Another trick for gradually transitioning is to “start where you are,” which means eat more of the plant-based meals you like and make slight changes to your meals with meat to slowly phase it out. For example, if you like cooking beef and broccoli, you can use a higher proportion of broccoli each time until the meal is mostly broccoli and almost no beef.
4. Give yourself a break!
I don’t mean a break from vegetarianism, I mean let yourself eat some less-than-ideal foods to make the changes easier.
When you first cut out meat, let yourself eat some extra pasta, fake meats, or even cheese. Sure, none of these are great for you, but the point is to ease the shock and make the transition more pleasant so that you aren’t tempted to quit.
I still eat vegan sausage from time to time when I’m really craving it. It’s made from wheat gluten, and I don’t pretend that it’s a whole food or really great for me. But if it takes an occasional splurge to eat a diet that, the other 95 percent of the time, compels me to make better choices, then to me, that’s worth it.
5. Try new foods.
The most exciting part of a plant-based diet is all the new foods there are to experience.
Sure, you could have tried them all along, but for some reason you didn’t when it was easy to fill the plate with meat, potatoes, and when you were feeling really saucy, a vegetable.
Take advantage of a new reason to expand your horizons. Make some Indian food, go to a Thai restaurant, or eat Ethiopian food with your hands. Find a weird-looking, brown, hairy root in the produce section of the grocery store and search for “recipes based on weird-looking, brown, hairy roots” on the Internet and make one of them. (Make sure you catch the name of said root because I promise the cashier will not know it.)
Allowing yourself to experience all these new flavors and textures will take your attention off of what’s missing from your plate and shift it to what’s new and interesting.
In short: relax your expectations and make it easy on yourself.
Trust me, I know how hard it is when you’re all pumped up to make a big change to understand that your willpower and enthusiasm will, at some point, wane. Rather than crashing at that point and feeling like you failed, I’ve learned that you’re so much more likely to succeed if you don’t expect too much of yourself.
Go slowly, go smoothly, and don’t beat yourself up over mistakes. And when you’ve got questions or concerns, reach out. It’s not hard to find someone who wants you to be vegetarian and would be happy to help.
“This All Sounds Good, but I Need Specifics.”
What I’ve outlined in this chapter represents 80 percent of the story of what a plant-based diet for athletes looks like: simple, easy-to-follow guidelines and a relatively laid-back, natural approach to eating. But it’s not quite the entire picture.
I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little more than this. The first thing most people ask when I tell them I’m an ultramarathoner and a vegan is, you guessed it, “Where do you get your protein?” Although it’s not the big deal most people make it out to be, pro-tein is something to consider, so we’ll get into how much propro-tein (and other nutrients) you need and some easy ways to make sure your diet is balanced. We also haven’t yet touched on iron or B12, two other deficiencies in some people’s plant-based diets that we’ll need to make sure aren’t an issue for you.
In the next chapter, we’ll get into all of this. But for now, the important thing is to start.
chapter 3
Plant-Based nutrItion For sPorts: an IN-dePth GuIde
To put plant-based nutrition for athletes on a more solid foundation than I ever could, I asked Matthew Ruscigno, M.P.H., R.D., who is vegan and has served as chairman of the Vegetarian Nutrition Practice Group of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, to write this chapter, the most in-depth section about nutrition in the book. But don’t think that Matt’s just a dietitian who doesn’t know about what it’s like to be an athlete; among other endeavors, he’s an ultra-distance cyclist who has placed tenth in the Furnace Creek 508, a 508-mile solo bike race through Death Valley. You’re in good hands.
—Matt Frazier These days, there is so much nutrition information available, it isn’t easy to discern what’s best for you. And the stakes are high! Diet plays a key role in how we feel and perform, as well as in long-term disease prevention.
The main theme of this chapter is that plant-based nutrition doesn’t rely only on specific foods for specific nutrients, contrary to what we’ve been taught and to conventional wisdom. You probably grew up learning that milk is the best source for calcium and that meat is the best source of protein because of very successful adver-tising campaigns associated with these foods. These campaigns were so effective that people now confuse food with nutrients. It’s such a pervasive idea that even proponents of plant-based diets sometimes fall into this trap and compare soymilk directly to dairy milk, or beans directly to meat, to prove their nutritional value.
But there’s no need to make these comparisons. Why? Because in plant-based nutrition, the focus is on eating a variety of whole foods that contain many nutrients in varying amounts. We don’t need to get 30 percent of our calcium from any single source because we can get calcium from half a dozen different sources.
This chapter covers the basics of plant-based nutrition to give you the confidence to prepare and eat vegan and vegetarian meals. Chapters 8 and 9 have additional informa-tion on training techniques and how to eat around your workouts.