Mad Season | Week 76 Weight Loss

Day 545. 213.5 pounds lost.

Did I ever say I had my nutrition “on lock”? Yes…. Yes, I did. I mentioned this during my interview on the CrossFit Podcast. I genuinely thought I had.  After all, I had been eating all the right things for over 15 months, I knew precisely what foods to be eating, and I thought I had it all together. Except……… I did not.  Taking my Level 1 brought this to my attention, and it probably saved me (going forward) from much unnecessary suffering. So what was I doing wrong?

Through much of May and June, I increased the intensity at the gym; I was paying extra close attention to the foods I was eating and making sure I was working out at a minimum of 5 days a week.  Why was I not dropping pounds? I should have been? I was spinning my tires for weeks, but I reluctantly just figured it was another one of those slow periods that has happened many times. Legitimately there have been weeks when I wasn’t losing and then all the sudden I would drop 3-5 pounds, BOOM all the sudden. It wasn’t anything unusual. However, this slow period seemed to be going on for quite some time. I was also feeling fatigued and a myriad of other oddities.  I hadn’t changed any of the foods I was eating; it indeed was a mystery.

Sunday afternoon during a session of the Level 1 called “Nutrition,” the coaches started talking about the importance of nutrition and introduced me something called “The Zone.” I had heard of it but didn’t have much knowledge and certainly had not previously applied the concepts.  It essentially puts foods into “blocks; specifying balanced portions of carbohydrates and protein at every meal. As I am studying the board, my head started making all these calculations and I am spinning through visual images of what I had been eating and comparing it to the diagrams of what I SHOULD have been eating and the math wasn’t adding up. I knew right away what I was doing wrong. I almost wanted to cry. How could I have been doing it wrong for so long without catching it? The culprit? Too much fruit and way too many nuts.

In the beginning, losing weight was pretty easy. All I had to do was eat the right foods, and the weight dropped without too much hair pulling for the most part.  Losing hundreds of pounds makes the body change in more ways than I can describe. During this process my bodies’ nutritional needs have also changed; something I never took into account.

I was sitting there half stunned. In a matter of 45 minutes, it was as if every single dot along Athena’s road of frustration was connected and it explained why I was having trouble. If I hadn’t learned anything else, what I learned on the nutrition side was worth its weight in gold and one of the first things I implemented upon my return.

I’m not too proud to say I have everything figured out. I am learning as I go.  I will write another post on the takeaways from L-1 but the nutritional side? I think I will start kicking ass again. *smile*…..  Eating the right foods is only part of the solution.  Now I have to take what I learned about eating the right foods and fine tune it.

Lovingly,

Bean