30 Day Paleo challenge guidelines + New Template

In an effort to give myself a kick in the ass and re-implement the healthy lifestyle I once followed religiously I am putting myself on a strict 30 day challenge following the paleolithic model. I made this decision about 10 days before my 50 mile ultra I just finished 2 days ago. My reasoning behind this is to lose some weight that has crept back into the picture after I let my diet go over the last couple months. I also gained a few pounds my first semester in college due to the elbow injury I had and not training or eating very well.

It's best for me to do this now in my opinion because I'm coming off a very big accomplishment that should give me plenty of momentum. I've read that the best way to accomplish a goal is to state the goal, the reason behind wanting to accomplish this goal (aka what it will do to benefit me) and where it fits in with the rest of my goals. Therefore:

My goal is to follow the paleolithic diet model with no cheats from 3/22-4/20. That means that from the morning I wake up on 3/22 until the day I wake up on 4/21 nothing other than clean food will enter my body. My diet will also be getting rid of my daily coffee for 30 days to reset my caffeine sensitivity. 

My reason behind doing this is to lose some weight. To advance my running career I think this is a necessary step. I'm OK with losing/maintaing strength for 30 days in order to do this because it's not worth it to me to be disgusting in order to be strong. My guess is that if I eat enough protein and fat I can still make some gains anyway. I think it will also help improve my chances of succeeding in my bodyweight goals. The last reason is because I want to get healthier. My family has a lot of health issues and I have no desire to go down that track. I'm going to start here and after the 30 days is up I will make decisions based upon how good I felt during this. Eating healthy is not temporary, just being this strict is.

The biggest things I'm changing are removing coffee from my mornings, eating after 8pm (unless I get off work at 8 like I do sometimes, in that case I'll eat), only eating sweet potatoes post workout, no whey powder for the course of the challenge, and limiting carbs after the post WOD meal (typically around 4-5pm)

I will also be walking 2-3x a week to try to speed up the process and not affect recovery. Tomorrow morning there will be a weigh-in and a before picture taken before any food is consumed.


Since weight loss and strength gains do not go hand in hand I will be focused on some of my other goals this month. Everyday will still have strength training but other than that I plan to test my Fran time, and work on my sub 5min mile goal, handstand pushups, pullups and muscle ups. Here's an outline of my template for the next 4 weeks plus: