Matthew Baldwin

I’m not a professional athlete, trainer, or nutritionist. I’m just a religion professor at a small college in Western North Carolina.

At the present moment (June 2009), I’m 40 years old. As recently as January 2009, I weighed around 217 pounds, and had 25% body fat. Today, at 6′2″, I weigh a hearty 180.0 lbs, and have about 13% body fat. (To see a chart of my weight loss and maintenance from January 2009 until the present, click here).

How did this happen to me?

Well, for one thing, I’ve finally gotten my crap together, fitness and training wise. I have lots of incentives to try to remain fit—a young daughter, an eternally youthful wife, a love of surfing and other board sports (hence the name of this blog: training board)— but in spite of my best efforts to stay in shape, over the past two years I had reached a peak of flabby shabby disrepair. No more. I’ve been doing CrossFit since mid-December 2008. I’m not going to try to explain that here. Read the blog, or follow my links to the main site and CrossFit Asheville. But suffice it to say that six months later I am stronger, faster, and more hale than I have ever been, at any stage of my life.

The other piece of the fitness change, and the body composition change, is that I have completely changed the way I eat. I’ve been doing a diet inspired by Barry Sears’ Enter the Zone, by the principles of the so-called “caveman” (Paleolithic) diet, and by all the great advice and tweaks offered by so many CrossFitters from coach Greg Glassman to Pat Sherwood, Robb Wolf, Nicole Carrol, and the coaches at CrossFit Asheville, Corey, Shanna, and Randy.

It might sound like a lot of work, honestly, I love this way of eating. I feel better than I have in years, and while I have lost fat, week after week I have also made steady and measurably large gains in strength and speed and ability to generate “intensity” (in the CrossFit sense of the term, where Power/Intensity is reckoned as Work times Distance over Time). It’s all of a piece. The diet fuels the body.

This blog is a way for me to keep an eye on my success, and thereby to safeguard it. Having a public website basically just “ups the ante” for me. It gives me further incentive to stay with my program. So, I’m keeping this blog as a way to stay focused. But I’m also hoping the blog can be a way for me to share with others what I’ve learned from working on myself.

Right now my blog-plan is twofold.

First, I will be posting my workout activities and my rest-day reflections. Those posts are really totally for myself. It’s a searchable record keeping system, kind of like the notebooks we keep down at our gym.

Second, I plan to post a series of articles on the “Weight Loss Arsenal” I have built for myself. These posts chronicle and explain the tricks and tips I have developed to help reach my goals for body composition, energy, and power. It is my hope that these articles could help other athletes training at CrossFit Asheville and elsewhere figure out how to line up their nutritional and weight-loss efforts with their fitness program.

Third, I plan to create a series of posts in which I discuss in detail the principles which guide my diet and food choices. I’m not ready to start writing about these right at the moment, but if you’re interested, I did try to list them once, in a post I created during a previous incarnation of this blog. You can read them in my post of March 31st, 2009, “My Diet, Part II: One Month in the Zone.”

Finally, I hope that I can post a series of reviews of nutrition and exercise related media, as I encounter and consume them myself. At the moment (May 28th, 2009) I’m working on a review of a recent article from the New England Journal of Medicine on weight-loss programs, and I have been reading Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s classic 19th century gastronomical treatise, The Physiology of Taste. Expect posted reviews of these works soon.

This website is therefore committed to helping me maximize my own health — measured in the terms suggested by Coach Glassman as the area under the curve of fitness measured over one’s lifetime — and I hope that your health could benefit too by occasionally checking in with me.