WHAT CAN I EAT?

Thankfully, we will be doing most of the work for you and providing you with handy little charts that tell you what you can eat and how much of it to eat. We recommend eating meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no (refined) sugar.  Pretty straightforward right? You wouldn’t believe how difficult some people make this.  If the food you are about to put in your mouth does not fall into one of those categories, stop putting that food in your mouth. As we start to talk more about the zone diet, you’ll need to differentiate between the three different macronutrient categories. Protein (meat, eggs, sorry, no vegan tofu stuff here), Carbohydrates (vegetables and fruit), and Fat (nuts and seeds, vegetable oils, olives, avocados, butter). We want our protein to come from animal sources. Carbohydrates need to be predominantly low glycemic, which we will explain. Fats should be mainly monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and Omega-3 fatty acids. At the end of this article we will provide charts that tell you how to portion all of this food the right way.

GOOD CARBS,
BAD CARBS
& THE GLYCEMIC INDEX

Carbohydrates are sugars. Before you lose your marbles and say hey we aren’t supposed to eat sugar, just hold on a second. We don’t want you to eat refined sugar. The white stuff people dump in coffee, or in your homemade cookie recipe. We also definitely don’t want you eating anything containing high fructose corn syrup, so if you see that on an ingredient label burn the box and run away screaming. You will just have to know that not all carbs are created equal.  Earlier we mentioned low glycemic carbohydrates. The glycemic index measures how the carbohydrates you eat raise blood sugar levels after eating. Lower glycemic carbs will not spike your blood sugar, higher glycemic carbs will. Spiking blood sugar and insulin levels are bad, and eating a diet with predominantly high glycemic carbs will inevitably lead to inflammation and weight gain, and possibly to diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. If you want to learn more about the science behind all of this, read “Enter The Zone” by Dr. Barry Sears. If you want to just take our word (it’s the truth) that you should avoid high glycemic carbs, just keep reading. There is a common misconception that eating dietary fat is what makes people overweight. Obviously, if you eat a ridiculous amount of fat you’ll gain weight, but the real culprit behind obesity is nasty (delicious tasting) refined high glycemic carbohydrates. All the food options we provide in our charts will be low glycemic. Just remember that vegetables with low starch are always lower glycemic, and most fruit is on the lower end of the scale too.  

As an athlete, we don't follow Paleo principles 100%.  We believe there is a place in your diet for some dairy, oats, rice and potatoes.  If you're starting from scratch, we do feel you should cut back to as close to Paleo as you can for a month or so and then reintroduce some of the dairy, oats, etc slowly back and see what effects they have.

BLOCKS

The Zone Diet uses “blocks” as a unit of measure to define how much to eat of a certain food. One block is composed of 7 grams of protein from a protein source, 9 grams of carbohydrate from a low glycemic carbohydrate source, and 1.5 grams of fat from a healthy fat source. Before you start counting grams of macronutrients out and losing your marbles trying to keep track of everything, remember that we are going to include charts that do all that for you. We will teach you a rough way to estimate how many blocks you will need to eat in a day. Most women will eat 3 or 4 block meals with 1 or 2 block snacks a couple times a day, and most men will eat 4 or 5 block meals with 2 or 3 block snacks a couple times a day. A very simple illustration of what a 4 block meal looks like would be 4 ounces of chicken (your 4 blocks of a protein source) 2 apples (1/2 an apple is 1 block of carbohydrate) and 12 whole almonds (your fat source).  Athlete tip: make sure you're getting enough fats.  Some athletes 2x-4x their fat intake depending on volume and their goals in the gym. 

CALCULATING LEAN BODY MASS

In order to accurately estimate the amount of blocks you will eat in a day, you need to know your lean body mass. Lean body mass is the weight of everything in your body that isn’t fat. Your muscles, bones, tendons, organs, all contribute to your lean body mass. There are plenty of different ways to calculate lean body mass, but for your convenience you can go here (Body Fat Calculator) and just like that you have your block requirements too!

Or, you can have your body fat measured, take that percentage from your total weight and you'll have your lean body mass (LBM).  Be honest when you are measuring. You aren’t doing yourself any favors by understating your body fat percentage. It is important to know these numbers, you don’t want to be over eating or under eating. Both are detrimental.  Plug that LBM # (lbs) into this equation where N is your activity coefficient:

Baseline # of Blocks = (LBM) * N/7
N = .7 (For an athlete who is active and does ~5 WODs per week)
N = .8 (For an athlete who is more active with 5+ WODs + Strength work per week)
N = .9 (For an athlete who is extremely active doing multiple WODs per day)

EATING, MEASURING, KEEPING IT SIMPLE

Once you have your daily block requirements, you can go about structuring your meals. A 17 block male would ideally eat a 5 block breakfast, 5 block lunch, 5 block dinner, a 1 block snack during the day and a 1 block snack prior to sleeping. You want to structure your meals so that you eat every 4 hours. Try not to go longer than 4 hours between meals. GO BUY A SMALL SCALE AND SOME MEASURING CUPS. If anyone ever told you that you don’t need to measure your food, reach back in time and slap them across the face. This is just something you’ll have to do, especially initially, to make sure your food intake is accurate. Once you have been eating in the Zone for a month or two, you’ll be able to eyeball most foods and make an accurate decision, but we recommend continuing measuring just to keep yourself honest. Another thing that will help is keeping things simple. It’s fun occasionally to whip up some magnificent Zone/Paleo recipes but doing complicated things constantly is draining. Try to stick to basic meals about 80% of your week just to keep it easy for you. 

DO, DON'T & CHEATING

DO: Eat protein from animal sources. Eat primarily low glycemic carbs. Eat monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and Omega-3 fatty acids.

DON’T: Eat anything that has refined carbohydrate, white flour, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, added sugar, trans fats, etc etc. DO NOT drink alcohol or use tobacco. Drinking alcohol will literally ruin everything about what you are trying to do here. The one glass of wine a day to be healthy idea is stupid, eat some grapes and blueberries and you’ll get the same health benefits. If you MUST have a drink, you can have ONE or TWO (not a 12 pack) on your cheat day.

CHEAT DAYS are important psychologically. Take one day a week and eat whatever you want. Over time, all your favorite foods like twinkies and ice cream and cookie dough will give you a massive food hangover, but it’s okay to splurge and spoil yourself once a week as long as you ate appropriately the rest of the week. However, do try to still eat in Zone proportions with your cheat meals.  As an athlete, think of the cheat days as a way to make up any deficit in calories that you accumulated from the intense workouts in the previous week of training. Don't let yourself cheat one day, then cut way back on your blocks the following days because you feel bad about it.  If it's more stress for you to cheat than it is to keep your eating clean all the time, don't cheat.  Start small and you'll see that the cheat meals don't hinder your progress.

GO GET 'EM

You now have all the basics you need to know nutritionally to be really freaking healthy. Use our charts to determine your blocks, reference this whenever you need to, and feel free to contact us with any and all questions. Try this for 6 weeks. Take a picture of yourself in your undies on day one, be diligent for 6 weeks and then take a comparison picture at the end. If you do this right, you WILL see visible body composition changes. You’ll see muscles where you didn’t have muscles before and there will be less jiggle where you used to jiggle. Good luck!