At the 2011 Reebok CrossFit Games, CrossFit founder and CEO Greg Glassman sat down with Fast Company Magazine to talk about CrossFit.
In this segment, Coach shares the origins of CrossFit”s dietary prescription: meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.
In 1995, Glassman says he took a year off from training to travel with the founder of the Zone Diet, Dr. Barry Sears.
“We had a revolutionary message at the time,” he says. “It was: The carbs that you think are so good are bad—they’re killing you; in fact, that’s why you are headed towards heart disease and your mother has it.”
On tour, Glassman found that “nutrition and exercise are twin facets of the same goal or result, which is improved health and fitness.”
Glassman also discusses how the Paleo Diet has affected CrossFit nutrition.
“Paleo’s the easy paradigm,” he says, and it fits well with the CrossFit prescription—but alone it isn’t enough.
“There’s a better way than Paleo even, and that is to not just look at the quality of the foods but to simultaneously look at the quantity,” Coach says.
“When we move from Paleo to something Zone-like we put the nutritional prescription on a quantifiable basis, we’re turning nutrition from religion to empirical science, and I begin to learn the lessons as to what happens when you tweak these knobs.”
12min 24sec
Additional reading: What Is CrossFit? by Greg Glassman, published March 01, 2004.