Falling Off The Wagon

At our weekly coaches meeting, Jesse and I were making note of some of the successes we’ve been seeing in our membership, both in body composition and performance. It’s incredibly motivating to see, and success breeds success; when one person is making great gains, everyone is asking them what they’re doing and they get motivated,  and soon more people are making tremendous progress.

From Dawn Green who’s lost 20 lbs., to Ricky Alcaraz (super heavyweight MMA fighting champ) losing 60 lbs, and making PRs on his lifts to Francis Bruening dropping 8% bodyfat in his 50’s (yes, this program works for all ages) we’re seeing success after success. And the performance PR’s are almost comical in their frequency. Coach J must post 20 video’s a week of our members PR’ing their lifts.  We have so much to be thankful for, but mostly we’re thankful for the amazing energy and commitment our members bring to the box each and every day.

It’s easy to get all spun up on all the success we’re seeing, but I want to take a moment to address something else that happens from time to time ~ falling off the wagon. Sometimes life hits and we revert back to a form of eating that makes us feel good. Binge eating when stressed or overwhelmed in our personal lives happens all too often. For whatever reason, most people crave carbs when stressed out, and as we know, controlling carbs is the key to controlling our individual nutritional blueprint.

A few days of this binge eating go by, and you realize you’ve been eating pizza and late night bowls of coco-puffs, and you’re feeling sick (both because of the carb bombing going on, as well as because you realize you’ve been sabotaging the hard work you’ve done up to this point? ). What do you do?

Know that you have learned and continue to refine the principles of sound nutrition. You know what to do, the fact you haven’t been doing it for a while doesn’t change what works and what doesn’t.  As soon as you revert back to the “correct” form of eating and exercise for you (that we’ve discussed and tweaked as part of our nutritional discussions) your body will move back towards where it was before you “fell off the wagon”.

My advice is to go easy on yourself, and don’t beat yourself up for slipping up. We all do it once in a while. I’ve done it, Coach J has done it, I’ll bet the top CrossFitters have done it. It’s no big deal. This is a journey and a process. No one will care that you had several days of bad eating a few weeks ago when your workplace was going through layoffs. I promise you your body won’t know the difference either.

Accept it, life is going to keep throwing curve balls at you, that’s why it’s called life. You’re going to have your ups and downs. Know that you have a powerful resource at your disposal. Your fellow CrossFit Reflexion members (and coaches) are always there to lean on and to look to for guidance or help or just someone to listen to the crap going on for you right now. Seriously, that’s one the greatest things about our box, is the community we/you have built.

Revel in the success of others and jump back up on the wagon. We are all in this together.

— Shawn