Since its creation in 2000, CrossFit has garnered a huge amount of attention and praise from health and fitness enthusiasts. This regimen combines elements from the Olympics, interval training, weightlifting, calisthenics, and gymnastics among others.
CrossFit is primarily a high-intensity strength and conditioning fitness regimen that aims to improve the overall fitness and performance of its practitioners. It targets improved performance in some specific areas: strength, stamina, power, speed, flexibility, agility, coordination, accuracy, balance, and respiratory endurance.
7 Top CrossFit Diet Plans
However, a high-intensity exercise regimen is not the only requirement for sculpting strong, lean muscle and sustainable weight loss. Another vital component is diet. Fitness experts recommend a protein-rich diet is a perfect accompaniment for successful CrossFit training. Not only does protein provide adequate energy for your workouts, but it also helps build up lean muscle mass and stabilize blood sugar.
A good diet will also decrease the chances of you getting an injury during training.
Below are seven of the best CrossFit diets to help you do all this and more while helping you achieve your peak performance:
1. The Paleo Diet
The Paleo Diet is all about changing our eating habits to what ancient man would have eaten. That means consuming none of the processed or refined foods.
Instead, people on the Paleo Diet are encouraged to eat a lot of meat from fowls such as chicken, turkey, and duck. Wild fish meat is also recommended. Other great food options for this diet include eggs, green vegetables, natural oils, fruits, tubers like sweet potato, and nuts.
The Paleo Diet eliminates processed foods, carbs, and sugar from your meals, forcing the body to burn fat for energy in a process known as ketogenesis. This, in turn, allows you to lose weight faster while protecting and building up lean muscle.
Many people consider this diet to be the best meal plan while you are in CrossFit training. It helps you get in shape, lose weight, and build up lean muscle, all the while allowing you to eat until satiated and without counting calories.
So, does the Paleo Diet work? Consider this: early societies were built on hunting and gathering. When agriculture was discovered, and we shifted from wars to wars a more agrarian society, the man started becoming more dependent on grains. The result? 33 percent of Americans are obese, with a further 66 percent considered overweight. Something is clearly not right.
What Paleo does is bring you back to how your body is biologically designed to eat. This allows you to start living healthier, as well as tap into an unmatched potential of physical performance.
2. The Zone Diet
The Zone Diet focuses mainly on controlling the body’s hormonal balance. This is important because your hormones impact how your body functions. They influence wellness components such as body composition, blood chemistry, and energy use among others. The foods you eat act as a drug, because they cause either positive or physiological changes in the body.
This diet is not about cutting out certain food groups from your meals. Instead, it focuses on balancing your consumption of proteins, with preference given to natural, lean meats; carbohydrates, especially those with a low glycemic load like vegetables and fruits; and fats.
The right balance of these components helps control three hormones that are most influenced by diet: insulin, glucagon, and eicosanoids. In turn, the diet ultimately helps you shed fat, stabilize blood sugar levels, and inflammation.
The only downside to this diet plan is that it is quite rigid. You have to weigh, measure and plan your meals quite extensively because each is organized in blocks. However, it is also quite popular with CrossFit athletes.
3. The Danielle Sidell Diet
One of the best things about nutrition in the CrossFit world is that many of its top athletes put in a lot of work to help other enthusiasts. This leads to successful athletes coming up with unique diet plans specifically geared to CrossFit training. One such meal plan is the Danielle Sidell diet.
This diet is designed for people who want to lose weight but have a very healthy appetite. It involves eating a lot of lean meats, eggs, and bananas while staying away from vegetables that can cause bloating such as spinach.
However, this meal plan ultimately encourages athletes to listen to their bodies. It is about eating what has been proven to adequately fuel your body through CrossFit workouts.
4. The Primal Diet
Like Paleo, the Primal diet focuses on bringing people back to a healthier way of eating. It also follows a protein-rich, low-carb philosophy to manage body weight. The only difference is that the Primal diet allows the consumption of dairy products like Greek yogurt, butter, cream, and cheeses. However, the key to this diet is moderation.
5. The Ketogenic Diet
This is another great protein-rich, low-carb meal plan that helps CrossFit athletes with weight loss and muscle mass. It is proven to change your body’s metabolism, shifting it from burning carbohydrates for fuel to burning up fats.
The Ketogenic diet shares a few similarities with the Zone Diet in that it uses percentages to regulate how much of a particular food you can eat. Specifically, it allows you to consume between five and ten percent of calories from carbohydrates, 20 to 25 percent from proteins, and 70 to 75 percent from fat.
This diet is a pretty straightforward meal plan. It also seems to let you eat more kinds of food, and provides more flavorful options than the Zone and Paleo diets. However, it is not suitable for people who have certain medical conditions like a history of kidney disease, or those who have undergone gastric bypass surgery.
6. The Eat This, Not That! Diet
Fitness magazine Eat This, Not That! developed a broad diet plan that mainly focuses on increasing your protein consumption. This diet was formulated with people who want to lose weight in a healthy way in mind. Increase your intake of protein sources such as lean meats, vegetable proteins, natural oils, nuts and seeds, sweet potato, eggs, oatmeal, peanut butter, and bananas. Supplements such as whey protein should also be part of your post-workout routine. Conversely, stay away from high sugar carbohydrates, processed or fried foods, and alcohol.
7. The Brooke Ence Diet
Brooke Ence is another successful CrossFit athlete who developed a meal plan for people who may have discovered that other diets do not work well for them. She advocates for the consumption of cereal grains such as oatmeal and processed meats like bacon. This diet also includes eggs, vegetables, caffeine, daily protein shakes, and plenty of water. However, counting your macro and basing your diet on meeting your body’s needs is the best kind of diet to follow.
Conclusion
Out of the numerous diet plans available today, it is important to go with the one that works best for you. Choose a diet that meshes well with your lifestyle as well as your fitness goals and ensures you get your best performance with CrossFit.
Bio: Olivia writes on health and food at Everynutrient.com! She’s written a whole bunch of articles that have to do with health and fitness foods for people from all walks of life. Her articles have been published on several health and fitness websites. Every Nutrient focuses on effective changes that you can make to live a healthy and fulfilled life!
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