Welcome to the last FULL week of the challenge! Next Wednesday, May 23rd will be the first non-challenge day!

By now you should have started to see some physical, mental and systemic changes. You might be sleeping better, you might have more energy throughout the day, and maybe something in your digestion has cleared up. Either way, you should have noticed that by altering what you put into your body, you are changing how your body works and reacts.

What you put into your body affects what you get out of your body.

Want rock hard abs? Minimized muscle soreness? Pain-free joints? A more optimistic outlook? Better sleep? Less ‘hunger pains’ and ‘food babies’? A generally better life?

Treat your body well and it will reward you.

Wondering what do to AFTER the 30 days is over? First read this blog post that I wrote after the last 30 day challenge.  It’s applicable here, and should provide you with some general guidelines for venturing back out into the fake food jungle.  It also goes into detail about what I typically eat while not on a 30 day challenge, for those of you who are looking for extra guidelines or examples.

OR you could just decide that you like yourself, your body, your energy so much more while eating perfectly, that you don’t want to mess that up, and you feel like staying on a strict real food diet forever.

That is, after all, the point of these 30 days. It wasn’t to starve you and make you lose tons of weight for a before/after photo. It wasn’t to make you ‘skinny’ or give you a magic pill that will solve all of your problems.

It was to help you make a very significant lifestyle change. Food is all around us. We eat multiple times every single day. We associate food with special events, family gatherings, social activities, and emotions.  It’s a BIG deal. And it’s hard to make a shift in the way that you think about food.

During these 30 days, we told you over and over that it’s not really that hard to make this change. Except it was. It was really tough to throw everything you’ve been told by the government and your doctor out the window. It’s been tough to come to the realization that ‘food stores’ rarely carry any food. It’s been uncomfortable to endure social events, surrounded by non-foods and booze. It’s been weird to feel all of these changes to your own body – a body that you thought would always be achy, tired or cranky.

You are making your way through a very important, and very challenging month. This month will change your life. The things that you’ve learned about nutrition, your body, disease, aging, sleep, recovery, etc will help you to make much better decisions in the future, and will hopefully allow you to spread the word to others who need some help.

EVENT REMINDERS:

Friday, May 18th, 7:30pm:  Paleo Potluck.

Wednesday, May 22nd, all classes: 30 Day Challenge Workout Re-Test.  Be there! You can make up this workout on Thursday, May 23rd if you miss it.

Here’s Jamie’s day of food. Notice that she eats a lot of food. Also, notice that she’s the strongest female lifter in our gym (she wasn’t always). Want to get stronger? Eat more food.

Jamie is also on the Autoimmune protocol, which includes the elimination of eggs, certain spices, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants. See how well she is able to incorporate variety into her diet while sticking to the plan!

I went to 6:30 a.m. CrossFit, so at 5:15 a.m. I had four cubes of bone broth (defrosted in the fridge overnight and then heated up in the microwave) and a cup of decaf coffee with coconut milk and cinnamon. I throw an herbal tea bag (usually Lemon Zinger or Pomegranate Pizazz) into my water bottle for the gym.

On Wednesdays I have standing Skype conference calls at 9 and 10 a.m., so my breakfast is usually in two parts because while I’m hungry when I get home from the gym, I also need to shower and get set up for the calls (thanks to Skype I now have to worry what I look like).

Driving home from the gym, I drank a bottle of Kombucha. As soon as I got home, I had another cup of decaf coffee with coconut milk and cinnamon and banana and three strips of Whole Food Black Forest bacon that my darling husband left for me. After showering, I put a pound of grass-fed ground beef in the microwave to defrost, then cooked it on low with garlic, sea salt and black pepper during my first call. I threw in 10 chopped up spears of asparagus for the last 10 minutes and then ate half of it for breakfast part two before my second call.

Lunch was the other half of the ground beef and asparagus with two handfuls of spinach thrown in. I drank the rest of my herbal tea from the gym and seltzer water all morning and with lunch. I was still a little hungry, so I had a few dried mango slices.

Dinner was a Whole Foods Icelandic lamb roast cooked in the crockpot with coconut milk and cumin over broccoli cooked in bacon fat with seltzer with lime to drink.

Liz Levinson is an endurance athlete, mother, and family doctor…and she has some of the most impressive musculature in the gym. What an overachiever! She frequently goes on long runs in addition to CrossFit and her body demands the proper nutrition to help keep her going – in training, and in life.

Breakfast:  Omelet with kale, bacon, peppers, onion, basil- some sliced avocado

Brooke Convento is stealthily making a name for herself at CrossFit Aspire. She came to us at first as “Ron’s wife” and is slowly but surely sneaking up on all of your PR’s.  She recently learned how to do unassisted pull ups, and her form on most lifts is near perfect. She will be the next big thing. I’m calling it.

Speaking of big thing, Brooke has already noticed body composition changes since she started at our gym. She hasn’t lost any weight (hear that, girls?!), but she has definitely lost fat and built up some muscle. She looks and feels great, and I’m positive that this next 30 days will catapult her into a whole new level of awesomeness.

Breakfast: 3 eggs over easy, spinach and bacon

Lunch: spinach salad: tomatoes, avocados, bacon, roast beef, balsamic vinegar and olive oil

Dinner: Pork shoulder from the crockpot and paleo BBQ sauce from “Make it Paleo” with braised cabbage from Nom Nom Paleo.
Snack:  2 hamburgers and bubbie’s sauerkraut

It’s week 3! You’re more than halfway through the ‘hardest’ part of your transition from Standard American diet to actual, nutritious, delicious, home cooked real food.

For most of you, other than some annoying coworkers and the occasional bought of sadness over all of the beer that’s not being drank by you at the bar, most of you seem to have been having a pretty easy time making this transition. Crock pots are cooking, ovens are on, and grilling outside is soon to become a weekly, if not daily occurrence.

This challenge is one of the easiest yet because the amount of information, recipes and support out there is at an all-time high. And its growing.  We are no longer embarking on a ‘risky diet’ that no one understands. Instead, our doctors, family members and coworkers are taking notice and joining us.

This ‘real food revolution’ has been brewing (stop thinking about beer) for quite some time now. Robb Wolf, one of the smartest and loudest voices in the Paleo community started his work about 15 years ago.  Finally, it’s gaining traction, it’s making sense to other people, and most importantly, it’s starting to be recognized by the medical community  (<—looking for a new doctor? Check this out!). It’s going to take years (decades, probably) for the greater medical community to recognize and fix their errors and for the general public to knock ‘low fat & hearty healthy whole grains’ out of their brains, but we’re making progress every day.

What can you do to help?

1. Know your stuff.  When someone says – “What about your cholesterol?” or “Saturated fat clogs your arteries. You might get heart disease” or “You aren’t getting enough calcium without dairy.”  do you know how to answer? If not, please check out some of the articles and podcasts that we list here, and on Free Paleo, a comprehensive collection of all relevant Paleo resources out there today. This way of eating (which used to be the ONLY way of eating, BTW) is based on hard science. It’s nothing new. It’s just new to you and to other people who’ve been steered in the wrong direction.

2. Lead by example. More about this next week will be written next week when we discuss what to do after the 30 days. But for the rest of these 30 days, the best thing you can do is to stick to your original plan of eating and drinking 100% ‘real’, and working toward your goals.

By ‘doing’ and not just simply ‘talking’,  you’ll be taking yourself one step closer each day to becoming the happy,healthy, energetic person you want to be, and the people around you will notice. Instead of giving them unsolicited advice about what they should or shouldn’t be eating, wait for them to come to you and ask. The hardest people to talk to are the ones that don’t want to be helped.  (<—Read that article. It’s really good.)

3. Vote with your dollar. This weekend, coconut milk was sold out at Whole Foods & Wegmans. Coconut aminos were also out. Coconut oil was sold out at Trader Joe’s the last time I went, and yesterday, sunflower seed butter was sold out. Did I miss national coconut day? OR could our 70 challengers, plus the other local real-foodies be causing a shift in availability of certain items and eventual restocking/purchasing habits of major stores? If we continue to use our money to buy real food and real ingredients, leaving more packaged foods on the shelves, we will send a message to the food manufacturers, suppliers, and to the stores. We Want Real Food.  (<–sign that)

This Spring-Fall, take it one step further and start doing the bulk of your grocery shopping at the local Farmer’s Markets or join a CSA. Being in the Garden State, we are lucky to have easy access to so many fresh fruits, vegetables and Grassfed meat/free roaming chickens. Take advantage!

Please post your comments, questions and thoughts to the comments section of this post!

Discussion Topics for this week:

1. Have you noticed any weight loss?

2. What’s your favorite real food recipe so far?

3. What would you bring to a party to ensure that you had something to eat while you were hanging out?

This is a day in the life of Eric Allen, man about town.  Those of you who live alone know how hard it is to muster up the energy to cook for yourself.  Also, “cooking in bulk” usually means eating the same damn thing every day. Here’s a great example of how to eat well, and keep things new throughout the day/week.

“I’ll gladly represent the live alone bachelor demographic After only 3 months at CrossFit Aspire I am definitely stronger than I have ever been. However, my diet has been CRAP, and as a result I am slow and my metcons have seen little-to-no improvement. I’m hoping this challenge will shed some unwanted pounds as well as help me recover faster and keep my energy and strength up for an entire metcon!”

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with sauteed onions, hot sausage, and roasted long hots. Also, some fresh fruit in coconut milk. I can’t believe how amazing that was, I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to regular milk!

Lunch: Pork shoulder cooked in a crock pot with cinnamon and apples, and roasted sweet potatoes, onions, mushrooms, and peppers

Dinner: At this point I was feeling tired and uninspired, so a simple hunk of steak and a mound of greens with some evoo and vinegar did the trick!

Snacks: I had some of those amazing hot sausage stuffed mini peppers, pictures were impossible to take because they literally went straight from the fridge to my mouth. They just taste too good! Also had a Larabar (gluten/dairy/peanut free variety) and a few almonds

And yes, all of my food is served on the finest of paper dishes and eaten with plastic cutlery – I did say I was a bachelor!!

Alex is a strong CrossFit athlete and has recently become a CrossFit coach. He is studying for medical school while working multiple jobs to save money and learn more. He has hopes of working in orthopedics, to help athletes like us!

Alex is a big guy, and therefore, needs lots of protein, fat and carbohydrates to keep him going throughout the day. Here are his three meals, plus some extra shots of some guacamole, brussels and sweet potatoes that he made. I’m pretty sure he didn’t eat all of those dishes in one day, but that would have been impressive, right?

Breakfast:

Lunch: Steak, brussels sprouts w/ bacon and a sweet potato

Dinner: Chicken, Broccoli, garlic paste, onion paste and spices

Cooked for Future: Guacamole (not shown), Brussels sprouts with bacon, and sweet potatoes with cinnamon.

Welcome to week 2.

Start posting your comments HERE!

This week, you should be concerned with using NEW ingredients and making NEW dishes. You know that meat & veggies are your best options, but have you branched out? Are you still eating chicken and peppers/onions every night?

Have you tried brisket yet? kale? parsnips? brussels sprouts? endive? bok choy? swiss chard? ground lamb? Asian Five Spice Powder? beef liver? raw saurkraut? stone ground mustard? ribeye steak? pork shoulder? wild caught corvina? Fenugreek?

Spend some time on Paleo recipe blogs, talking with other members, and chatting here online/swapping recipes. You’d be surprised at what falls under the category of “meat, vegetables and spices”.  I’ve seen real-food recipes that call for over 25 ingredients in one dish!

The goal during this week is to branch out and try to make an entire week’s worth of food that is not just healthy, but DELICIOUS.

Also, if you were substituting sugary snacks with fruit, now would be a good time to half the amount of fruit you are having. Use it as a ‘treat’ rather than a daily crutch to get you through.

Discussion Topics:

1. What’s your favorite new ingredient to cook with? How do you prepare it?

2. Have you gone out to eat? What did you order?

3. Have people asked you about the challenge? Do they wonder why you’re eating differently? What do you tell them?