I cooked my first substantial vegan dinner on the farm in Ujire, India using rice, channa dhal, and onion’s that I purchased from town and some local veggies that were growing on the farm.
I have since gotten more creative (standby for future videos!) but there’s something beautiful about the simplicity of a meal like this: It never leaves me feeling like crap and it always fills me up (thank you fiber)!
I just found out that Mac Denzig is a vegan and has been since 1999! If you don’t know who he is, you might have heard about the place he fights (and has won 18 times): the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). The MMA Digest has a post about his vegan diet and he also personally wrote about his diet after receiving endless questions by fans. In his write up, he references a page by Mike Mahler where Mike writes about Making the Vegan Diet Work.
It’s difficult being vegan. Being vegan means you need to be willing to sacrifice. It means accepting the single vegan choice on a restaurant menu of fifty items and skipping a latte if they don’t offer a soy option. It means making it known to the world that you don’t eat meat when ordering an item you’re unsure about. It means always packing alternatives (ProBar, almonds, trail mix). It means having respect and care for what you put into the one and only machine you are truly responsible for maintaining.
I started taking supplements of Zinc and Magnesium today (100mg and 400mg respectively) after reading that vegans (especially body-building vegans) generally have Zinc and Magnesium deficiencies. It’s easy for me to notice the effect of slight changes to my diet (since I control my diet so well) and I’m really curious how the extra Zinc and Magnesium will affect my overall health.
Ever since I started working out regularly, I have been trying to eat more protein while maintaining a vegan diet. I’ve tried making soy, hemp, and rice protein shakes, eating more tempeh and tofu, and even eating more beans (though I must admit that the time required to cook beans and grains definitely prevents me from eating them as regularly as I would like). I don’t know if I have a protein sensitivity or if I’m just not combining foods properly, but every time I increase my protein intake my body seems to reject it and digestion becomes very difficult.
I have thought about how much easier things would be if I could have EAS Myoplex shakes, cottage cheese, yogurt, non-fat chocolate milk, and other foods that I learned how to use to help with keeping protein high and carbohydrates low. Now that I have been maintaining a vegan diet, I feel like I’m starting back at square one; I feel like I don’t know anything about diet and fitness because everything changes when you remove all dairy from your diet.
Earlier today I was actually contemplating switching back to a lacto-vegetarian diet, but then I remembered the promise I made to myself several months ago:
I was born a Vegetarian, but I will die a Vegan.
So to push these dangerous thoughts out of my head, that has become my new mantra. If maintaining a vegan diet means I need to spend more time preparing food and learning how to cook complete meals, then so be it. I was thinking, I should probably tattoo the word VEGAN on my body somewhere so I can simply look at it whenever I’m doubting my commitment to a vegan lifestyle.
