I am a vegetarian. I can say this publicly, and I have been doing so very recently. In this series of articles, I will trace all the notable changes that will occur in my life in a period of one year. This concerns both sport (muscle mass, performance), the way of thinking, the management of different emotions (motivation, stress…) and everything that seems to me to be sufficiently important and different from my 26 years of eating meat.
Of course, variation in performance can be due to a lot of factors, but nutrition is still one of the main reasons. Also, I don’t think (never say never) that I will have any major changes in my life during this time, such as working nights or moving abroad.
I will report through several articles to see if the year ends with success or failure. I will explain in this first article why I made this food choice, what I hope to achieve during this year and by what means I intend to achieve my goals.
Personal motivations
Bodybuilding is a sport often considered incompatible with vegetarianism (oh sacred protein!), but I will however try to make sure to increase my muscle mass and performance, by gradually testing and adapting my diet over time.
But this is not a possible return to eating meat even if the year ends on a negative note. I am convinced that this will be impossible for me, because this choice is based on a moral choice and not in connection with sport.
I will not dwell on the subject but let’s say that a long period of information and reflections reinforced by the scandals recently observed in the slaughterhouses brought me to a certain awareness on the importance of my actions. I realized that I had to make sure to progress personally by minimizing as much as possible the suffering and the dependence of sentient beings.
The most difficult step for me was to make the connection between the piece of meat presented cut in store and the animal itself. Once this link was made, I gradually reduced my consumption of meat and fish while increasing the time spent learning about another way of eating, to avoid deficiencies as much as possible and continue to progress when it comes time to actually switch to the deed.
Because it must be admitted, most people who want to turn to vegetarianism are most often afraid of having deficiencies. But this fear is much more important if this person is athletic, and even more if he practices weight training.
As a sports coach, and passionate about nutrition, I studied sports nutrition for a while, and it became easy to have a balanced diet adapted to my goals with a meat diet. But switching to a vegetarian diet is a new way of approaching sport and everyday life. New questions appear like:
“Can we be athletic and vegetarian? What are the best sources of protein? How not to have deficiencies? »If you also ask yourself these questions and you wonder if it is possible to answer them without including the consumption of animal flesh, this series of articles will allow you to follow my course, to show you what this new mode food has caused on me and why not be inspired by it.
Please note, this is only from my point of view and a personal development. Everyone reacts differently to food depending on their characteristics (metabolism, intolerances, etc.).
Objectives: which ones?
My ambitions are simple. I will start from a series of photos and physical tests, and define goals to be achieved at the end of the course (12 months). Every 2 months, that is to say when a new article, I will do these photos and tests again, to follow the evolution.
In each article I will cover everything that I think is interesting, related to my diet and my training. I will detail the novelties on my plate. In the last article, I will take stock to determine if the year ends with a pass or a failure and I will explain how I plan to organize my diet and my training in the future.
Objectives: how to achieve them?
Personally, I’m not the calorie-counting type. It doesn’t motivate me at all, I think I have the minimum of willpower and self discipline to strike the right balance between eating junk food for lunch and dinner and weighing all the foods I eat. In addition, the vegetarian diet has the advantage of eating in an overall healthier way than an omnivorous diet, which makes it easier. This can be explained, among other things, by the lower presence of products rich in saturated fatty acids and the higher presence of antioxidants and fiber.
I will therefore start from my current diet and I will gradually adapt the amounts according to how I feel during / outside training and the results of measurements and tests. I will also add new foods to determine their effects and benefits.
Like food, I am in the middle between the extremely disciplined athlete and the one who works by feeling. I am not a fan of the bodybuilding program followed 1000% literally and no longer the type to have an anxiety attack in case of last minute change. But I’m not the type to train anyhow either, doing the legs once a month when they’re the only part of the body where I don’t have aches.
I have a workout routine that changes according to my goals and my desires, but I don’t hesitate to break this routine from time to time to do crossfit type wods, to do a training invented on the moment by taking inspiration from the material available, or simply to train with someone.
I think the notion of fun is very important, a program that is too strict can quickly get boring and the results not as good as expected. I will therefore start from my current programming which I will explain in the articles and I will add to it the desire for progress of the moment and the more original workouts that I have been able to carry out.
So here I am ready for this adventure. I don’t use the word experience because it doesn’t give me a positive enough connotation. The choice of vegetarianism is something that is close to my heart because it stems from a new philosophy of life. I repeat, if this adventure ends in failure, it will not change my way of thinking and my new outlook on the world.
I will therefore do everything to succeed. After all, if an athlete, with all the extra needs that he has compared to a non-athletic person, achieves their goals by being a vegetarian, vegan, or vegan being healthy without any deficiencies, anyone can be. , right?