It’s that time of year again, the on where you clean our your cupboards, get the scale out, and get your eating habits and lifestyle straightened out a bit. Every year we run our own little challenge at CVCF, and every year those who truly adhere to the guidelines we give them, work hard, and are consistent, reap amazing rewards. While this ultimately is just a 30 day challenge, the goal is to get you to truly change your lifestyle. There is a reason diets don’t work, because they aren’t long term, we want to see you make and adjustment to your lifestyle, something that you can continue, for weeks, months, and years after you finish this challenge. A detailed explanation of our challenge can be found HERE. With that said, some highlights, the basic need to know is below…

– “Sign-up” and all of your daily numbers you plug in go HERE

– Buy yourself a scale and some measuring cups

– Download the My Fitness Pal App for your phone

– Part of the goal of this challenge is to help change your eating profile, the Paleo diet is something that we have seen work incredibly successfully for many people. For the average person, who exercises 3-5 hours/week this is ideal, you don’t need 200-300 grams of carbs a day. If you’re doing the challenge and training 3 ours 5 days/week then your macros should be adjusted from what is given, and you may need to take in more starches/rices/grains.

– You’re not as active as you think you are. An hour at CrossFit burns maybe a few hundred calories at most for the average person, and most people are more sedentary in their daily life then they really think. If you’re goal going into this challenge is to lose weight, and you have it to lose, then it ultimately comes down to cleaning up your diet, as and unclean diet got you where you are today.

– You’ll get scored in 5 categories, change in weight, gym attendance, paleo points/adherence, caloric/macronutrient adherence, and fitness performance. If you just can’t do the Paleo Diet, but manage to follow everything else to a T, you can still reap huge benefits and even win the challenge, we just see those benefits magnified by eating Paleo.

– Know what you’re really eating. Again scale and measuring cups are huge, you’re probably eat a lot more than you really think, are you measuring the olive oil you put in a pan when you cook, could be 100 calories could be 300 calories, some small changes in being aware of your measurements could make a drastic change in your dietary intake.

– Use the calculator HERE to figure our your daily caloric intake, then change the Macro Nutrients to 25% Carbs, 35% Protein, and 40% Fat. That’ll spit out the grams of each Macro you should be eating per day. Use My Fitness Pal to keep track and monitor this.

– Make an effort to get the majority of your daily carbs in 1-2 hours pre workout, and 30-90 minutes post workout. If your not training on a given day then try and spread them throughout the day.

– Come in Monday, the 4th get photos taken of yourself, and perform the Benchmark Workout and make sure you write down weights, reps, numbers, etc. for it.

Last but not least, have fun, stick to it, know it may be hard at times, but know that ultimately you will be happier for it, and your body will feel SO MUCH BETTER.