NUTRITION

The CrossFit stimulus—constantly varied high-intensity functional movement coupled with meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar—prepares you for the demands of a healthy, functional, independent life and provides a hedge against chronic disease and incapacity. This stimulus is elegant in the mathematical sense of being marked by simplicity and efficacy. The proven elements of this broad, general, and inclusive fitness, in terms of both movement and nutrition, are what we term our CrossFit Essentials.

Practice Makes Powerful

Everyone who’s successful at what they do starts with the fundamentals — whether it’s learning to play piano or training for the CrossFit Games. In CrossFit, if the basic principles are never truly refined, then the distance between potential and performance will always be greater than necessary.

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The Basics of CrossFit

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The best way to understand CrossFit and its value as a fitness program is to experience it yourself by walking into a CrossFit gym and trying it. But we understand you may want to know what you’re getting yourself into before you take that step, so here’s a primer on the basics of CrossFit.

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The Angry Woman With the Puke Bag

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Dina Marks was working as a pastry chef at Michael’s on Main in Soquel, California, baking warm brownies, crisp-topped crème brulées, and strawberry shortcakes when the pain drove her to visit the emergency room. After a confusing medical diagnosis turned into a harrowing journey toward recovery and healing, Marks started doing her own research. That's when she became angry.

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Nutrition: The Teeter-Totter

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Anyone who wants the full benefit and results of CrossFit must understand—and then act on the information—that nutrition is the foundation for all the other work you do in the name of athletic development and elite health. The key, of course, is hormones, which regulate how the body stores and releases energy and repairs itself.

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Obesity and the Microbiome

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In "Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health," Alessio Fasano, M.D., and Susie Flaherty point to a number of environmental factors that influence obesity, including “sleep deprivation, disruption to circadian rhythms, chronic stress, changes in food composition, labor-saving devices, drugs (including antibiotics), and endocrine disruptors” as well as socioeconomic factors. They also add another variable to the mix: the gut microbiome, the ecosystem of microorganisms in and on the human body.

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12 Ways to Train Your Mental Fitness

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For many, the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced just how important mental health is for overall wellness. Rather than some intangible aside, it’s a critical element of physical health. You might even call it fitness. Referring to mental-health care as mental fitness creates a powerful mindset shift. It puts us in a proactive state and gives us the autonomy to improve it. And just as we build and preserve muscle with physical training, we can develop and sustain mental fitness by regularly training our brains. Start with these 12 steps.

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The Gut-Brain Romance: This Is Your Brain on Food

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When it comes to diet, most people’s concerns involve weight loss, fitness, cardiac health, and longevity. But what we eat affects more than our bodies; it also affects our brains. Recent studies have shown that diet can have a profound impact on mental health conditions ranging from ADHD to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, OCD, dementia, and beyond. In This Is Your Brain on Food, Dr. Uma Naidoo draws on cutting-edge research to explain the many ways in which food contributes to our mental health and shows how a sound diet can help treat and prevent a wide range of psychological and cognitive health issues.

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Sugar and Cancer: An Excerpt From Ravenous

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“'Too much sugar' might be the simplest explanation for the many obesity-linked cancers, but it is not a simple explanation. It is an idea built upon more than a century of science," Sam Apple explains in this excerpt from Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection. Here, Apple highlights key moments in that century of science, focusing specifically on how sugar and other rapidly digested carbohydrates spike insulin and insulin, in turn, "activates the pathways linked to cancer."

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Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine — Excerpt 2

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Over his more than 40-year career, pediatric neuroendocrinologist and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Robert Lustig has been dedicated to treating and preventing childhood obesity and diabetes. In his new book, Dr. Lustig exposes the truth, both scientifically and politically, underlying the current global pandemic of diet-related diseases. In this excerpt from chapter 8, he describes the two pathways that fuel energy metabolism and explains how different food sources affect the body at the cellular level.

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Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine — Excerpt 3

Over his more than 40-year career, pediatric neuroendocrinologist and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Robert Lustig has been dedicated to treating and preventing childhood obesity and diabetes. In his new book, Dr. Lustig exposes the truth, both scientifically and politically, underlying the current global pandemic of diet-related diseases. In this excerpt, he explains how the precepts of cell biology discussed earlier in chapter 8 (excerpts 1 and 2) present a new way to think about the role of diet and nutrition in the development of non-communicable diseases.

Read MoreMetabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine — Excerpt 3

Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine — Excerpt 1

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Over his more than 40-year career, pediatric neuroendocrinologist and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Robert Lustig has been dedicated to treating and preventing childhood obesity and diabetes. In his new book, Dr. Lustig exposes the truth, both scientifically and politically, underlying the current global pandemic of diet-related diseases.

Read MoreMetabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine — Excerpt 1

The Case for Keto — Exclusive Preview #4

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In this exclusive preview of Gary Taubes’ new book, Taubes explains why most of us have a fraught relationship with food and a flawed understanding of what makes a healthy diet. Here Taubes argues, “The existing evidence says that if you have metabolic syndrome, if you’re getting fatter or are already obese, if you’re prediabetic or already diabetic, avoiding carbohydrate-rich foods and replacing them with fat may be the single healthiest thing you can do for yourself." He adds: "No one can guarantee what happens in the long run. … Anyone who makes an ironclad guarantee for any way of eating—that one diet will assuredly make you live longer than others ... is probably selling something."

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The Case for Keto — Exclusive Preview #3

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In this exclusive preview of Gary Taubes’ new book, Taubes explains why most of us have a fraught relationship with food and a flawed understanding of what makes a healthy diet. In 2002, Taubes discussed recent research findings on the relative benefits of a low-carb, high-fat diet in an article in New York Times Magazine. Since then, he writes, “close to one hundred, if not more, clinical trials have published results, and they confirm these observations with remarkable consistency. The trials are still incapable of telling us whether embracing LCHF/ketogenic eating will extend our lives (compared to other patterns of eating the authorities might recommend), but they continue to challenge, relentlessly, the conventional thinking on the dangers of high-fat diets, and they tell us that in the short term, this way of eating is safe and beneficial.”

Read MoreThe Case for Keto — Exclusive Preview #3