Rather than a CFI Vault post, I’m reusing the name of an older post to better cover this particular subject. You see, after attending the Whole9 Seminar this past weekend, I’m reinvigorated and extra motivated to spread the nutritional knowledge! As Sean touched on Monday, the crew over at Whole9 distill better food choices down to whether items fail one or more of their four Good Food criteria.

A category that fails all four of the Good Food criteria is Sugar and Artificial Sweeteners. It promotes a negative psychological response and has some addictive properties. Strike 1. It wreaks havoc with your hormonal responses by causing blood sugar spikes and resulting crashes. Strike 2. It doesn’t do your gut any favors. By that, I mean your intestines, although it is also accurate for your waistline. Sugar feeds the bacteria in your gut and can cause some nasty imbalances in the intestinal flora, which may lead to obesity. By messing with the gut, it also can lead to inflammation and throw your immune system out of whack. Strikes 3 and 4.

When you switch over to eating Good Food, you are bound to see several paleo/primal or gluten-free dessert recipes. Note: this does not make them anything less than a cheat. I’ve said it before — trying to shoehorn a crappy recipe into paleo clothing does not make it healthy! In fact, Whole9 calls this concept “sex with your pants on”, or SWYPO for short. An excerpt:

You can tell yourself it’s okay, it’s still pretty good, you’re totally satisfied… but that’s kind of a lie.  Because you know exactly how good pants-less sex feels.

And if you continue your Whole30 program eating Paleo pizza, Paleo ice cream and Paleo pancakes, well… all it makes you think about is how less-than-stellar this version is, and how delicious the other version would be.  Just like… well, you know.

The problem is, if you continue to have sex with your pants on, it’s inevitable that at some point you’re gonna want to take your pants off.  And during your Whole30, that spells trouble.

An equally important takeaway is that other “more natural” sugars are not any better. Yeah, I’m looking at you honey, maple syrup, date sugar, sucanat, agave syrup, etc. In my older post Know Your Sugars, I quoted from Whole9′s comprehensive post on the many, many names that sugar goes by. Please go check out their article “Sugar=Sugar=Sugar” to educate yourself, both for the purpose of ingredient lists on foods you buy and for your own kitchen creations.

With this nutrition talk in mind, mark your calendars now — the Body Fat Test truck will be visiting Intrepid on Monday, February 25th to kick off our 2013 Nutrition Challenge! It will be parked outside from 7am until 7pm, so there will be plenty opportunity to get dunked that day.

WOD 01.16.13

Deadlift 1×5

Partner WOD:

4 rounds per person of:

• 3 Snatches
• 250m Row

While one partner does the couplet, other partner will do double-unders. Scores will be for total time on the couplet and total dubs.