Diet & Exercise Shouldn’t Be Enemies!

May 11th, 2009, by

Diet vs Exercise

We have all seen what my nutritional suggestions, combined with CrossFit,  have done for Jennie, Zach, and Bender. Dave, Garth, and Tom have all seen and felt some changes themselves. They did this through exercise and diet though.

Click here for some before & after pictures of 3 of Robb Wolf's clients. In the befores, they were all CrossFitting a few times a week, but not dialing in their nutrition. The afters are the effects of changing what they were eating while continuing to CrossFit. For all of them, the before and after photos are only months apart. This just proves that it works for people outside of the Fort too :)

The take home message of this post is that exercise alone will not get you the results you are after. You must alter the way you are eating if you want to alter the way you look and feel.

Category: Nutrition

3 Responses to "Diet & Exercise Shouldn’t Be Enemies!"

  • Jennie Forman
    May 12, 2009, 4:56 pm

    Wait...Bill, the FORT IS MAGIC.

    I want to also point out that dialing in your nutrition comes in many forms. For some of us, it will be just giving up the morning bagel. For others, it will mean working hard to weigh and measure everything we eat. "Dialing in" doesn't have to be all or nothing. Start by taking small steps. #1 - improve the quality of what you're eating. Let's all just start there for now.

  • Mark R.
    May 13, 2009, 8:16 am

    Diet Question:

    I haven't really posted anything on diet, because I've been trying to get a better feel for where your guys philosophy is on overall nutrition, as I've been reading the blog for a little while, I've gotten a better grasp so here goes; First, I've garnered that carbs are the boogey man here, this is nothing new of course, there have literally been dozens of low to no carb diets popularized in the last 10 years from Atkins/Southbeach/Zone and the like, however usually those have a specific breakdown Zone being the 40/30/30, Atkins the 0/50/50, and it seems as though you guys are somewhere in the middle there, at least from what I've seen from Josh (cause he works with me and can only have 40g (a bite) of carbs a day. Now at this point I should point out that of what I've seen and heard I tend to agree with about 90%, mostly based on the principle that your fat intake is not what is making/keeping people fat, and I love to see you guys pointing out that the crappy carbs are really to blame for a lot of this, although I don't know that I completely agree on all the foods you guys would tend to label as poor choices. Nevertheless my questions come in the form of athletic performance, and overall realistic practicality than weight or fat loss.

    What do you do with the detractors who say that you cannot perform at a high level athletically without the use of more carbs in the diet, one of the things that all of the studies on diets like atkins have showed is that it's really hard on the body to take protein and fat and convert them into quick needed energy, and say 40g a day will get the average person about 3 pulls on the rower before there OOG. Not to mention the hard effect high fat and protein diets can have on your kidneys, GI tract, and colon, and the higher cholesterol that goes along with it. In addition where are we supposed to get a majority of our vitamin and nutrient fortification? Now I agree as well that the idea of 4 to 6 servings of fruits and veggies is nuts, so are you suggesting we swear off a majority of our fruits and replace them with Megamans and Flinstones? Because many of the vegetables you endorse are not exactly vitamin/mineral blockbusters, i.e. spaghetti squash,

    To sum all this up, do you feel there is adequate enough balance in your approach for needed energy (workouts/normal functioning), as well as being realistic (what % should the average person be consuming because 40g, doesn't seem plausible), and furthermore for overall nutrition how do you reconcile not getting our supposed daily allowances without vitamin supplementation? And most importantly how and when can you cheat (on your diet) without ill-effect, as no one can be perfect all the time.

    That should be good for now, I'd love to know what you think.