Kitchen WOD

No, it's not a workout. It's a quiche. Two of them actually. One for Steven: sausage and bacon and cheese. One for Amanda: spinach, tomato, bacon, and bleu cheese. Oh, and eggs.

You may be wondering: what's quiche got to do with fitness? Is Kevin going to do 50 walking lunges with each quiche held overhead? Is he going to do an 800m quiche carry, a la pizza delivery style? If so, what's the weight on those bad boys? And how about some crash pads so we don't break the nice Pyrex dish? Is he allowed to wear oven mitts? Etc...

The answer is no--to most of those questions. The quiche is for eating, not back squatting. But, quiche is most definitely related to fitness. Why? Because it's something I eat. I put it into my body. Its contents form the molecular foundation of my fitness, or lack thereof. I'm not suggesting that quiche, in particular, is the anchor of a healthy diet. But! I am suggesting that my habits in the kitchen and dining room have a far greater impact on my health than my habits in the gym.

At my Level 1 certification, this often overlooked reality was phrased to us as the 23 and 1 rule; that is, there are twenty-four hours in a day; say you spend 1 hour at the gym or working out at home; what do the other twenty-three hours of your day look like? Are you getting enough sleep? Enough water? Are you eating food OR food products? How much? At what times? How about sunshine? Or your social life? Or your stress level?

Bilge pumps will not indefinitely keep a ship afloat. At some point the breach must be repaired. I'd wager the "breach" in your average American lifestyle--concerning health anyway--is food related. A single daily workout--no matter how intense--will not balance an otherwise toxic day of living and eating. GI tract trumps workout every time. Or, another way to think of it: 23 > 1. Big time.

So even though I won't be push pressing these Pyrex masterpieces, they still represent an integral part of my endeavor for better fitness. In an effort to spare you reader(s?) a soapbox-style nutrition lecture, I'll simply make these two points concerning food:

1) The CrossFit dietary prescription for avoiding disease and optimizing athletic performance (note: if you don't think of yourself as an athlete, you're missing out on life. seriously. life moves. you should too.) is to "eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that support exercise but not body fat." And if you're looking to compete at an elite level in any sport, you'll probably need to weigh and measure your food, giving careful attention to the macronutrient composition of every single thing that goes down the pipe.

This prescription (excluding the weighing and measuring), in my opinion, is hardly a puritanical or stifling way to eat. Before yelling in outraged outrage and disagreement at your computer screen, consider the fact that our Paleolithic ancestors, who subsisted almost exclusively on meat (in its broadest sense--animal flesh) and vegetables (latitude depending), dined on as many as 100 to 150 different foods. How many different animals have you eaten? Or, perhaps more to the point, can you even name all the vegetables in your grocery store's produce section?

The truth is most of us tend to only eat between 15 and 25 different foods. If this figure seems inaccurate, try keeping a food log. Remember, real food only has one, maybe two ingredients. Kellog's Special K is not food but a food product. Food is typically what you find on the perimeter of the grocery store, you know the same place you find the refrigeration containers and the misting sprayers. These products were once alive and, were it not for our storing methods, they would soon be either compost or carrion. Have your Rice Krispies ever decomposed in the pantry?

Hair splicing and nit-picking aside, an honest food log will reveal a remarkably impoverished spread of foods when compared to the diets of our ancestors. Thus my claim: "meat and vegetables" is hardly as Spartan as it might seem at first blush. The seeming frugality of the category is a failure of our curiosity, effort, and interest, not of the content itself.

2) Food is intensely personal. Everyone has heard the expression "you are what you eat" but few of us are quick to evaluate ourselves in that light. Though I've certainly made an effort to inform myself on human nutrition, there's still no book or magazine or news report or government agency or even medical doctor to which I'll give more heed than my own experience with food--how what I eat affects how I feel and perform. Daily life should be the ultimately proving grounds for what constitutes healthy eating--I eat one way and feel like shit, I eat another way and feel like a superhero; at what point do I need a doctor or the FDA to solve this for me?