More secrets revealed

A question I am often asked is this:

“Tasha, you’ve obviously perfected your training regimen down to the smallest detail, evidencing a level of dedication that most of us can never hope to achieve. But perhaps you’d be willing to share with us the secrets of what I’m sure is your equally stringent nutrition/diet plan, the one that has helped you hone your physique to its current state of chiseled perfection? Dare any of us mere mortals even dream of approaching similar results?”

Okay, I haven’t been asked this yet, not quite, but I can sense that it’s coming, and thus I’m happy to share my words of wisdom. I myself am a strict adherent to the Paleo Diet for Athletes, also known as the “caveman” diet. The basic premise is built around eating much as, well, the cavemen did: relying on whatever they could hunt or gather and taking advantage of the bounty to eat as much as possible when they could. What this means in practical terms is that one week they might gorge themselves on mastodon steaks, the next, eat nothing but twigs and berries. So not only does this diet involve a monofood approach, i.e. eating only one type of food for days at a stretch, but it also requires being opportunistic.

I know this is complicated, so I’ll explain it in layman’s terms, using examples from my own life. This week for me is Corndog Week – based on the principle of “one food at a time.” If the cavemen were to come upon a cache of corndogs, for instance, they’d eat that until it was gone, not risking life and limb looking for other fare in a cruel and unforgiving world. I follow this same principle – unless, that is, an opportunity comes along to snag other types of food at no cost to myself. Again, using myself as an example – if I’m swimming laps at the pool and in the midst of this intense workout, I see that someone in the lane next to me has foolishly left a granola bar or Twinkie on the ledge for a post-workout snack, I have to grab that item for myself, to help fuel my own workout. It’s a survival instinct that’s hard-wired into all of us, so it’s not as if I have a choice in the matter. Now, if there’s nothing to grab, then I just have to somehow make it through that 20-minute workout without. Tough, but that’s what I’m all about.

Some people don’t like this approach in that it has variation built into it, variation being anathema to most triathletes. They like things all orderly and rigid, everything the same, all the time. That’s fine for those who want to remain stuck in a rut, but for the elite among us, it’s all about adaptation. By changing things up, you’re forcing your body to adapt to the stresses you’re throwing at it, and this makes you a better athlete. Let’s say you’re in a race, following the standard one-GU-per-ten-minutes rule, and oops, there goes your box of GUs that you’ve so carefully strapped to your toptube. The standard triathlete would panic in such a situation and, deprived of his essential fuel, will crumble in agonizing fashion, lurching about on the side of the road, his muscles beginning to atrophy almost instantaneously.

Me, because I’ve been trained to think opportunistically, I’d go to the side of the road, feign a flat or other problem in order to get a good Samaritan to pull over, and would then grab their supplies and be off. Barring that, if I don’t want to lose that much time mucking about, I’ll just suck it up, as I’ve trained myself to do through endless cycles of deprivation and hardship.

So, based on all of these principles, right now I’m forcing myself to eat a LOT, to take advantage of the food supplies I have in the house. At some point the grocery stores might run out of food, or I might not be able to go the several blocks to make it there, and at that point I’ll move into “famine” mode, but right now the plan calls for me to “feast”, and so I eat. Sigh, it’s not easy being me.

That’s a quick and dirty summary of the Paleo Diet – granted, I haven’t actually read the book yet, but it’s pretty obvious to me that this is how it plays out. Feel free to contact me for more tips, if you too are ready to reach your own peak physical form. As you can see, however, it won’t be easy.