TAGS
The premise of the Zone Diet is to control your body’s metabolic hormone response by maintaining a specific “40:30:30” ratio of calories obtained from carbohydrates, proteins, and fats respectively. Why is this ratio so important?
Digesting too many carbohydrates in one meal causes our bodies to overproduce a hormone called insulin. Insulin has been shown to regulate carbohydrate and fat metabolism.
Insulin’s role in the body:
Essentially, insulin stores nutrients right after a meal by reducing the concentrations of glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids in the bloodstream.
Digesting too much protein in one meal causes our bodies to overproduce a hormone called glucagon. Glucagon has been shown to regulate carbohydrate and fat metabolism in an opposite manner compared to insulin.
Glucagon’s role in the body:
Essentially, glucagon mobilizes glucose from the stores inside your body and increases the concentration of glucose in the bloodstream.
After you eat a meal your body is ready to absorb all the glucose (carbohydrates), fatty acids (fats), and amino acids (proteins) digested from the food. The mere presence of these substances causes your body to increase the amount of insulin in your body to inhibit the secretion of glucagon. As levels of insulin rise in the body these nutrients are absorbed by the liver, muscle, and kidney cells.
When you are between meals your body is essentially fasting. Your cells need glucose for energy and start to absorb it from your bloodstream. As the glucose is absorbed, the body starts to increase the amount of glucagon in your body. Glucagon then mobilizes the glucose from the glycogen stored in your liver, muscle and kidney cells and releases it into your bloodstream.
As you can see these hormones work in a very complex feedback network to keep your blood sugar (glucose) levels constant throughout the day. We can think about controlling the portions of each macronutrient to stimulate specific responses from our metabolic hormones. In a crude sense, we have begun to use our food as a drug.
The Zone The “Zone” is when we have insulin and glucagon levels balanced in the body. Furthermore, when we are “in the Zone” we have a third set of hormones called Eicosanoids released into the bloodstream. These are anti-inflammatory agents that have a similar effect as aspirin on the body (without the negative side effects). Thus helping us to naturally improve recovery. If you want to know more, we suggest buying or borrowing Dr. Barry Sears book: Enter The Zone: A Dietary Road Map
In order to create a system to easily measure and create meals that fit our ideal 40:30:30 ratio we will establish the concept of a block. What exactly is a block? We can think of a block as a 3-dimensional cube. Each dimension of the cube will represent a single macronutrient (protein, carbohydrate, and fat). In order to keep our meals balanced, and our block looking like a cube, not a coffin, we need to make sure we have equal servings of each macronutrient. The unit of measurement for a block is as follows:
A 1-Block meal would consist of 1 measurment of each of our three nutrients; 7g protein, 9g carbs, 3g fats. A 2-Block meal would consist of 2 measurements of each of our three nutrients; 14g protein, 18g carbs, 6g fats.
If I find a food item whose label says it has 15g protein, 28g carbs, and 9g fats, do I have a complete Zone Meal? The answer is: NO What we have here is a meal that contains 2 portions of protein, 3 portions of carbs, and 3 portions of fats, so we are NOT balanced. What do we do? Find a 7g protein (or 1-Block Protein) food item we can add to this meal to round it out.
The easiest way to start creating Zone meals is to use a single-block listing or spreadsheet of foods and their quantities that equal 1 Block (Or 1-Portion, or 1-Serving). Pick the food items you want to eat for that meal from that list and voila, dinner. This will always be a little easier than picking a meal and then trying to find a way to balance all the nutrients.
1 Block Snack:
Next, we need to determine how many blocks a day you should eat. There are several ways to get to this number! In its simplest form we can just use the following chart taken from the CrossFit Journal Zone Meal Plan article as our starting point:
Or we can calculate our Blocks off of our activity level and body fat percentage: Or we can use a series of measurements: Or we can calculate blocks based on how much protein we should be taking in every day: Divide this number by 7 to get your daily Block prescription
Always try to choose Light or Moderate as your workout activity. CrossFit is intense, but we are not doing hard workouts 5-7 times a week that last more than 40 minutes. Most of our WODs last 10-15 minutes. If you still feel extremely hungry and sluggish after a few weeks based on these calculations make sure you are drinking enough water and then think about increasing your daily amount of protein.
All of these methods should put you in the ball park of where you need to be so choose the one makes you feel like Rich Froning, Jr.
Remember, you’re doing to this to get healthy and perform better in the gym. It’s only through hard work and top level performance that we can start to make weight loss and strength gains a reality.
.
