You Can Build a Community Around Nutrition

Good morning and welcome to the weekend edition of the Morning Chalk Up. This is Justin LoFranco, your Editor-in-Chief, to bring you a quick wrap-up of the major news items throughout the week. Today’s edition is brought to you by LIFEAID.

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“It’s easy to be distracted by difficulty. The difficulty of the work fills your focus, rather than the importance and impact of it’s value. Effort and energy fade when short-term difficulty is a higher focus than long term value.” — Brian Kight 

Nutrition philosophies are better known for their ability to divide versus unify. Discussions about whether you “should” eat dairy or sugar can result in “sides.” And, if you really want to create some enemies, have a strong opinion about the number of carbohydrate grams someone should eat per day.

It’s unfortunate because now, more than ever, we need to educate and motivate people towards better nutrition habits. Seven out of 10 people in the US die from a chronic disease (like heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers) and organizations like the Center for Disease Control agree that chronic diseases are largely preventable through lifestyle choices like nutrition (1). Nutrition also improves performance and recovery making it an obvious priority for athletes chasing health and performance.

But why does there need to be a community around nutrition? For the same reason a strong community helps drive one’s fitness results; habit change is easier when one has the support and motivation from a peer group.

The problem, of course, is how do you unify a community around nutrition given how much noise there is in the media? It’s probably easier than you think and there are plenty of parallels to coaching. It’s about understanding big-picture concepts versus specific physiological details. It’s similar to understanding that CrossFit is constantly varied functional movements at high intensity; it’s not Fran on Mondays and back squats on Wednesdays. Fran and back squats are the workouts to implement the methodology. Similarly, in nutrition, there are underlying principles that dictate one’s nutrition success, where choices, like eating meat or counting macros, are similar to selecting individual workouts or scaling options. They are how people implement physiological principles.

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After four days of competition, 11 scored events the 2019 Dubai CrossFit Championship is over. In a field stacked with nearly 30 athletes already qualified, albeit unofficially, it can be a little hard to tell who will actually wind up with the Games invite. Turns out, it might not be Fikowski who gets the invite from Dubai after all.

News broke via email last month that the New York based meal delivery service Kettlebell Kitchen abruptly went out of business. Morning Chalk Up has learned the company, who’s legal name is High Quality Nutrition Company LLC, filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy on November 16.

Eighteen-year-old CrossFit Games athlete Jacob Morris passed away on December 13, just weeks after having heart surgery. The CrossFit community has rallied all week through memorial WODs, a GoFundMe, and sharing memories on Instagram.

CrossFit HQ’s self-imposed deadline to finalize the Open rankings was missed Monday evening. The 2020 CrossFit Games rulebook gave the organization until 5:00 PM PT on Monday, December 16, to complete the video review process for both the top 20 and national champions and finalize the leaderboard. This means the leaderboard is not yet finalized and it’s possible for additional penalties or adjustments to occur.

After four Sanctionals, a handful of teams and athletes have qualified through the new Sanctionals system. Because the CrossFit Open leaderboard has not been finalized yet, these are not official but represent the most likely scenario given no additional changes. At this time, no changes are expected.

This season’s International Online Qualifier (IOQ) was the first of its kind, allowing four Sanctionals to join forces and streamline the qualification process under a unified banner that included six workouts over the course of three weeks. Now in 2020, the IOQ will return for round two, featuring four more sanctioned events happening in the latter half of the season.

There’s been a lot to celebrate this week. Here are a few things to help get you in the spirit of celebration, and a few tips for those of you that are behind.

1. Colleen Fotsch hits a 240 pound clean complex. 

2. Ivan hits a 375 pound split jerk on his birthday. 

3. Ben Smith celebrates his spot at the Rogue Invitational. 

4. If you’ve spent too much time in the gym and now you’re scrambling for gifts for your loved ones, we’ve got you covered.

• Coaching from Invictus
• 30% off NIKE
• Free ground beef and bacon from ButcherBox
• Personalized healthcare from SteadyMD
• Affiliate programming from NCFIT Collective.