Thursday, June 4, 2009

Warrior Diet

First off...I hate the name. It sounds chinsey. It sounds like it was made to attract middle aged balding guys who are trying to recapture the virility of their youth (or what they perceived it to be). Secondly, it goes against conventional wisdom. We are supposed to eat a large breakfast and by dinner time eat a piece of lettuce and some ground hemp seeds or multiply our body weight by ten and split that up evenly over six meals a day, right? Oh, and we are supposed to not eat carbs.

Well, I can't argue that those methods have worked in the past to get me into "fighting shape", but they also worked at making me irritable, suffer low sugar should I be ten minutes late for a meal, and spend countless hours and dollars measuring certain foods, making "perfect" meals. I can stay on these programs longer than most, and with a good amount of working out, I am able to keep up a decent amount of physical conditioning....but, there is always something better out there, right?

Well, for me there is. I was tooling around on my favorite workout message board, http://www.bodyweightculture.com and happened across the "Warrior Diet". I snorted at it, believing it to be another fad "eat almonds, drink kefir, lose weight" thing that no one can follow for long. Being more optimistic than pessimistic, I decided to visit http://www.warriordiet.com and have a looksy. First off, I was put off by the sales attempts from the get go, but I also realize this is a necessary evil when it comes to an eating program...most consumers want to buy something tangible, and the people selling the diet need to make money. I blew it off, but after reading another post on the body weight website, and seeing some pics of the guys who were on it, and their discussion about how satisfied they feel, I looked into it again.

This was a week and a day ago, and one week ago I started a preliminary version of the diet. Basically, I eat raw fruit or veggies every three hours or so (when I feel really hungry), and eat what my body craves in the evening. Note, this is what I truly crave, not emotionally crave...think lots of protein or complex carbs, not the All America Chocolate Cake from Costco. I also take Whey Protein immediately after my workouts. The diet advocates eating clean...avoiding all the foods Oprah tells us to avoid. The difference? From day one, I had no sugar drops, was never ravenously hungry, and was completely satiated by the eating plan (including the eating of "clean" foods).

I work out regularly, and would not have given this diet a second chance had it not been for advocates on the website posting their pics. You can retain and gain muscle on this program and don't need to eat 200 grams of protein a day to do it, either. You can lose fat (quite easily) on this program, which I am in the midst of doing right now. I am about 10lbs shy of where I want to be, and don't see any issue of making it there with this program, or exceeding my goals if I decide to do the diet to a tee, versus kind of winging it right now.

Why did I choose this topic as my first blog? Honestly, because I know there is a lot of crap out there, and I have fallen for much of it, but so far (one week) into this, my body feels better than it has in a LOOOOONG time!