WOD:   4/04/17

Establish a 3RM Clean and Jerk

For time:
20/14-lb. medicine-ball cleans, 50 reps
155/105-lb. push jerks, 25 reps
20/14-lb. medicine-ball cleans, 50 reps

Get in the Zone

The Zone, what do I mean? Am I talking about the ideal place we want our heart rate to be at while working out…? No. Okay, do I mean AutoZone…? Not that one either, but nice try! What I mean by the Zone is the diet plan known as the Zone Diet.

The Zone Diet is a blueprint for how you eat your food and what you eat. You may have heard of this diet before and looked into it a little bit. Long story short the Zone says in each meal you should have a certain amount of protein, carbohydrates and healthy fats. Depending on who you are as a person, male or female, height and weight, and physical activity level all determine how much protein, fat and carbs you can take in. Doing the Zone Diet correctly will allow your body to create a balance of hormonal responses every time you eat. According to Dr. Barry Sears, “If you’ve done the right balance you will not be hungry for the next five hours.”

The Zone Diet was created by a man named Barry Sears, Ph.D. Sears is “considered as the founder of anti-inflammatory nutrition.” Sears is a former research scientist at the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To add on to those achievements he has over 40 years of study to lipids (fats) and how they affect the body and medication. Sears also has more than 40 scientific publications and 14 U.S patents of intravenous drug delivery systems and hormonal regulation for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. (1)

Dr. Sears has written a few books, one of which my father and I have taken up and are reading, it’s titled Mastering the Zone. And what this book does is A) teach the reader about what the zone diet is and B) how to do it effectively (along with a plethora of other things). According to Mastering the Zone, doing the Zone Diet correctly will allow 4 things to occur, of which are:

1. Think better, because in the Zone you are maintaining stable blood sugar levels.

2. Perform better, because being in the Zone allows you to increase oxygen transfer to your muscle cells.

3.Look better, because in the zone you are shedding excess body fat at the fastest possible rate.

4. Never be hungry between meals, because staying in the Zone means your brain is being constantly supplied with its primary fuel: blood sugar.

*In these four key points the Zone is brought up once per point. What Dr. Sears means by “the Zone” is the balance of hormones every time you eat.*

Now on to the fun stuff… How to be “in the Zone”

Like I mentioned before, the Zone Diet consists of eating three things in every meal, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Normally attempting to measure out how much of each can be difficult, trying to figure out how many grams of protein are in an egg and then calculating that out to fit your bodies needs can begin to be too much work just to eat some food. Dr. Sears has made it much easier for us. What he has done has created these things called “blocks”. A block is a measurement of how much protein, fats or carbs you eat in a meal. From here he breaks down what a block consists of for proteins, fats and carbs.

1 block of protein = 7 grams of protein (for example 1 ounce of sliced turkey, chicken, beef or 2 egg whites)

1 block of fats = 1.5 grams of fat (for example 1 macadamia nut or 1/3 tsp. of olive oil)

1 block of carbohydrates = 9 grams of carbohydrates (for example 1 ½ cups of broccoli or ¼ cup cooked pasta)

Now looking at that and those examples it doesn’t seem all so daunting anymore, or maybe it does, I don’t know you! But knowing these conversions does make things a little bit easier.

There is much more to the Zone Diet than just these three conversions, such as the timing of when you eat or how many meals you eat in the day. Also what foods you choose to put on your plate. If you have read this far than you hopefully noticed the two massive differences in what a single block of carbohydrates looks like. 1 ½ cup of broccoli compared to ¼ cup of pasta, that’s insane! If you are a 4 block athlete that would mean you would only need to eat a single cup of pasta if you had that extremely carbohydrate dense food. But if you have something that isn’t nearly as carbohydrate dense, such as broccoli, you would need to eat 6 cups of cooked broccoli in one meal to suffice 4 blocks of carbs. Just ask my dad that is not an easy thing to do.

I could keep going on and on about the Zone and more and more things like that but I think it’s pretty clear that the Zone diet, if done correctly, can do a lot of good things for your health and your fitness. Here is a link to a CrossFit Journal article written back in May of 2004. It talks briefly about what the Zone is and how to figure out your blocks. It also gives rough estimations on how to plan out your eating schedule throughout the day. Pages 3-9 all tell the reader what food is considered a protein, a carbohydrate or a fat and how much of that food equates out to 1 block.

     Figure 1. On the left is the Zone Diet Pyramid and on the right is the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. Notice how on the Zone Diet pyramid the very top of the pyramid is breads and grains whereas those are located on the very bottom of the USDA Food Pyramid.

--Written by Austin Gray

Bibliography

(1) Sears, Barry. "Biography." DrSears.com, 2017, www.drsears.com/about-dr-sears/biography/.

(2) Some picture off of Pinterest, can’t find proper website to cite

(3) Melnick, Meredith, and Sabrina Siddiqui. "What The Government Got Wrong About Nutrition - And How It Can Fix It." The Huffington Post, 31 July 2014, 1:47 p.m., www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/31/usda-dietary-guidelines-diabetes_n_5635554.html.