Well this week has seen a couple of interesting changes. On Sunday, I went food shopping for this week and bought lots of fruits and veggies. And then on Monday, after discovering the Vegan Fitness Forums, I made the decision to go vegan — which means no dairy, including whey protein. I already have a couple of tubs of soy, hemp, and rice protein so I’ve started using that to make protein shakes. Probably the easiest, and most tasty shake, that I make is done like this:

1 cup unsweetened soymilk
1 scoop of soy protein
1 banana
1 tbsp peanut butter
ice to taste

It’s incredible! You don’t taste the soy protein at all, but the whole thing contains over 35g of protein! And meat eaters wonder where we get our protein…

This week I was also given the additional task of being the QA Engineer for Aerva. It will be an excellent learning experience and it will help me gain a better understanding of the whole software development process.

I finished almost all of the fruits and veggies you saw in my fridge on Sunday, but I still have enough for this weekend. Usually I don’t have easy access to a stove during the weekends and I end up eating at LifeAlive or snacking on nuts, but this weekend I’m going to make it a goal to finish everything left over from Sunday. I definitely bought too much food this week, but now that I have a good idea how much I’ll need, I’m going to buy less for next week.

I also need to increase my protein intake, which I plan to do by consuming more soy protein shakes. I’m also going to buy wheat gluten, something I’ve never bought before, however I’ve learned it has the most amount of protein of all vegan foods.

My workouts have been going well, however I haven’t been doing enough cardio. Starting next week, I’m going to get back on my HIIT workouts, two days a week. HIIT is extremely intense and I have had excellent results in the past using it. I actually wrote a post about it back in 2003. I’ll probably start doing that same HIIT workout and then increase the intensity in two months.

I’ve been reading stuff on the Vegan Fitness forum lately. I found it somewhere in a post on the bodybuilding.com forums, which I also frequent. I’m learning a ton of stuff from the Vegan Fitness forums — many of my questions related to bodybuilding on a vegan diet have been answered.

I bought two bags of raw seeds yesterday — pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds. Both are inexpensive and have a high protein content. However they’re both high in fat, which means even though they’re good fats, they still contain a ton of calories. If I eat enough pumpkin seeds to consume 20g of protein, I would have also consumed 40g of fat — 448 calories! That’s almost 1/4 of my daily caloric intake!

I also listed a new item on eBay yesterday; a broken Toshiba laptop I bought from someone for $35. Similar broken Toshiba laptops have sold for $90+, so hopefully I can make a little money off it.