As you know, I was doing Crossfit workouts at our other gym with Garth and Tom for 8 months before the stars aligned and Tom found Crossfit Fire for us. The instruction and competitiveness that we receive in our workouts is second to none, which elevated our workouts to a level we’d never experienced before.

Then came the diet advice, which is what REALLY made the difference. It started with the “two week experiment of Jennie”. When I saw how you looked, I wanted to do EXACTLY what you were doing with your diet. Within a week of that, Bill setup the nutrition seminar. He didn’t just say “this is WHAT you should eat”, but rather explained in detail WHY we should eat the way he was describing. After 60 days of following Bill’s nutrition advice, I lost a lot of my bodyfat, felt great, and am now setting PRs and besting my times during the Metcon workouts (not to mention beating my fellow Crossfitters who I never used to beat before). AND I’ve gained an increased confidence that I can tackle anything life throws at me.

What you and Bill have done for me these last few months in nothing short of amazing – my life has changed for the better because of you!

60 day transformation

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Dedicating your time, effort and body to eating, being and promoting paleo and CrossFit is tough! It was worth it though! My total weight loss was 25 pounds exactly. Besides the weight loss, things have drastically changed for me health-wise. I've struggled with cronic anxiety since I was 21 and there has been nothing I can do to help it. The first few weeks of eating paleo were exhausting. My energy was down, I had a hard time making it to the Fort, and I was sleepy all the time. Once my body got rid of everything in my system, I had a complete change. I was full of energy, my anxiety was gone and I felt great. I learned that to feel good you need to put good things in your body. No sugar, no bad carbs, no processed foods. When I first started at CrossFit Fire, I had a really hard time going to the fort 3 times a week. Now I go 5 days and have never felt better.

I've also realized, that I need to give myself a little bit of credit for what I have accomplished. Eating healthy and exercise is a part of my life now. So is the Fort. I feel like I owe Jennie and Bill for everything they have taught me. They've helped me change my life forever!

90 day transformation

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My total weight loss was 42 pounds. It really took seeing the pictures to see how far I’d come. The work is far from over. The diet was very tough to stick to at first; I guess I really didn’t notice how many carbs/grains/sugar I really ate during the day, until I gave them up cold turkey. I felt like someone had sucked the life out of me the first two weeks. But when you drop that initial weight/water or what ever it is the first couple weeks (20lbs for me) its real motivating when you see the scale. But more then the weight loss has been the way I feel free of (mostly) grains and carbs. I used to REQUIRE a nap after work every day, there was just no way around it. After a week or so on Paleo that nap BS was over and my energy was endless. I was amazed.

My general health as a whole is 100 times better. I had a reoccurring/chronic upper respiratory infection that surfaced every other month or so for as long as I can remember. Since I have gone Paleo it hasn’t returned. That in its self is worth the weird looks I get at the store buying 15 pounds of red meat every Saturday. Now that I have been at the Fort for a while and I get to compare work outs the benefits/results are undeniable. Pre BBC “Cindy” was 7 rounds with an assistance band for pull ups, last week I was able to get 12 with out the band, far from the Elites but a huge step in the right direction. This really has been a life style change for me and I plan to stick to it and see just what my body is like under all that jiggle HAHA.

90 day Transformation

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Simply put, I eat a LOT of skirt steak; ask the MeatGoat. I usually throw it under the broiler for a a few minutes on each side, slice, and serve. It goes great with black coffee for breakfast or as a cold snack later in the day. This time, I decided to put in a little effort and this is what resulted:

Tequila-Lime Marinated Skirt Steak

• 2 pounds grass-fed skirt steak
• 3/4 C fresh lime juice
• 3/4 C Cazadores Reposado Tequila
• 1 bulb elephant garlic, diced
• 1 small bunch cilantro, chopped
• 1 jalapeno pepper, diced
• 1 serano pepper, diced
• celtic sea salt to taste
• fresh ground black peppercorns to taste
• ground cumin to taste

Instructions: Combine steak, lime juice, tequila, garlic, cilantro, jalapeno, and serano in a large bowl, being sure to mix well. Cover and refrigerate for 4 to 24 hours, stirring every so often. Remove from refrigerator and let sit at room temperature for 30 to 60 minutes before cooking.

Pre-heat broiler on high for 10 minutes. Remove steaks from marinade and add salt, pepper, and cumin. Pour marinade into a pan, add salt, pepper, and cumin to taste, and simmer on the stove top until liquid is cooked off.

Place steaks 4" under broiler for 3 minutes. Flip and cook an additional 2.5 minutes. Remove steaks from oven and let rest, covered by aluminum foil, for 5 minutes. Slice and serve with marinade reduction.

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When it comes to cooking, I lack time and skills. Generally, this would lead to some basic, generic tasting dishes, but not today! The following was awfully easy to prepare and contained an explosion of flavors. There is no doubt I will be making this again.

Lemon Butter Chicken with Onions:

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• Trader Joe's Poultry Seasoning
• 1 large yellow onion, sliced
• 6-8 TBSP Kerrygold Pure Irish butter, sliced
• 1 large lemon, sliced

Instructions: You can see by the pictures that we used a 6 quart Lodge Enamel Dutch Oven for preparing and cooking this dish. If you do not own a dutch oven, don't worry, a baking pan, lined with aluminum foil will also work. Use enough foil to be able to create a tent over the food. This will lock the moisture in and provide the proper cooking environment.

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Place the chicken in the bottom of your dish and season to your liking. Layer with onions, butter, and lemons. Cover the dish and place in oven. Cook until chicken reaches ~160 degrees. The amount of time required will vary based on the size and amount of chicken, but generally takes around 30 minutes.

When dishing up, be sure to get plenty of melted butter with your chicken

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If you're like the rest of us, you've had your fair share of ground beef hamburgers since going Paleo and would welcome a robust flavor change. Enter ground lamb burgers with a cool cucumber sauce:

Ground Lamb Burgers

• 1 pound ground lamb
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, diced
• 10 Kalamata olives, pitted & chopped
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 1.5 tsp fresh thyme, chopped
• .75 tsp sea salt
• .25 tsp fresh ground black pepper

Instructions: Combine all ingredients in a bowl and then form into 4 patties. Cook on the grill or under broiler to desired doneness.

Cucumber Sauce

• 1 seedless cucumber
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 cup plain full-fat greek yogurt (look for FAGE Total)
• 2 TBSP olive oil
• 1 TBSP mint, finely chopped
• .5 tsp sea salt
• fresh ground black pepper to taste

Instructions: Peel, halve, and then coarsely shred the cucumber. Use a garlic press or the back of a spoon to mash the garlic. Combine shredded cucumber, pressed garlic, and all other ingredients in a bowl. Serve on top of or next to burgers.

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From Wikipedia:

Gout is a medical condition that usually presents with recurrent attacks of acute inflammatory arthritis (red, tender, hot, swollen joint). It is caused by elevated levels of uric acid in the blood. The uric acid crystallizes and deposits in joints, tendons, and surrounding tissues.

I have heard that the pain experienced during an episode of gout is akin to having someone walk on your eyeballs. Sounds like some pretty serious stuff if you ask me.

We have all probably heard that gout is brought on by consuming too much red meat and alcohol. This misconception has been around for well over 100 years and just won't go away. This past Christmas, while enjoying a delicious feast of prime rib roast and wine with our extended family, someone chimed in, half joking, that we were all going to get gout. Where did this faulty science originate?

The faulty logic comes from the following: There is a protein compound known as purines that is found in every cell of your body as well as virtually every food; meat having the highest concentration. When these purines are broken down by your cells, uric acid is produced. If we go back to the definition of gout, we will see that gout is caused by elevated levels of uric acid in the blood. At first glance this seems to be solid science, but the problem is that the production of uric acid doesn't necessarily result in an elevated level in your blood.

If you're a little confused, think about this in terms of cholesterol. If you eat a lot of dietary cholesterol, that will not, in and of itself, have a direct effect on the level of cholesterol in your blood. This is because your body auto-regulates itself and slows down its own production of cholesterol if you are eating plenty of it. Back to uric acid, a high purine diet will have a negligible effect on uric acid levels in the blood because the kidneys increase their excretion of uric acid.

So what causes uric acid levels to increase? I know this will shock you, but like the other diseases of civilization, insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, and fructose are to blame. When one is insulin resistant, uric acid excretion by the kidney is decreased. Therefore, anything that raises insulin levels would in turn raise uric acid levels and cause gout.

Whereas glucose indirectly increases uric acid levels by decreasing uric acid excretion, fructose has a more profound, double whammy effect by not only increasing uric acid production, but by also reducing the excretion of uric acidy by the kidney.

Why then has the sugar/fructose hypothesis been ignored by the masses? It all comes down to money. In the 1960s, shortly after the formation of this hypothesis, allopurinol, a drug for curing gout, was discovered and funding for nutritional research was cut-off. Why spend time and money researching something that they could now cure?

Even more frustrating is a 2004 article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Walter Willett, Gary Curhan, and their Harvard colleagues reporting that men with gout seemed to eat more meat than healthy men. In it, Gary Curhan admits that he might have once known that fructose raised uric acid levels, but that it had slipped his mind. He also acknowledged that he never knew that sucrose was half fructose! Remember, this guy is regarded as the ultimate authority on gout. The establishment can truly be a scary thing.

To sum this all up, if someone you love is suffering from gout, have them avoid sugar, especially fructose, while still enjoying the oh so delicious rib eye steak.

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