Rx Girls: Miami

“You’ve Gained Weight”

I’m gonna go on a little rant here – sometimes when I’m feeling a certain way and I know it’s messed up I think it’s important to share it. It’s funny, but those words “you’ve gained weight” can have such a dramatic effect on people. Last month (maybe two months ago) I decided I wanted to put on some muscle. I started tracking my calories and realized that I have not been eating NEARLY as much as I should be, given how active I am. Sometimes eating clean can be really hard to get calories in… Using a calorie tracker (which I hate by the way) I put EVERYTHING in, from the honey in my tea to the coconut milk ice cream late at night. For about 5 weeks straight I was consistently eating 2600 calories or so (up from about 1800). I felt good, stronger, and had more energy.I PR’d my deadlift by 25lbs, my bench by 10lbs, and I easily did a hang clean with what WAS my last power clean 1RM.

So my goal was to put on 10 pounds… of muscle. That would be hard, I had to train regularly and make sure I didn’t get lazy on the days I was tired from being at the gym all day. As of today I have put on 7 pounds… haven’t done my body fat yet to see how much of that is muscle but I’m pretty sure a lot of it is. I am happy about this!! So why is it that when someone tells me “hey, you’ve gained weight dude!” it leaves a bitter feeling in my mind?

Body image issues. They are a major problem today… Not just with women either, men suffer from trying to get leaner, more muscular, and stronger all the time. The media puts these ideas in our heads about being skinny and lean (or big and muscular), but most of it comes with a super unrealistic quick fix weight loss or muscle gain solution… like steroids… or HcG Diets.

When I was younger (high school and college) being “skinny” was always important to me. While I now know that comes mainly from the media, it bugs me that it has stuck with me over the years, despite what I KNOW is the truth and regardless of the industry that I work in! Knowledge really is power though, and I’m lucky today that even when I have those negative thoughts when someone tells me I’ve gained weight, I can change that negative thinking to realize that weight does not mean fat! “You look big” in here is supposed to be a compliment not an insult. and it is.. a compliment.

You might struggle with the same thing – but you wanna get over all that negative thinking? Start tracking your records in the gym (and being proud of them), measure your inches, and notice how your clothes fits differently. That’s real right there… The number on the scale is not. It’s deceiving. People’s comments (and compliments) and your head can be deceiving.

Pay attention to what’s real.

Most of us know that sugar is not good for us. Typically, in the health and fitness community most trainers and coaches will advise their athletes stay away from refined sugars as much as possible. We do the same at Soul, and to go a little further I wanna share some facts about WHY it’s such a big deal.

So how bad is sugar REALLY? Well, while traveling this month I came across a natural food stand at the York Fair, which had all kinds of info on health and wellness. There was a little fact sheet about sugar that I realized either most people don’t care to know, or like to ignore… pretty messed up. Here are the basics that stood out to me:

The damaging effects of sugar can start early:

From the day a baby is given store bought formula and even fed breast milk. If you consume sugar and breast feed, so does your baby! Eat healthy while pregnant and you have a baby that is pre-programmed to enjoy the same foods.

Sugar is an Unnatural Chemical:

Through refinement, sugar is stripped of all the nutrition that that it originally had in the plant itself. The chemical it becomes (C12H220) is foreign to the human body. Try to stay as natural with your food intake as possible.

This Chemical is Addictive:

Sugar’s addictive nature has been compared to that of heroin. The sweet taste can become habit forming, and the signals it sends to your brain cause a release of serotonin, making you feel relaxed and happy… just like a drug does. Get your body too used to feeling good with food and you have yourself a food/sugar addict. Pretty scary!

Other Damage:

You won’t see instant consequences of eating too much sugar; that can take years. The damage can eventually ruin your pancreas, adrenal glands, throw your endocrine system out of whack, cause tooth decay, bleeding gums, diabetes, hyper and hypoglycemia, is a major contributing cause to heart disease, mental illness, depression, hypertension, and even cancer.

Need More? Sugar also contributes to the following:

Increases Overgrowth of Candida yeast organism

Increases Chronic Fatigue

Can trigger binge eating in those with Bulimia

Increase PMS symptoms

Increase Hyperactivity in about 50% of children

Increase Anxiety and Irritability

Can increase panic attacks

Can make it hard to lose weight because of the constantly high insulin levels, causing your body to store the excess carbs as fat.

SO… what does this all mean? Make sure you read your labels when buying food! Sugar is found in almost EVERYTHING, even organic and health foods. Even worse, the food industry knows that we are catching on to this, so they try to hide sugar by calling it other things, like fructose, cane juice, sucrose, sucralose, or dextrose, to name a few. Remember that all the fruit you eat has natural sugars (fructose) in it, so while snacking on fruit is obviously MUCH better than a cake or muffin or whatever, your body still sees it as sugar. Be careful and don’t overdo it.

Mindful Eating vs. Being Mindlessly Hungry

I always do this… I can’t find time to post until something happens and I start really thinking about stuff and get inspired. Today is the day before our first in-house competition at CrossFit Soul Miami. I’ve been doing shit all day – teaching classes, making signs, score cards, posting wods, updating facebook, cleaning up… before I know it it’s 10:30pm and I’m freaking STARVING! What the hell is open at this time that’s close to the gym? Fast food.

It’s been like… I dunno FOREVER since I ate fast food. Like drive through window food. All I wanted was a burger – no cheese, no pickles, double bacon, no bread. I guess getting a frosty won’t be so bad either. Then I talk to my husband “I have food at the gym if you want it” fuck. I tell him I got a burger from Wendy’s “WHAT?!”. I start to tell him how I ordered it and the phone cuts off…. So I start thinking about it while I continue to eat. This is the worst of the worst meat. The frosty is filled with sugar, cheap dairy. My stomach starts to hurt. My thoughts “We are doing a FITNESS competition tomorrow!” “What kind of ground up nastiness am I eating right now?” “What the hell chemicals are in all this crap?” “I’ve been eating so clean!!! DAMMITTTTTT”

That right there, my friends, is the definition of mindlessness. MindFUL eating would have included all of those thoughts beforehand, and then committing to the conscious decision to eat the crap despite all the presenting information. When you eat mindlessly you feel like an asshole after. When you eat mindfully, you feel good about your decision. Simple as that. Had I thought about all these things before I went to get the crapfood I honestly probably wouldn’t have eaten it an instead searched the gym fridge for someones left behind meal delivery    >:)

Moral: Be mindful when you eat. It makes you accountable when you decide to eat crappy food all the time and wonder why you won’t lose weight/feel energized/stop breaking out/insert some other weird side effect here____________. When you are mindful and eat healthy, you are also accountable for the awesome results you will see from it. The best part is you won’t feel like an oferloaf afterwards.

Good luck to all my Soul family tomorrow during the competition! I know you will all do great 

Love,
MoMcfatfuck