Would you rather listen to this article? Click the play button below =)
Audible Version
Music: Cosmic Blessing
Artist: The Intangible
It’s been a year since I started a plant-based diet, ditching meat at first and eventually the rest of animal products from my kitchen. This has been by far the biggest change in nutrition that I’ve ever done, and if you know me just a little you should know that nutrition has been my field of study, and the kitchen my laboratory.
The idea of a plant-based diet for me was always a way of living, and not a diet I would do for some specific purpose in my goals. I could not conceive having such lifestyle in the past, with the restrictions that come with it, but it actually wasn’t about being restricted and more about being in the right mindset.
I have been through a lot of different diets throughout my career as a bodybuilder, so the idea of making a change this drastic wasn’t a big hurdle for me. I did have some concerns about my nutrient intake for certain vitamins, minerals, and of course protein, but nothing that I couldn’t figure out with my nutrition background. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
How it got triggered
I was listening to a podcast one day where I learned that my bodybuilder mentor, Eric Helms, was in fact a vegetarian, this got me very curious. To say that Helms is an accomplished natural bodybuilder, phenomenal researcher, and a great human would be an understatement and won’t do enough honor to him. At the moment, and out of admiration for him, I started chewing on the idea of becoming a vegetarian myself.
It’s nothing new that I have been against the establishment for over a decade already, I have a huge rejection towards the System that dominates our lives in this society, and one of the many things I could not tolerate was Factory Farming. However, I still bought and consumed animal products because they were cheaper, in my mind they were always superior to vegetable proteins, and quite honestly because I played naive to the reality of their origin, no shame in admitting that I covered my eyes for years to this truth.
But, if my mentor could thrive on a vegetarian diet, why not me? So, one day in the summer of 2018 while walking around the neighborhood with my wife in our usual walk-and-chat routines, I mentioned to her that I would eventually become vegetarian. Now, me and her have always been on the same wavelength, for the most part, on anything that we do, we literally would do almost everything together.
This was shocking to her, I vividly remember how she said “I can’t imagine myself not eating meat” to which I responded that it was indeed a hard thing to do after years of conditioning both mentally and tastewise, but I knew I was able to ditch meat without much problem.
It helped that I was never fond of beef or any type of meat to be honest, steak for me wasn’t this thing that everybody talks about, pork had even less appeal, and as you can imagine chicken was like water for me, I ate so much of it that I was in fact happy with the idea of never eating it again.
Fish and seafood altogether were never actually something I liked, it never resonated with me so I was unaffected by eliminating it from my list. When it comes to my perception of animal products, in an energetic way, I have a different view on seafood though.
But for my wife this was inconceivable, she wasn’t a veggie person either and she would have to undergo a lot of conscious changes, which are usually difficult, to stop eating meat. But, as chance would have it, 2 months later she had a synchronistic life changing vision, while in deep meditation one night, that somehow brought her back to her childhood and started revisiting early experiences.
That’s a long story on its own, but the result of that night’s vision, and subsequent integrations stemming from it, was a full-blown vegan wife. This made it easier for me to immediately switch to my vegetarian plan, we have always cooked together and had roughly the same foods, and my first transition into a lacto-ovo vegetarian was smooth and perfect by this change.
The bodybuilding mind
Now, I have to admit that there are two very important factors that helped me make such a drastic change in my diet and life in general, I may digress a little from the main topic but bear with me as I think this is very important to the transition, since it puts things into context for what it takes to adopt a serious mentality towards a plant-based diet.
The first one is that as someone who has always been tinkering with diets as a lifestyle, I got used to switching things around and not getting too attached to certain foods, so the natural substitutions, the restrictions, the willingness to try new things, and an overall appreciation for food (all of which are enhanced by my sport) were of great help.
Since I was a kid, I never rejected food like some did, veggies, soups, traditional food from other cultures, for one reason or another I was always willing to try it and find the enjoyment that others did. More often than not I would like the new food, except those with hot spices, I am not your typical Spanish guy in that regard.
This is something I need to admit has always been in my personality, and in fact I’ll go as far as to say that this is actually what made me an experimenter of diets of all kinds for my body composition goals, training, and health reasons, so it definitely made the transition a lot smoother by me being open to it as I always have.
The second is that, whether other vegetarians or vegans admit it or not, having a plant-based diet will surely make you a pariah of some sort. I am certainly not a stranger to that mentality, moving to a country like the US with its social stratification in my adulthood, and already with a rejection to trends and mainstream culture, I was in my own way an outsider of society.
Add to this that bodybuilders learn their share of exclusion from social events, and you have a good candidate for self-seclusion. These behavioral patterns made it easier for me to adopt this new lifestyle that I internally was shifting towards, and inevitably become the change I needed.
The motivation behind it
I mentioned already how I’ve despised factory farming, this was the central idea for me to stop consuming animal products, and by default adopt a plant-based diet of some sort. Second to that, as I learned more collaterally from my investigations, not only did I realize how healthful a diet based on plants was, but also how harmful animal products actually are to the human body.
As someone who has been involved in nutrition science for over a decade, I was shocked to find out this was true. I quickly understood that the reason this is not mainstream information is thanks to the industry and their lobbying to suppress research and evidence that can affect their profit. Nothing new here, more of the same corporate trash we already know.
I also noticed how naturally this type of diet would improve my performance at many levels within my sport. So, I would stop contributing to the Industry, get healthier, and improve my performance at the gym, it was gold. All this paved the road to refine my new diet.
Now, becoming vegetarian for me then was quite easy, but the idea of veganism was harder to digest, it was thanks to my wife who started down that path (yes, the same one who said she couldn’t imagine being vegetarian), who investigated every aspect of it, that I began to conceive my plan to make sure we transitioned in a smart way together, taking care of every nutritional need that otherwise would be lacking, like protein, vitamins, so forth and so on.
I maintained my lacto-ovo vegetarian diet for a couple of months, I was mostly concerned with the lack of protein given my sport, so my first steps were to try out several protein powders, finding decent lunch protein substitutions and combinations, balance some of my usual meals that used to have whey/casein (my delicious Proatmeal, I had to develop a new recipe and now it tastes like mana!), and other cooking logistics that I could adapt to my diet.
Over time, I started taking out the remaining animal products from my diet. Eggs were pretty easy since I was never really into them, cheese was the hardest of them all I have to admit (and I am so grateful for the phenomenal vegan cheese out there), finally whey and casein were the last items off my list simply because I had so much of it, and I ended up giving them away anyways.
Variety and perception
One of the benefits I have been enjoying is the variety of food I now consume, not only do I have a wide array of options to eat from independent items, but the cooking and preparation methods are also more than I used to have.
This is something very important for me, eating the same thing over and over again is something I conditioned myself to do, but no matter how much willpower I may have, in the end it becomes dull and bleak.
I also feel that this is part of the reason people often go out to eat, having only a few food options at home makes it boring, and so they seek “good food” outside of their homes. This inherently causes overweight and health issues due to the nature of how the industry and restaurants cook meals. But I digress.
Another thing that developed after time was my taste buds, vegetables used to have no taste for me, they were a filler in my plate that I consciously put there for the many benefits they provide; likewise, fruits were a sugary water feeling with some distinct flavor. Now, after months of consuming a plant-based diet, I enjoy the flavor of everything to a degree that is hard to explain.
Having explored so many vegetables with different textures, flavors, consistencies, combined with how I make them, me and Julie constantly admire our meals as delicacies. This happened without a doubt after desensitizing our taste buds from a lot of processed foods, including meats that needed to be prepared with added fats or sugars to taste different.
I think it’s fair to mention that there is an element that has played an important role in how I consider food now as well. Thanks to my meditation and frequent fasting practices, I have developed an appreciation for food at a fundamental level.
For many, eating has become this act of filling your stomach as ways of custom, savor some food to satisfy cravings, or even out of boredom, in some cases just to waste it. This limits our awareness to appreciate food for what it essentially is: nutrition for the body.
Almost a decade ago I used to write about this, one of the things that shocked me about American culture was food waste, how people eat for mundane pleasure and not out of necessity. From the daily meals where people have leftovers everywhere as garbage, to the absurd competitive eating, another form of sport for Americans, where participants compete for the most amount of food consumed.
This mentality is a sacrilege to the current condition of the planet and humanity as a whole. In the US alone almost 50% of the food produced ends up in the garbage. I want to reiterate that, almost half of the food that is created for public consumption is trashed. It is no surprise then that people place no value whatsoever on food in this society, being a sacred gift from the planet and sadly, from animal sacrifice as well.
Recovering this gratefulness for food, which is not coincidentally in every religion and has nothing to do with veganism, will align you better with your higher self and the Earth, precisely where we come from and where we are now.
Continue Reading: