 52 years old.

When you are reaching for that sandwich, consider getting something that does not have bread. You can go protein-style and leave the bun out of it. That will have the most dramatic impact on your weight loss, but here is an important thing to know - you are going to go through something that is called the "Keto Flu" which is basically an electrolyte imbalance causing you to experience symptoms like headache, fatigue, depression, grogginess, irritability, etc. But don't worry - I have been through it enough times to know that it takes about 3 days before you start to feel really good. So what is happening is that your body is becoming "fat adapted" meaning that it can utilize fat as an energy source again, because that mechanism was suppressed by constantly shoving easy energy into your gullet. When you stop doing that, your body has to rebuild that mechanism and that is part of the Keto Flu experience.

I hope this was helpful. Stop eating processed carbs. Cheers!

Craig