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 :)

Racing and Food

Okie dokie.  So training is going well, just 16 weeks out from the Edinburgh Marathon now.  My long run is back up at 22km and increasing each week.  I plan to be at 32km within 8 weeks or so.  I'm also working on my speed and I've currently set myself three tiers of goals:

• Tier 3 - Worst Case - Complete the damn thing.  No matter if I have to walk, I don't want a DNF (Did Not Finish) on my first marathon.  Or worse yet, a DNS (Did Not Start) due to injury.  Must get this tier at a minimum!
• Tier 2 - Reality Check - 3 hours 30 minutes.  Based on my existing times and proper preparation, I should be able to clock this time.  Not easily, but should be doable.
• Tier 1 - Platinum Standard Awesomeness - Sub 3 hours 10 minutes.  This is my primary goal, as it will get me a good for age place at the London Marathon. It is a stretch, but if I train well, I feel I have this in me.

So there you have it, I've outed my expectations.  Let's review again after I've done my warm up races.

Next up, I thought I'd do a walk through of a recent stir-fry extravaganza!

Step 1: Get lots of stir fry ingredients.  Here I have carrots, broccoli, mushroom, baby corn, Chinese lettuce marinated tofu, and sweet pepper.

Step 2: Cook in a wok until, you know, all cooked and stuff

Step 3: Add some sauce and put in a plate. People like plates, they tend to add a touch of refinement over eating directly from the wok.  Fancy chopsticks are totally optional.

Why I don't have a cooking show on TV is a mystery.  Clearly I'm a genius.

Or not.  You know, since it didn't actually taste that good.  Word to the wise: don't use a BBQ stir fry sauce with tofu that has a completely different flavour.  They compete.  And not in a good way. 

Back to the drawing board...

Break in the weather

Lots of good news for this post my friends, family and random Internet people!

First, the diet.  Going plant powered has thus far provided:

• A more balanced diet and therefore a more balanced energy system (no sleepy afternoons at work)
• A cheerier outlook on life (just feel more positive and less grumpy... No scientific backing for this one)
• I've attained my target weight (73kg, thanks for asking)
• I ran a 5km PB on Saturday (likely due to my running going well and carrying less fat around)
• I've found a bunch of new vegan and vegetarian friends at work (really lovely people)
• A way more varied diet (Julie and I have been experimenting with food, with some success!)
• Regular errr... movements (they don't tell you about constipation re: low carb and thus low fibre diets)

Not too shabby if you ask me.

Next up is a community service announcement.  If you are running for longer distances, make sure you cut your nails.  Otherwise you get this:

Yup, the long nail cuts into the toe next to it, leading to blood and pain and annoyingly difficult to clean socks.

In related news, did a long run today of 19km in absolutely lovely weather.  Not too bad a run, getting back into the higher mileage as I rebound from my calf injury.  Speaking of which, calf is awesome, no problems at all on flats now. Still some issues with hills, but I can work on that as the healing continues.  Never liked hills that much anyway.

Off for a walk

So on Sunday Julie and I hit the trails and did a jaunty 21km loop near Guildford:

I really enjoyed the walk... So much so that I'd want to do it as a run.  As you can probably guess, my leg is 90% healed and I'm back in business!

My recovery has been much hastened by going to a physio and getting the underlying issue sorted and the injured muscle mercilessly massaged.  From this I have decided that physios are awesome.  If you are a physio, give yourself a pat on the back.  If you are near a physio, and it wouldn't be totally weird, give him or her a hug in appreciation.

So my beloved physio has patched me up and given me a bunch of exercises to help avoid a repeat of the same injury.  Here's hoping for a incident free lead up to Edinburgh.

But I digress, back to the trek...  At around half way, we came across this great little sign:

Love it :)

While on the walk we got to see lots of quintessentially English countryside, including this path/tunnel/hobbit hole thingy:

Very Alice in Wonderland I thought.

Final thing for this update - the diet! All is going really well, energy levels are great, recovery is good, variety is... Well, that needs some work.  It is so easy to get stuck in a rut of always buying the same food you know how to prepare.  I need to break out and try new things.  Food is the source of our very beings and it deserves to have a bit of thought and effort put into selecting and preparing it.

This may lead to disaster, but hey, that's the fun part :)

Marathon Sponsorship!

Hiya everyone :)

Not content with doing a half marathon last year and raising over £1,000 for Royal Parks thanks to everyone’s generous support, I’ve decided to go the whole hog and run the Edinburgh Marathon in May this year!  None of that half marathon business, this time it will be the full 26.2 mile shebang.

…with the following likely outcome:

Anyway…  this time I’ll be supporting Breast Cancer Care, a fab charity that provides information and support for people (and their loved ones) that are afflicted by breast cancer cross the UK. The aim is to raise £750 for the charity directly, and have Barclays chip in another matching £750.  Lofty aspirations, but totally worth it!

You can donate using the this link: http://www.justgiving.com/MatthewToy

As a special reward for getting this far into the blog post, here I am in my oh-my-goodness-so-very-hot-pink race singlet.  I think I can carry it off…

I’m going to assume that has convinced you to donate now!

I'm back!

The post title says it all, I'm back baby! After nearly 6 weeks of no running due to a pulled calf muscle, I was able to bang out a slow 40 minute run last night.  Thank goodness.

So, a couple of lessons learnt:

1. See a physio and determine if you have any biomechanical issues.  This will help avoid injury in the first place.
2. Make sure you monitor your protein intake.  I'm pretty sure I was below 50g of protein a day around the injury time. Without protein your body can't repair itself between exercise sessions.  I've since invested in Clif Builders bars, which are both yummy and packed with 20g of vegan friendly protein per bar.

The diet is still going well. My weight has normalised around 74kg, only 1kg from my self imposed ideal weight. I'm also finding more and more food options, including everything from cakes to full vegan meals that is rounding out my diet nicely.

The next stage is to up the exercise to 6 runs a week (including recovery runs) and keep a close eye on the nutrition.  This combined with some exercises to target my weak spots, should give me the lead up to the Edinburgh Marathon that I want. Sub 3:30 marathon here I come!