How to do CrossFit on a Meat-Based Keto Carnivore Diet | are you training for performance or health?
“The biggest mistake people make is thinking that CrossFit is a get-out-jail-free card when it comes to diet. This could not be further from the truth. Your CrossFit should not supplement your eating; your eating should supplement your CrossFit. ”
Like anyone that does CrossFit I know, my journey began on a similar road: one night I was scrolling through Netflix and came across a documentary called Fittest On Earth. I was confused when I did not hear David Attenborough’s voice narrating the opening scenes. The Likes of Rich Froning and Mat Fraser resembled silverback gorillas — only with less hair and more muscle.
One thing led to another and I was hook-line-and-sinker addicted to the sport. That was 5 years ago. To this day, I train mostly 6x per week. In the 5 preceding years, I have witnessed many different types of people that come into the CrossFit box: you got your average Joe that just wants to train, your finance or tech dude who thinks he still has a shot at going to the games and insists on RXing everything, even if his back is bent like the Golden Gate bridge, and you have your mom who has been going for 10 years and her body has not changed one bit — if anything, her body has gotten slightly worse.
The biggest mistake people make is thinking that CrossFit is a get-out-jail-free card when it comes to diet. This could not be further from the truth. Your CrossFit should not supplement your eating; your eating should supplement your CrossFit.
CrossFit has been associated with many diets. It used to be paleo but I am seeing a more vegan-centric approach now. I’m just going to get this out the way: I do not think going vegan is good for your CrossFit gains (or the environment for that matter).
Due to a number of gut and mental health issues, I stick to a meat-based ketogenic way of eating. Call it the carnivore diet, the animal-based or the ketovore diet — the basic premise is to eat mostly meat and avoid most plants.
The concern for most is that a meat-based diet is too low-carb to train Crossfit with. In this post, I hope to answer that question. I hope to shed light on the question you need to ask yourself before assuming a meat-based diet is not the answer for you.
Are you training for performance or health?
If you are training for performance, I do not think it is entirely possible — at a high, Mat Fraser type level — to stick to a strict carnivore diet. However, if you are training for health (which most should be), then I do believe it is possible with a few things to keep in mind.
Training for Performance on a Meat-Based Carnivore Diet
This is the part where I tell you that strategic carb use is beneficial. Specifically around workouts and at night. I’d suggest not falling for the typical CrossFit Games athlete post-workout carbs of pastries and ice cream. You are not them and they are not you. Your carbs should look something more along the lines of berries, avocado, white rice, sweet potato and honey.
Basically, fruit and resistant starch. But stay with me, because what I lay out in the training for health portion of this post still applies to you, the athlete that wants to perform well while still sticking to a carnivore-ish diet.
Training for Health on a Meat-Based Carnivore Diet
Now is the part where I tell you it is entirely possible to train every day on a meat-based diet while doing CrossFit. There are a few things to keep in mind which can make all the difference:
1. Chicken is a Weak Animal: Eat Fatty Red Meat
This is a ketogenic diet after all. So most of your energy is going to be coming from saturated animal fat. This is the fat that will give your brain, muscles and hormones the energy it needs to train and recover.
The biggest mistake, which has been proliferated via the “fat is bad” era of the last 50 years, people make is not eating enough animal fat. If you eat too lean protein — like chicken -- you simply won’t have the energy needed from ketones (fat).
2. Avoid Fasting
Fasting and Intermittent Fasting have been a hot topic for a number of years. It works magic. But it also becomes chronic. It is easy to use Intermittent Fasting as an excuse to binge out on garbage. Unless you have a chronic illness or disease like cancer, you should avoid fasting; fasting is a stress on the body, and on top of your already stressful man existence, does not warrant much — and in fact, will promote muscle degeneration in most cases.
If you can, and if you do CrossFit in the mornings, try and have at least a few eggs or Bulletproof Coffee (butter coffee) before you workout. The protein/fat combo will be enough to sustain your workout.
On most days Bulletproof Coffee is my pre-workout. I have it with KerryGold Unsalted Butter, C8 MCT and Hydrolysed Collagen Powder. Sometimes I have a couple of eggs too. It all depends on what the workout is and how I am feeling. I am always listening to the wisdom of my body to guide me.
3. Load Up on Electrolytes: Stay Salty
Salt (sodium) is going to be your best friend when going as low-carb as a carnivore diet. We tend to lose a lot of sodium when we exercise and go low-carb and the answer is not always as simple as “drink more water.” It is not about water so much as hydration. Drinking more water will just dilute your precious mineral stores in your cells and dehydrate you — this is when high-performing athletes suffer from hyponatremia: a dangerous and often fatal condition when the sodium in your blood is too low.
Salt has been wrongly vilified in the past (like saturated fat) for causing high blood pressure. They got the colour right but the substance wrong: it is sugar that is the enemy. Don’t fear salt.
I currently use LMNT Electrolytes from Robb Wolf’s company LMNT Labs.
4. Dairy is the Ultimate Supplement
If you can handle dairy and are not in the infant stages of your healing journey, by all means, use it. The calorie-dense nature of dairy can make a huge performance-enhancing boost to your CrossFit journey. Think of dairy as a supplement, not the main course. Use it sparingly.