CrossFitters know that you only get out of your body what you put into it – and diet is a BIG part of their approach in getting people fit and healthy and transforming their bodies. Rob Forte, Australia’s fittest CrossFitter, explains how to eat like a champion.

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FIRST PRINCIPLES

“CrossFit founder Greg Glassman laid out the basic ideas for diet when he prescribed this advice: ‘Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.’ So a lot of CrossFitters eat paleo; it’s very popular in the community. You eat fresh food, staying away from the processed stuff.

“I did my first paleo challenge in February 2010 and I’ve been eating that way ever since.  I noticed a big difference when I changed my diet completely. My energy levels definitely improved  ... I see it often in the gym here. Guys who do it properly, they walk in three weeks later and we’re like, ‘Whoah!’ Big difference. And you see the way they improve in the gym with faster times and heavier weights. The first week and a half we have people reporting headaches and feeling low on energy, but that’s just the process – the body needs to get over that. Once they get through that, they’re really good. So you have to reassure clients that they’re going to feel pretty bad the first week or so, but they’ll feel great when they get through it.”

IN THE ZONE

“A lot of CrossFitters also talk about the Zone Prescription. The Zone diet is the way of measuring your macro nutrients, so you’re eating the right amounts of proteins, carbohydrates and fat. You work this out by a formula where you assess your body fat percentage and lean body mass, plus your activity levels, and you work out how much you’re supposed to get into your body each day. This gets a bit technical, but essentially you break things down into blocks; you work out that you should eat a certain amount of blocks per day.

“If I was to eat 20 blocks in a day it would have to be 20 blocks of protein, 20 blocks of carbohydrate and 20 blocks of fat. I know one block of protein is seven grams, one block of carbohydrate is nine grams, and one block of fat is 1.5 grams. With each meal, you have to have even amounts of those three macro nutrients.

“There’s a baseline to start with that they recommend to athletes and people with high activity levels. A leaner person might up their intake to 25 to 30 blocks in a day – but you know exactly what you’re putting into your body and you can tweak it one way or the other to see what works for you, because everybody is that little bit different. You want to eat meat for your protein source, fruit and vegetables are your carbohydrates, and then your fat sources are all the good fats: nuts, avocadoes, coconut oil, some olive oils – that sort of stuff. We want to steer away from the bad fats.

“It’s a really good tool to work out exactly how much you should be eating. It’s pretty popular – though probably not as popular as the paleo diet itself. But there’s just a little bit more to it.

“Once you do it for a few days, you know just how much of everything you should be fitting in. At first there’s a bit of weighing and measuring, but after you’ve done it for a few days you can put the scales away and you get a very good idea of how much of everything you should eat.

“There are some really good websites for people to find out more about the Zone Prescription.”