B.A.M.F Athletics

Hey kids,

Welcome to the B.A.M.F Athletics B.A.M.F 30.

What is it? It’s a 30-day strict Paleo intervention to strip out all the nonsense you eat, based on the Whole9 Whole30, which is based on Robb Wolf’s 30 day challenge, which is based on pure common sense.

First off, check out the Whole30 rules.

Here’s an excerpt:

More importantly, here’s what NOT to eat during the duration of your Whole30 program. Omitting all of these foods and beverages will help you regain your healthy metabolism, reduce systemic inflammation, and help you discover how these foods are truly impacting your health, fitness and quality of life.

• Do not consume added sugar of any kind, real or artificial. No maple syrup, honey, agave nectar, Splenda, Equal, Nutrasweet, xylitol, stevia, etc. Read your labels, because companies sneak sugar into products in all kinds of ways.

• Do not eat processed foods. This includes protein shakes, pre-packaged snacks/meals, protein bars, milk substitutes, etc.

• Do not drink alcohol, in any form.

• Do not eat grains. This includes (but is not limited to) wheat, rye, barley, millet, oats, corn, rice, sprouted grains and all of those gluten-free pseudo-grains like quinoa. (Yes, we said corn!) This also includes all the ways we add wheat, corn and rice into our foods in the form of bran, germ, starch and so on. Again, read your labels.

• Do not eat legumes. This includes beans (black, kidney, lima, etc.), peas, lentils, and peanuts or peanut butter. This also includes all forms of soy – soy sauce, miso, tofu, tempeh, edamame, and all the ways we sneak soy into foods (like lecithin).

• Do not eat dairy. This includes all cow, goat or sheep’s milk, cream, butter, cheese, yogurt, whey, ice cream, etc.

• Do not eat white potatoes. It’s arbitrary, but they are carbohydrate-dense and nutrient poor, and also a nightshade.

• Most importantly… do not try to shove your old, unhealthy diet into a shiny new Whole30 mold. This means no “Paleo-fying” less-than-healthy recipes – no “Paleo” pancakes, “Paleo” pizza, “Paleo” fudge or “Paleo” ice cream. Don’t mimic poor food choices during your Whole30 program!

One last and final rule. You are not allowed to step on the scale for the duration of your Whole30 program. This is about so much more than just weight loss, and to focus only on your body composition means you’ll miss out on the most dramatic (and lifelong) benefits this plan has to offer. Give yourself a well-deserved, long overdue break from fixating on that number on the scale! Absolutely NO weighing yourself or taking comparative measurements during your Whole30.

Read the full document and get your head around it. Or, if you’re a pervert, download the PDF.

Next, here’s some little extras for the B.A.M.F 30 (#BAMF30 on Twitter)

The way I feel, the Whole30 doesn’t go quite far enough, so let’s see how hard you can test yourself with the following:

• Completely avoid eating nuts of any kind. Need fat? Enjoy the fat on the meat you eat, the fat you cook in and AVOCADOS. Here’s an awesome breakdown from Diane at Balance Bites (danger it’s a PDF) – Fats & Oils.

• Completely avoid caffeinated drinks. Everything should be decaf. Knock that stupid habit on the head. If you must drink coffee (like me) find some tasty decaf. It exists. Hell, I can’t tell the difference in Starbucks any more. You can get green tea, black tea, white tea and coffee all decaffeinated. It’s awesome.

• Avoid chicken and pork as much as possible. Now, this might sound MENTAL, but there is a very large quantity of N-6 (Omega 6) in chicken (especially chicken skin) and pork (especially pork fat). Grass eating animals are a much better way to go. Now, we’re on a budget, I realise that. When in the supermarket just try to aim for meats that are *more likely* to be eating grass than grain. Lamb is a great one. Beef is next in line. If you must eat chicken, discard that skin. Pork? Trim off all the fat you can see and bolster it with some healthy fats if need be.

• Mix it up. Don’t just fucking buy broccoli. Get adventurous. Oven bake some kale with olive oil and salt. Fry brussels sprouts in coconut oil after part-steaming them so they are crunchy and interesting rather that soggy and sulphuric. Google your ass off when you buy a new cut of meat or some crazy type of veg and create an interesting meal.

• Completely avoid fruit juices of any kind. You may as well drink coke. Check out Dr. Robert Lustig’s 89 minute talk on fructose.

• Avoid fruit. You don’t need to eat fruit. There are all the vitamins you need in meat and vegetables (see below for carbs).

• Stop taking stupid supplements. With the exception of:
  • Vitamin D
  • Fermented Cod Liver Oil
  • Fish Oil
  • Magnesium
  • Iodine
  • BCAA’s

I may have missed some out, but you get the idea. Nobody needs protein shakes.

Questions and caveats:

• Need more carbs? (metconoholics and endurance athletes) – eat more ROOT tubers. Not stem tubers. ROOT TUBERS. Yams. Sweet potatoes. That kind of thing.

• Have a strength meet / competition coming up and need to gain / maintain large mass? Have some post workout (PWO) goat’s milk, raw if possible. Shit’s ANABOLIC. You’re supposed to have no dairy whatsoever. This is the only allowable window and reason to do so – if you are prepping for a comp or on a mass gain cycle ONLY. I call this The Power Athlete Caveat.

• Got kids / family / no time? Oh grow up. So does Sarah Fragoso, and she manages to write a blog, run a podcast and WRITE A BOOK over at Every Day Paleo.

That about wraps it up I think. Any questions, get them asked on the site. Let’s DO THIS.

Craig.

Good day.

Welcome to the first instalment of the BAMF Athletics Science Sunday sermons. That’s right. Science. On a Sunday.

Nice.

I recently had a week off work and was perusing Robb Wolf’s blog specifically for an article written by one Mat Lalonde. I had heard Robb and Andy joking about Mat’s hatred of fructose on the Paleolithic Solution Podcast and wanted to delve a little deeper into that. A link provided took me to the utterly stunning 89 minute lecture given by Dr. Robert Lustig from the University of California in San Francisco about quite how toxic fructose is to the human body.*

Now, I have never had a mind for science, but given my increasing interest in human biomechanics, evolutionary biology and chemistry, this really ticked a box for me. Not only that, but I found it to be compelling. See, I have a problem. I have no official nutrition qualifications to speak of and thus Ben Goldacre would assure you my advice should be avoided. This is why it makes me a very happy man when I have been going on about something for ages, then all of a sudden I come across a lecture from a Professor of Clinical Paediatrics, in the Division of Endocrinology at UCSF who backs up my point somewhat with an assload of mighty science. Now, it’s not all science. There is some banter and some socio-political commentary in there that will make you think.

On top of that, last Friday night, at about 02:30 in the morning I found myself staring in horror at the Food Standards Agency blog. This is the problem when you go to visit your mother in your hometown. There is little else to do but trawl the internet.  In said FSA blog, There was a rebuttal of sorts regarding a recent daily mail article regarding how the governmental nutrition recommendations are making us all fat and ill. In this rebuttal Andrew Wadge, the FSA Chief Scientist, shot himself squarely in the face with a diatribe that reads ridiculous to all but the layest of mans. Oh, it’s okay. You recommend whole grains. My bad. You can see the depth of the hole he’s in by the comments alone. Needless to say, I submitted a comment that has not yet seen the light of day (at the time of writing) linking to two papers on thermodynamics / nutrition and Dr. Lustig’s lecture.

Without further ado, find below the lecture itself as well as some further reading about why the first and second laws of thermodynamics do not and cannot be applied to human nutrition:

Sugar – The Bitter Truth (YouTube)

Paper on reinterpreting first law of thermodynamics

Paper on why “A calorie is a calorie” violates the second law of thermodynamics

Chow down on them NOM NOM NOM. It is worth spending 89 mins of your life watching this. Trust me. Science Sunday isn’t for the good of my health.

Stay Badassed™

*in the absence of fibre and exercise