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Most Functional Fitness gyms do some sort of diet challenge to encourage their members to adjust their food intake and see what proper nutrition can do. Most people find spectacular success by making sweeping changes and sticking to them because of the accountability that comes from stating a goal in public and then having the rest of the community hold them to it. Many gyms go with some sort of “Paleo challenge” where members vow to follow the Paleo Diet most famously promoted by Dr. Loren Cordain. There’s nothing wrong with the Paleo Diet. It’s a great way to adjust your eating if you know what you’re doing. Dr. Barry Sears’ Zone Diet is another diet worth researching. Nevertheless, Functional Fitness 204 is simplifying things. You don’t have to start weighing and measuring your food, and you don’t have to memorize the glycemic index. Nor do you have to understand how sugar affects insulin levels and how macronutrients fuel the body. You just have to use common sense to eat better. Inspired by Jeff Barnett of Functional Fitness Impulse, our diet challenge is simply called “Eat Less Crap,” and it will run from Sept. 1-30. Rather than asking members to dive right into a diet they don’t understand and aren’t ready for, we’re asking them to behave like the intelligent humans they are. While we might not know exactly why, we all instinctively know which foods and drinks are crap. So we’re going to cut those things out to various degrees. Water = good. Pop = crap. Simple, right? In short, we’re going to ask members to commit to small, medium or large adjustments to eating habits for one month. At the end of the month, they’ll evaluate what those changes did for them and if they’re ready for more. We’re going to do this by offering several “levels” of the challenge. Level 1, for example, might just include eliminating one bad food choice for a month: no chips for September, or something like that. Another level might include more sweeping dietary changes like eliminating refined grains or switching to grass-fed beef. The goal here isn’t to overwhelm, browbeat and prescribe one diet for all shapes and sizes and activity levels, then throw everyone in at the deep end with a few pieces of celery floating in the water. That would be stupid. Our goal is to get people thinking about what they eat and then making small personal changes that will add up quickly. We challenge you to commit to some level of the Eat Less Crap challenge and see what it does for you. If you aren’t interested, feel free to evaluate what this experiment does for others. We’ll reveal more details tomorrow, and Mike and Crystal will be blogging about their experience with the challenge all along the way. Stay tuned. And eat less crap.