Until we get the new site this will be a good place to find all upcoming events offered by Mat.
CrossFit Toronto, Saturday October 16th 2010
Reviews:
1) Pierre Augé, head coach and owner of Capital Strength and Conditioning
I have to admit that I might be a bit biased here, but Mathieu Lalonde has helped to increase my profits considerably. With the help of his very succinct and undeniable arguments based on clear and reliable science my clientele has shed layer after layer of bodyfat. Even with having years of experience applying and recommending paleo nutrition to my clients, his insights over the past year and a half have made a remarkable impact on their lives and mine. My own fiance has dropped from a whopping 47% bodyfat to 22% bodyfat in a period of about 8 months and it keeps coming off. His advice has helped my athletes in every single one of their athletic endeavors. One example was the effective control of body weight for the 5 member team we brought to provincial Weightlifting Championships in March of this year. Everyone made weight easily whereas this tends to be difficult prior to competition. 4 out of 5 won medals by the way and three qualified for Canadian Championships. The team of Professional Mixed Martial artists I work with have had no trouble maintaining healthy weights, either in training or at fight time, and we have nothing but wins so far to show for it. We have seen massive gains in lean body mass in our young football players at the expense of body fat. Our boys are bigger, stronger and faster. The amazing part are the scholarships our Canadian kids have won to attend and play for Div1A Universities south of the boarder.
But most importantly to me is the effect his advice has had on my parents. While my diabetic mother was not willing to fully trust my advice regarding her own nutrition, she was willing to follow Dr. Lalonde’s. Her blood glucose levels were at a soaring 22 mmol/dL which in basic terms means she was about as insulin resistant as anyone can get. Her Doctor’s solution would have been to give her insulin injections, which would have completely buggered her for the rest of her life.
Two days after a conference call with Mathieu and I, her blood glucose levels were at 9 mmol/dL, by the end of week 1 they were stable at an optimal 6-7 mmol/dL. After 2 months her weight had dropped from 180 lbs to 145 lbs and has remained stable for the past 6 months (5′2″ tall). My father who did not dramatically alter his own nutrition dropped from 195lbs to 165 lbs (5′10″ tall). this we call the proxy effect. Because he has to make his own potatoes for dinner he only makes 1, he rarely eats bread anymore and his legume intake is pretty much zero. He lost 30 lbs by proxy as a result of the dramatic change in his wife’s nutritional lifestyle. Meat and veggies is amazing medicine.
I consult with Mathieu on a weekly basis and would recommend that if you are serious about your own health, longevity, and performance that you give yourself or a loved one a gift this year and register for a seminar with this amazing young scientist.
2) William Davidson, research scientist
I discovered CrossFit, Paleo Nutrition, and Evolutionary Fitness my second year in a Chemistry PhD program. I credit the discovery to finally having seen enough garbage to know gold when I see it. I have become a self-coaching weightlifter, sprinter, and gymnast since discovering the CrossFit methodology. I followed a weighed and measured zone diet and saw amazing results. It was as if I was now in control of the fate of my body and health (because I was). I began eating a paleo diet and became pretty well versed in the available literature of the blogosphere. I noticed Mat’s low-carb paleo experiment with interest and it was binned away as a good example but not enacted.
I attended both Mat’s presentation at the Nutrition Certification at CrossFit Albany as well as Mat’s nutrition seminar at Crossfit Plateau. I enjoyed Mat’s well-researched and pragmatic approach to the care and feeding of a human being. Fairly convinced that what I had seen presented was legitimate, and trusting in the experimental evidence (have you seen Mat?) – both my wife and I stopped weighing and measuring our food and ate lots of grass-fed beef, canned oily fish, ghee, and light coconut milk. Fruit intake was greatly reduced and fresh vegetables became a staple.
Fast-forward six months to the seminar at CrossFit Plateau. Immediately upon our arrival Mat notes that we appear to have lost a lot of weight. We knew this was the case but when we stopped to consider that we had lost the combined weight of a small child we realized how glad we were to be back spending some time with Mat. I went from 245 to 210 (and all my lifts went up) and my wife went from ??? (Love you, Hun) to a sexy 150. I think she’s lost four? pants sizes and we have probably replaced our wardrobes twice in the last six months. The real cost of the low-carb(fructose) paleo diet is not in food costs but clothing as you lose the weight.
Mat’s new and improved seminar blew me away. It was clearly the product of extensive and well-considered research. I was intellectually satisfied by his in-depth mechanistic and systematic understanding of the mechanics of lipid and carbohydrate metabolism. He showed the various choices and detours along the way that leave people lost and stranded - led to diabetes, inflammation, cancer, weight gain, atherosclerosis.
Mat began the seminar with a very important lecture on evaluating scientific experiments which set the stage for the formation of opinions based on logic and evidence. This laid the groundwork for a stepwise scientific examination of the causes of metabolic derangement and the subsequent breakdown in health that follows. Mat provided ample references, experiments, and examples of primary research for each of the assertions he made. For a layman it might have been almost too much at certain moments but it absolutely drove home for me that what I was seeing wasn’t simply made up – and in the world of Nutrition advice, that’s priceless.
For a man who has never been ’skinny’ – the effortless weight loss that comes as a result of a thorough understanding of the mechanics of my own body is more than gratifying.
