Paleo on a plane

Well I made it to Niagara. I am currently blogging from my dad's iPad so forgive me if this post is short. I just wanted to talk a little about staying on track while traveling. It's easy to get caught unprepared when traveling. We spend so much time figuring out what we're bringing to wear that we forget about the actual journey. Airports are generally not very Paleo friendly so it can be really hard and really expensive to get the right kind of food. On this trip, I knew I didn't want to be caught unprepared so I made sure to include in my carry on larabars, oloves brand olives ( I talked about those in a previous post) easy squeeze applesauce and macadamia nuts. I can safely say that I made it through the trip without resorting to eating those little crackers they hand you on board. In my book, that's success!

Sugar Cravings....nobody is immune!

Oh man! It's day three of my nutrition challenge and I am having full on sugar cravings! You see, I've been doing great so far. This morning I had two scrambled eggs and some coffee. Lunch was sauteed zucchini and elk sausage with some homemade Kombucha that my dad made! Wow was that delicious!  I was pretty busy this afternoon though, and didn't make it home until 6pm. Since my lunch was at noon, I came through the door starving! That's when the sugar cravings hit. I was so hungry, that all my body was telling me to eat was sugar. You're body will frequently lead you towards the sugary stuff at times like this for two reasons. The first is that sugar is the fastest source of energy for your body. It takes much longer for proteins and fats to digest. Also sugars affect the dopamine receptors in your brain releasing "feel good" hormones when you eat them. So when you're stressed or overly hungry, your body will crave sugar!
One of the beauties of the Paleo diet is that when you remove sugars from your diet, your body craves them less and less. One of the reasons is that you become an efficient fat burner meaning your body will oxidize stored body fat when you don't have any food around and your body needs energy. Unfortunately for me, I have allowed far too many sugars into my diet lately. Now that I am back on track, I will have to fight these sugar cravings off for the next week or so until my body gets regulated again.
Needless to say, I did not give in completely to my sugar cravings. I grabbed a larabar and had some hot tea to tide me over. Ordinarily, I would have just made dinner but Wednesday nights at 7:30pm are Advanced class nights! I love advanced class because I get to get together with my other trainers and advanced athletes and work on some really fun skills and throw down on some great WOD's. Tonight's little number looked like this:

3 Rounds
18 Pistols
9 Deficit Handstand Push Ups
3 Burpee Muscle Ups
then
Teams of two complete 3000m row switching every 300 meters.

That row was a serious lung burner!

Tomorrow I am off to Niagara Falls, NY to see my lovely Aunt get married to the love of her life, Trish. I am bringing my computer with me so I can keep up the blogging. I am hoping to get in a WOD at CrossFit Niagara but we'll see how the wedding weekend festivities go. Stay tuned with tips on how to stay on track while traveling! Goodnight for now!

Staying on Track on a busy day!

Whew! What a day! Tuesdays are usually my toughest days of the week. Right now I am working two jobs. The first one being my full time coaching job. I usually coach or co-coach 23 classes a week at CrossFit Katy. My second job is as a nurse and Paleo Nutrition specialist at Specialty Healthcare and Wellness in Bellaire, TX. We are one of the only clinics on the Paleo Physicians Network in the Houston area. We specialize in wellness, women's health, hormone balancing and athletic performance.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love both of my jobs, but Tuesdays are rough!
On Tuesdays I get up at 4:50am and get ready to coach the early morning classes at CrossFit Katy. I coach 5:30am, 6:30am, 8:30am and 9:30am. Then I have two hours to come home, make and eat lunch, walk my dogs and relax for a bit until I have to get in my car and drive up to Bellaire to my second job. I usually see three or four patients (working until about 4:30pm) and then I drive back to CrossFit Katy to co-coach the 5:30pm, 6:30pm, and 7:30pm classes. Most of the time when I come home I just want to collapse but a girls gotta eat! So I usually make dinner, watch tv or surf the net and then hit the sack at around 9:30 or 10:00pm. This Tuesday has been particularly tiring but I made a commitment to blog everyday for 30 days so here I am!
The point of this post is that there really are no excuses for eating poorly just because you're tired or stressed or busy. If I can do it on this crazy schedule, then so can you! My secret to success is making sure I'm prepared. Last night, I cooked one pound of ground beef and one pound of ground elk in a pan with some spices and greens. From this two pounds, I had dinner last night, breakfast this morning and lunch today. I had a tub of pre-made guacamole in the fridge from HEB and I just topped my meat with some guac and voila! Meat, Veggies, Fat! Perfect combination. For dinner tonight, I came home and grilled some lamb shoulder chops and sauteed some zucchini. This whole dinner took me 10 minutes to cook and probably 5 minutes to prep. That's pretty good so don't tell me you don't have 15 minutes to cook cause I know you do! Priorities people, get them straight.
Anyway, my go-to's for making sure that I'm prepared and can have a decent breakfast, lunch or dinner cooked in no time flat are:

Eggs
Thawed Ribeye Steaks
Thawed Ground Beef, Bison or Elk
Some kind of Greens like Swiss Chard
Zucchini
Canned Salmon or Tuna
Frozen Broccoli

With this combo, I can pretty much make anything. Obviously, the more goodies and the more stocked your fridge and pantry are, the better off you'll be because you will have lots of choices and won't get bored. So that's my story for today. Now it's time for some sleep!

Day One!

Today is October 1st, 2012 and It's the first day of my personal nutrition challenge. I've been studying nutrition and experimenting with different ways of eating for about 3 1/2 years now. I have to date completed 3 Whole 30's and they've really taught me a lot about food and myself for that matter. I can safely say after all this time, I still don't have it all down! I think nutrition is an ongoing challenge for most of us. I'd say my diet is about 90% better than many people's but there's always room for improvement. So today I am embarking on another nutrition challenge. Just to clarify, I am not doing a Whole 30. I know that for me getting caught up in the little things (like whether or not my organic, nitrate-free lunch meat has less than 2% sugar) is not the path to success. But 30 days of shunning Starbucks Peppermint Mocha's and corn tortilla chips IS the path to success. I am carrying a few extra pounds these days and have some big competitions coming up. More importantly, I do not have as much energy and drive in my workouts as I would like to have and I think my nutrition and supplementation is a big part of that.
I was inspired recently by my friend and fellow CrossFitter, Matt Munson who has made it a goal to blog everyday for 365 days! While I don't think I can accomplish that goal right now, I am going to try and blog everyday for the next 30 days documenting my nutrition challenge and any changes that occur with it. Today started at 5am. When I coach on these early mornings, it's challenging getting a good breakfast because I am usually not hungry until about 8am. When I am "on", I will scramble some eggs and bring them with me, but this morning I decided to go the easy route and had some deli ham and olives and coffee of course with a splash of raw milk. I found these great olive snacks at HEB. They're called Oloves-the healthy olive snack. They're pre-pitted green olives in 3 different flavors ready to eat in a little package and they're only $1 per package! Olives are a great source of fat, which we all need for satiety, to produce cholesterol, to produce all our hormones. Basically fat= life! Lunch today will probably consist of grilled lamb shoulder and I think dinner will be Elk burgers sans the bun. Sounds like a pretty well rounded day today...now if I can just get enough veggies in!

You can keep your Sexy Metcons.

Ok this post has been brewing in me for a while. First of all, I want to say that I love CrossFit. I love everything about it. It makes me stronger, faster, better not just physically but mentally so this is by no means a bash on CrossFit. I'm irritated though. For anybody that doesn't know, I have been a part of the CrossFit community for a while now. I did my first ever CrossFit WOD back in 2007 at Body Armor in San Antonio. I didn't really get serious about it until 2009 and since then I have been coaching and competing continuously. Before CrossFit I was a powerlifter and collegiate volleyball player. Yeah I've been doing cleans, back squats, front squats, snatches...you name it since I was 14! For anybody whose counting that's 13 years of barbell work and 3 solid years of CrossFit. What does this have to do with me being irritated?
I just want to emphasize that I've been at this a long time and there are many new trainers, new affiliates who can't boast this kind of track record. And those are the people that are making me irritated.
In my gym we have spent the better part of our 4 years honing and evolving our programming to give our community the best combination of strength, speed, power, endurance, etc. that we can. Our programming is precise. It has purpose. It's simple and it's really effective. We have taken good athletes and made them great and we do it without any frills and with very few "sexy met-cons". Look people, I get it. Chippers like the Filthy Fifty and the WODs that got thrown out at Regionals..they're fun! They're awesome! I mean come on, which looks cooler to you? A complicated multi-bar WOD with hang cleans and push presses and HSPU and like 7 different movements....or Deadlift 3-3-3-3??? But which one is going to actually make you a better athlete? Which one are you going to be able to sustain for years and years?
When I went to my first L-1 Cert., Pat Sherwood said something about programming that has stuck with me. He said good CrossFit programming can be described in less than 20 words. "Live your life in Couplets and Triplets. Lift Heavy. Sprint once in a while." That's it. That's the heart of quality CrossFit that can last over the years and will continue to make you better. I look at some of these newer affiliates getting sucked into the Sexy Met-Con. One affiliate in the area in the last three weeks has programmed 6 days of metcons using over 3 different barbell movements just for one WOD...some of these WOD's had three different barbell weights as well. Now it is very hard to properly coach three different barbell movements, test out how much weight is appropriate for people and effectively and safely implement it into a WOD and yet they are doing this multiple times a week. Now, I am not saying that this is impossible. Maybe you are sitting there reading this and thinking, well she must not be a very good coach then if she can't do that....and you'd be wrong. We will periodically throw in a complicated multi lift met-con with say hang cleans and front squats and push press in it. But we do these WOD's maybe once every 3 months. We don't do them twice a week. Another thing that irritates me is the over abundance of 1 Rep Maxing. 1 Rep maxes don't do anything but test how much strength you've gained. When you do 5 different one rep maxes in three weeks with zero days of multi-rep strength, you get nowhere. And I'm not talking about lifting in a met-con. I'm talking tried and true 5X5, 3X3 lifts. Most of our athletes do not have 10+ years of barbell strength under their belts. They need to continue to do these simple movements to build a base of strength. CJ Martin over at CrossFit Invictus has his competition athletes doing strength sets every day that they train right now and he's arguably one of the best trainers/programmers in the country. But the thing I think that makes me the most irritated is that I don't expect new CrossFit athletes to know any of this. I expect their coaches to know it and often times, they don't! It's our job as coaches to keep our clients safe, to teach them properly, to build them up... and most importantly, to keep them CrossFitting. The fastest way to break someone down and sideline them from overuse is through the Sexy Met-Con. I want all my athletes to be in the gym CrossFitting for years to come and that's exactly what I tend to do. So you can keep your Sexy-Metcon, I've got some 5X3 Deadlifts to get to.....

Book Review: It Starts With Food

As some of ya'll know, CrossFit Katy is a Whole 9 Nutrition Partner and, much to my excitement, a few weeks ago we received an advanced copy of Melissa and Dallas' new book, It Starts With Food, to review! So this past weekend I finally got down to digging into this gem and WOW! It is probably the most well-written and relevant book on Paleo Nutrition and Health since Robb Wolf's The Paleo Solution. I hate to actually use the term Paleo when reviewing this book because one of the big messages that Dallas and Melissa try to make is that it's not about "Paleo". It's about food choices and lifestyle choices, period. It's about what makes you a healthier, more vibrant human being and what doesn't. Like the title says, it all starts with the food you put on your plates and in your body.

So I'm kind of a closet nerd...ok maybe I'm just a nerd. Who am I kidding? People know me. :) Anyway, I was really psyched and impressed with how much science Dallas and Melissa were able to cram into this book without making me feel like I'd just sat though a mind-numbing freshman biology class. The science was easy to understand and made so much sense. Now I know that having a background in Nursing and working as a Paleo Nutritionist gives me a little leg up with regards to the "science-y" stuff but I promise, anyone can understand and apply the principals put forth in It Starts With Food. And there are definitely some analogies that I will be applying in my own practice. I absolutely love the break down of the four Good Food Standards and the explanation as why certain food groups do or don't fit into the Good Food Standards.

As far as real-life food management, It Starts With Food scored a home run. Their Mealsimple Template and comprehensive chapters on proteins, veggies, and carbs make it easy to create healthy, well-rounded meals. No weighing or measuring necessary because, let's be honest, we're not going to carry around food scales everywhere we go AND we don't have to! And of course this book wouldn't be complete without an extensive introduction to the Whole 30. I have completed 3 Whole 30's myself and I think the first one would have been a lot easier had I had It Starts With Food at my disposal.

Overall, It Starts With Food is a must to add to your ever-growing nutrition/health/paleo library. So get your copy here and enjoy!

Hold On

"I can't remember all the times I've tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass..."-Adam Duritz.

This is probably one of my favorite quotes. It doesn't hurt that it's from my favorite band of all time, Counting Crows. But besides that, it has such a powerful message. I know that I have written a million times that I have resolved to blog more and every night I put it off, and the next thing I know, I've blinked and it's June! I feel like in the past four months I have been swimming, swimming, swimming and haven't had a chance to come up for air yet. When life gets crazy like that, it's easy to let things pass you by, but tonight, I am taking a moment to hold on...

Here's a little recap on what's happened in the past four months.

1) CrossFit Games South Central Regionals 2012:
This year, CrossFit Katy took San Antonio by storm! Our team entered the South Central Regionals ranked 12th after our performance as a gym in the CrossFit Games Open. At the end of the weekend we emerged in 8th place! It was an amazing weekend and I am so grateful to be a part of such an incredible gym. This year left me proud of what I was able to accomplish and motivated to become an even better athlete and teammate!

2) Neal and I got engaged!
After a little over three years together, Neal surprised me on bended knee at the Houstonian on a mini "stay-cation" weekend. We celebrated with a sushi dinner and took in a Radiohead concert (Neal's favorite). The date is set for October 2013 and I'm sure I'll have a lot more to post about it as the time gets closer.

3) We're in the process of expanding the gym....again!
Yep, CrossFit Katy is about to go to 5200sq feet which is incredible! The new space will allow us to change even more lives by bringing the best fitness program in Katy to more people and our current members can enjoy more space, more equipment and a continued devotion to bringing out the best in all of them!

4) I have a new baby sister!
Orli Leal Goldstein was born on May 17th which means there are now 7 combined Goldstein/Ramsey/Peitsch kiddos in this melting pot of a family! Pretty awesome and more than just a little bit crazy!

5) Neal and I may finally be moving into a house!
Yep, as long as all goes well on Tuesday with our inspection, Neal and I will enter the scary and exciting new world of homeownership! This is one of the most exciting things on my mind right now because it marks such an enormous step for us as a family. I am so proud of what Neal has accomplished in these last four years. I doubt that many people know how hard he has worked to get this far. And though I have been an integral part in growing the gym, I feel that I have been able to do so much more of the "fun stuff" while he has shouldered the burden of the actual business decisions. Words cannot describe how much I love him and how proud I am of him.

Wow! That list is pretty crazy. It's hard to believe that all of this has happened in less than 6 months! 2012 has been one incredible year so far. It's half way over and I hope to accomplish just as much in the next 6 months. Glad I took the time to stop, reflect, and hold on...