2017 - Year of Change

2017 was quite the year of change for me.  I relearned to swim, made many personal bests in cycling, running, archery, added gym rock climbing, joined two running teams, traveled a lot and moved out of parent’s house.  But my biggest change to is what people often refer to vanishing/wasting away Vik, I lost over 50 pounds in about 6-7 months from my switch to a whole foods plant based diet (basically a high carb vegan diet with limited process food).  This is my food journey:

The idea of a plant based diet was reintroduced to me when reading Rich Roll’s Finding Ultra.  Rich Roll wasn’t the first athletic who spoke about the benefits of being vegan.  Scott Jurek spoke about in lengths in his book Eat and Run and I am a big fan of his but I ignored his claims at that time.  They both claimed more energy and faster recovery times.  The biggest difference now was that through experience and studying training theories that I now understood how important recovery was.  Finding ultra was able to convince me to go vegetarian but diary however was a different story, I grew up drilled by ads on how good milk is.  I never questioned why I ate diary and I felt it was essential to my identity.  

The next book I read was Whole by Colin Campbell which does a great job of explaining why I feel the way I do about food.  It was next on my list to read randomly, I found it on Strand and thought the cover looked interesting.  I adopted my diet as whole foods plant based from the book.  I committed myself to reading four more books about nutrition while slowly cutting out diary.  One book wasn’t going to be enough to change a lifetime of habitats!  Reading more about nutrition helped keep the ideas of plant based diet on my head as I changed.  

I started off allowing some weekly cheat meals (2 cheat meals, 2 cheat desserts a week [not cheat days, that would be too much for me]) for meat and dairy but my body adopted fairly rapidly.  Within a month I started becoming lactose intolerant.  It started by getting a bit gassy when eating diary (which was ice cream at this point) to stomach pain for about 30 to 40 minutes and having the runs.  That honestly made things a lot easier, now I didn’t have any choice.  As my body changed, my taste buds also started craving fruits more and I slowly lost the taste for diary and meat.  

I rapidly lost weight and without any training gained free speed.  Just 5 weeks after going plant based, I came pretty close to my marathon PR without training and while still recovering from a 50k the week before.  As my body changed, I become curious about testing out what it could do.  I started pushing the limits of my body farther in training.  I took on triathlon training and 100 mile training at the same time over the summer.  To my surprise my body was able to handle the load.  I went from someone who ran 30 miles a week to someone who ran 60-70 miles a week while also biking and swimming (a little).  

So perhaps you are thinking that I run so much, that’s why I lost the weight.  I averaged less than one run a week 5 weeks after my 100 mile race and 2 weeks after my recent 50 miler in December, I maintained the same weight.  My appetite adapts to my training load (the more I train = the more I eat).