QUICK SCROLL : RECIPES – SUPPLEMENTS – FAQ

Quote –

1. “Success is the sum of small efforts—repeated day-in and day-out.” —Robert Collier

2. “Simple is sustainable.”

3. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” —Lao Tzu

4. “Eat better, not less”

Welcome to CFG Nutrition! In this page we will attempt to help you with your food choices by offering a place to start, some basic tools, recipe options, additional reading and links to our services.

Maybe you want to see your performance at the gym consistently and rapidly improve; maybe you want to walk around the poolside without ‘sucking it in’; maybe you want to have more energy through your working day or maybe you are concerned about your health, your heart or your risk of osteoporosis. Whatever the reason for you hoping to improve your nutrition, it starts right here on this page.

Nutrition is essential to getting the best out of the way your body looks and performs.  There is no substitution. Without good nutrition: at best, performance suffers; at worst, ill health isn’t far away. With good nutrition, energy levels increase, recovery between training sessions improves and the risk of chronic disease drops significantly. This is why CrossFit places nutrition on the ground floor of its prescription for athletic performance and health. You may not become a Games athlete even if you do optimise your nutrition; but you can categorically rule it out if you don’t.

CrossFit’s Hierarchy of Development

As you can see from the pyramid above, nutrition plays such a key role in your development that, if managed poorly, it can hamper the rate you develop in professional sport or the liklihood of living a long, healthy life. You may not become a top flight athlete even if you do optimise your nutrition; but you can rule it out if you don’t.

Nutrition also represents the only ‘input’ to the hierarchy above; gymnastics, metabolic conditioning, weightlifting and throwing and sport all represent outputs by the body that depend on the appropriate ‘inputs’. Gymnastics – the control of one’s own body through space – is made radically more difficult by being overweight; metabolic conditioning – the training of the metabolism – cannot progress effectively when there is no fuel or the wrong fuel present; weightlifting and throwing – the control of external, often heavy, objects – cannot progress without the raw materials to build muscle and bone. The progression to sport and/or a long productive life are not precluded by poor nutrition but certainly appear less likely.

Nutrition is a massive and often controversial topic fraught with misinformation, hyperbole and debate. Essentially, what it boils down to is consistency in the basics. Your diet needs to be grounded in simple fact and to be sustainable in the long term. We begin our own guidance with an excerpt from Greg Glassman’s ‘100 words of Fitness’:

“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no refined sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.”

This quote is remarkably concise, readily understood and consistent with the definitions of any major public health system; though in almost every case it is more direct about what WILL be effective for obtaining long-term health and performance benefits.

The creation of healthy, balanced meals requires a source of protein, plenty of fresh vegetables, some healthy fats and an amount of starch appropriate to the activity of the individual. Variety is essential to preventing boredom and micronutrient deficits or excesses. The general avoidance of refined sugar is a no-brainer in the context of optimising health.

We have created this section of our members’ area to share guidance through videos, recipes and articles to help you optimise the meals you consume for health and performance.

GETTING STARTED – Fresh Start

Where to begin – Baseline – What does that look like? Iain – 3 meals a day containing: protein, salad, fruit or mixed veggies (carbs) and fat in all 3.

Food list of recommended types of food, examples of carbs, proteins and fats.

Accountability chart – 30 days – no alcohol, fizzy juice – needs revised?

If this is all a little too much to take in here’s one of our nutrition coaches talking to members about breakfast. VIDEO

If this is all a little too much information why not book in for a one-to-one and we can work together to get you started?

The supplement market is worth in excess of $15.6B and shows no signs of slowing its growth. It can be confusing to know what to take but the good news is a varied and balanced diet should contain most, if not all, you should require. For the rest we recommend the following based on their backing by scientific literature as well as their purity: