This February Power House coaches Max Lipset and Gina Fangel spearheaded the gym’s first-ever customized nutrition challenge. The challenge was designed to meet each person’s unique goals, all in hopes of helping our members win their lives. Whether the goal was to break a bad habit, learn more about nutrition, adjust body fat percentage or to gain muscle — Power House coaches created eight-week plans that would be attainable and supported.
After taking initial body metrics and identifying goals, Power House coaches would check in with their athletes to see if their plan was working, identify what could be better and provide ideas and recipes to make the nutrition journey more successful. As we know, nutrition is not a one-size fits all program, and definitely requires adjustments to see results. This philosophy helped many of our members take their nutrition to the next level, and as a result many people left the challenge feeling informed, empowered and accomplished.
Many people had success stories, including members Doug Lodermeier, Kelly Smeltzer and Nickyla Marso. These three all had transformational experiences and all learned things about their nutrition that they did not know before.
Meet Doug Lodermeier. Doug signed up for the nutrition challenge to make better nutrition choices as well as improve his energy and performance. During the challenge Doug eliminated sugar from his diet, decreased his caffeine intake and started looking at labels to see what his food was made of. At first Doug was discouraged because the number on the scale was not changing much. However, throughout the challenge he realized that you can make progress even if your weight isn’t “going down”. By the end of the eight weeks, Doug’s body fat went from 21.4% to 14% and his muscle mass increased by almost 4%. Not only did his metrics show substantial progress and growth, but his energy also increased and he started to crush WODs with ease.
Like Doug, Kelly Smeltzer joined the challenge to lose weight and develop better eating habits, especially when traveling. During the challenge Kelly used macronutrients and the hand-eye method to track her food intake. Before the challenge, Kelly thought decreasing the number of calories would help her lose weight, but during the eight-week time period she learned she wasn’t fueling her body with enough quality nutrients her body needed. Now, Kelly is more aware of what food she is consuming and has managed to stick to her diet even when she’s traveling. Whether that is planning meals in advance or researching what is on restaurant menus, she is now much more proactive and has strategies to stay on-track regardless of her environment.
Lastly, Nickyla Marso joined the challenge to better understand how nutrition impacted her overall health. For the past two years, Nickyla had been on a Paleo diet and CrossFitting multiple times per week. Regardless of these healthy lifestyle choices, Nickyla started to lack energy, would crash mid-workout and would get stomach aches. She thought she could push through the exhaustion, but after being told she was pre-diabetic she looked to her nutrition for some answers and guidance. During the challenge, Nickyla increased her carb intake and found that when she added more carbs to her diet she lost fat, gained muscle and sustained enough energy to get her through the day. She has even been back to her doctors and they’ve seen progress as well. Carbs are not the enemy!
Even though the nutrition challenge is over, every member has a nugget of knowledge they will take with them moving forward. If you even need help with nutrition let us know, we got your back.