The Diet Jouney - Part 2

In part one of my journey series I described how I employed low-carb diet to successfully shed a lot of weight and kick start my exercise.  In this one I want to go into my journey from a low-carb, meat-centric diet to one that is now wholly plant powered.

Which brings up a point around motivations.  One of the key drivers underpinning my dietary choices has been the daunting task of managing my weight.  While I enjoy being fit and care a great deal about both animal rights and the sustainability of our fragile planet's ecosystem, much of my drive has come from a delightfully vain desire to look good. Or look the best I can in any case.

With this as a major motivator, I was happy with a lot of the changes that had taken place with my body. Gone was the chubby cheeks, flabby arms and budding man-boobs. To achieve this I was running three times a week, doing some weights at the gym and eating (somewhat) moderately.  However my dilemma was that I was stuck in the dreaded "fat and skinny" zone.  As demonstrated by the photo below, taken not long before I went vegan:

Fat and skinny

It is clear that while I'd lost a lot of weight, I was carrying a lot of fat around my belly.  Not exactly the 6-pack that men aspire for.  So I had plateaued at this point, the tummy fat wasn't going to budge, it was here to stay. If I wanted to break out of the deadlock with my body, I needed to change it up a gear.  Since I wasn't prepared to starve myself or try out another fad diet (no shortage of those around), I needed something sustainable.

Enter the vegan super athletes!

Inspiration comes in many forms, for me it was in endurance athletes.  Check out this photo of Rich Roll, plant powered ultraman extraordinaire:

Rich Roll - spot the difference much?

Now he isn't some 20-something who is just naturally buff, this is a 40-something year old family man who has transformed himself into one of the fittest people in the world, the plant powered way.

This got me thinking.

So I started researching and the more reading I did, the more people I found who were plant powered and amazing athletes.  I've mentioned Scott Jurek before as another example of someone who has achieved prominence as a vegan athlete.  I started the tally up the pros and cons and decided this was something that really meshed with me.

The positives:

• I don't have to control portions.  Quite important since I suck at it.
• I was able to eat a much wider variety of foods than when I was low-carbing it.  
• I don't have to think about it too much.  Just eat lots of plants of different types.
• It feels "right" to me.  The moral choice to not eat meat just agrees with my psyche. It feels like a load has been taken off my spirit/soul.
• It has proven to be a healthy choice for top athletes.
• Finally, it is a lifestyle change, not just a diet or shortcut.  It is sustainable over the long term - this is possibly the most import of all the points.

The negatives:

• I wouldn't be able to have cheesecake any more.  On second thoughts, this might be a positive.
• Eating out can be a right pain in the ass.  That said, I probably shouldn't be eating out so much anyway.
• I wouldn't be a cool meat-eater any more. Oh for shame! I'd have to forgo the extremely masculine task of hunting my prey down in the meats aisle of my local Tescos.  

It wasn't such a hard choice to make when it came down to it.

So how is the 6-pack going?  Quite well thanks - 5 months in and the flabby belly is nearly gone. No photos though, I think this post has quite enough manly-ness already :)

Instead, here is a fry up I made post long run yesterday, proving once again that being vegan is never without variety!

This is my new version of a fry up - garlic spinach, fried mushrooms and onion

The Diet Jouney - Part 1

It has been quite some time since my conversion to plant powered and I've been reflecting a bit on my diet and the road I've taken getting to where I am today.  I realised it is quite difficult to separate the improvements brought about from my not eating animal products from the general improvement due to my taking more care with what I put in my body.  Applying conscious thought to what I am eating is almost as important as what sort of thing I decide to eat...

Those who know me will already be aware that I went from some 99kg down to 80kg using a low-carb diet called the TNT diet from Men's Health.  For a year and a bit, I cut down my carb intake to less than 20g a day, started going to the gym to do resistance training and a bit of cardio (primarily the elliptical initially, later more running).  While the diet was massively successful for me, I wouldn't recommend this diet to anyone, as I believe it isn't particularily healthy.  The near-daily fry up breakfasts of bacon, eggs, tomato, cheese (yes, melted onto the bacon) and mushrooms will probably kill you.  It will be a delicious death, granted, but possibly not worth it in the long run.

Like this, only not as healthy looking...

All that said, it was successful.  However... why did it work???

I think the success came down to three main things:

1. It broke my sugar addiction.  Since I couldn't have carbs, I finally gave up casual chocolate, muffin and chocolate-muffin consumption.  This alone probably accounted for 50% of the weight loss, due to the removal of low nutritional content, high calorie and low satiety foods from my diet.  
2. I started to learn what is in or added to food.  I found out about the evils of HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), learnt to read labels and generally become more aware of the crap I was putting in my body. Companies put a lot of stuff in food to make it taste better, make you want to eat more of it and make it cheaper to produce.  Almost none of those things are aligned with a goal of making anything healthy.  So I learnt to read labels and start being much more picky about what I bought.
3. Exercise.  Doesn't matter what sort you do, but do as much of it as time allows.  You will feel better, live longer and be able to do more in life.  As a certain mega-corp admonishes - just do it.

Each of these opened up new processes - I could eat a muffin as a special occasion (making it all the more delicious), or choose a healthier option when out shopping, or actually enjoy group physical activity without being the guy at the back gasping and wheezing - that changed my life for the better.

After I lost the weight, I dropped that diet and went back to a "balanced" diet, keeping the knowledge I'd gained and employing it in a more natural way.  I stayed off chocolate for the most part, kept exercising and always checked the labels of anything I bought. I also stopped the fry up breakfasts.  Seriously, after a year I was utterly sick of meat and cheese.

In the next post I'll go into why I think the vegan diet has been the logical progression from this and how it has taken me from somewhat healthier to truly healthy.

Moroccan Strength Training

We recently got back from spending three days trekking through the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. It was a fantastic adventure, tromping up the mountains and back down into the valleys...

The elevation profile looks like a roller coaster with over 2,500 metres of elevation gain over the first two days before the GPS died.  I forgot to bring spare batteries.  *sigh*

Anyway! While on the adventure we had a mule...

And a dedicated chef, Mohammed! He was more than happy to prepare a delicious vegetarian (and I'm fairly sure vegan) meal for us three times a day. Now you know why the mule has so much stuff on it :)

So, food was awesome, sights were brilliant and walking up and down hills for hours on end was amazing strength training for my legs.  I had started introducing some into my training hills recently and this has convinced me I really need better leg strength. From what I've read it has the dual benefit of being lower impact and reducing the chances of injury.  On the downside it is really hard and not fun at all.  But then again, speed intervals aren't exactly the most enjoyable thing to do either... Wait, why do I do running again?

Oh right, I'm clearly I'm a unrepentant masochist. Good to know.

Final bit is the diet and exercise are clearly working very well, I got this great news from the (yes, probably highly inaccurate) set measuring thingy at the gym:

Ooooooooooh yeah baby.  Another milestone reached thanks to plant power :)

Day 11 - Ups and Downs

Had an important meeting today that didn't quite go as well as I'd hoped.  Left me feeling a bit "bleah" for the rest of the day.  Not the vegetables fault though, so enough of that!

What is interesting is how my weight loss program has been going.  I've been limiting myself to a net intake of 1,800 calories a day.  That means if I do a big run, I eat more to compensate the calories burned.

The chart below shows my daily weigh in over the past 40 or so days.  You can see that 11 days ago I stopped eating all animal products, marked by the red line.  What gets interesting is how my previous diet involved a great deal of daily fluctuation (the maxes and mins) with a steady downward trend.  My new plant powered diet is more consistent and the rate of weight loss is a bit steeper (for no additional exercise).

My goal is to reach 10% body fat (at about 12% now) which means I will aim to plateau out at around 74kg or so.  With my new diet that shouldn't be a problem at all.  The interesting thing will be making sure I don't lose too much weight.  Wow, never thought I'd have to worry about that!

Day 8 - Is there such a thing as too much avacodo?

Legs are a little sore from yesterday's jog, but otherwise feeling fine.  On the food front, I had tortilla chips, salsa and guacamole twice today. I'm pretty sure that's the vegan equivalent to junk food.  Not ideal, but yummy all said :)

I finished Rich Roll's book Finding Ultra which I enjoyed immensely.  Above all the guy knows how to put together an interesting tale.  I didn't find the product endorsements too annoying (a common complaint on the Amazon reviews) and love the message about not being too old to become super fit.  I'm 35 and often wonder if I'm past my prime, but if you take Rich's word for it, I have plenty to go yet.

One thing I've noticed in the past 8 days is my weight has fluctuated a lot less. Normally it varies by as much as 1.5kg a day.  I always measure it in the morning at the same for consistency. Since changing my lifestyle I haven't exercised more than normal (perhaps a bit less actually) but I've lost 1kg in a very consistent, gradual manner - between 0 and 200g a day.  So the weight it coming off and it is doing it in a controlled manner, this seems positive!