Anyone here Meat-Free?

[Joshua Naterman]

Oh! That's good to know!

As for the carbs, Ido gets very few carbs and is very athletic (although I don't know how enduring he is). He seems to believe that one of the best (or the best) ways to get lean and strong fast is to get low carbs (around 100g or less) and get a LOT of fat and protein. You were fat adapted not too long ago, weren't you? How'd you like it? Did you get a lot of extra energy afterwards like Ido says most people get?

I understand that macronutrients are macronutrients, but it seems like all the vegans I've ever seen are very, very thin with hardly any muscle mass! They perform well (The Shaolin's do), but outside of extreme endurance athletes who tend to be very thin anyway, they all seem to be very thin. In fact, if it were not for the fact that I've seen the Shaolin monks perform so well, I would think they were unhealthy and underfed at first glance. Maybe the thinness is generally caused by not getting enough fat. I've looked it up a number of times, but I can't find a list of high fat vegetables anywhere! Maybe if they were drinking coconut milk and omega-3 fish oils they'd be thicker.

Obviously I am not going to state that the vegan diet is ideal athletically, but there are many people performing at an extremely high level on this type of diet. There are also many people with other diets performing at very high levels. If I were to put together a "perfect" athletic diet it would have a crapton of leafy vegetables, a good amount of cruciferous veggies, as many colors as possible throughout the week, and many of these would be cooked with grass-fed animal fat. I would probably use whey protein as the primary protein source. Why? Because it is the most biologically efficient protein on the planet that we know of. Your body can do more with 1 gram of whey than with one gram of anything else. We're talking about perfection here, not practicality. However, I can tell you from occasional experience that this kind of diet is pretty easy to set up.

I know I'm going to sound stupid, but I have to ask... why obviously?

So you definitely suggest eating more than 100g of carbs? Without eating over 3500 carbs, how would you get a lot of carbs, fat, AND protein? I currently (for the last few days) eat about 190g fat, 175g pro, 105g carbs.

Here's where the confusion is. I hope I can clear this up: 608g, which is something like 1.3 lbs, of broccoli is 40g of carbs. Think about how much broccoli that is! 40g of carbs in all that. 1 lb of mustard greens, or any other green, is about 25g of carbs. You know how much leafy matter that is? It's a ridiculously large amount. Go weigh kale or some other leafy green and see how much it takes to make 1 lb. If you're having 1 lb of broccoli, 3 carrots, a red bell pepper, 1 lb of spinach (around 12g carbs) and 1 lb of kale you STILL won't be over 100g carbs.

This is my point: A diet that has an enormous amount of plant matter can still be like 60-70% fat and 15-30% protein by calories. Plus, keep in mind that a LOT of that plant matter is fiber and will not contribute to actual calories, so the numbers are actually lower than they look.

Think about that: 100g carbs is 400 calories. If you are a tiny active person you might get by with 2000 calories per day, but generally you need more than that. You usually need 2000 calories if you're sitting in bed all day as a 68kg person. So this represents less than 25% of your diet, and usually less than 15% if you're eating as much as you actually should. Plus you can assume that at least 10% of that is fiber (that number is lower than the true number, but it makes for easy math) so you're only using 90g of carbs out of that 100g. That is a very low carb, very high vegetable, very high fat, moderate to high protein diet.

There's nothing wrong with that. It works, and I have personally seen Ido chow down on the veggies. I can't imagine that he would ever claim you shouldn't eat tons of veggies, because they are low carb. TUBERS, like potatoes and sweet potatoes, and ROOTS like carrots are higher carb and should be measured more carefully if you want to be low carb, but those are not actually vegetables even though we call them that. At any rate, your non-starchy veggies should be in the highest quantities you can tolerate. I dare anyone here to eat the list I posted above every day. That is a LOT of veggies. You will be amazed at how hard it is to eat that much vegetable matter, and you will also be amazed at how ridiculously good you feel. You can still be high protein and high fat with tons of veggies in your diet, don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise. They are just trying to sell something.

[Quick Start Test Smith]

Great. That really sums it up perfectly.

I have (at my mothers direction) tended to a pretty big family garden in the last few months, so soon I'll have access to tons and tons of bell pepers, cucumbers, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, AND squash

Thanks! 8)

By the way, if anyone else is interested in becoming familiar with the nutritional value of various vegetables, I just found two great websites with info about them.

1) http://www.buzzle.com/articles/vegetabl ... otein.html

2) http://www.caloriecountercharts.com/chart2a.htm

[Quick Start Test Smith]

You're right, man ... :oops:

Mac Danzig said that just eat non-animal foods, including supplements...

No problem, my friend.

If I thought I could achieve my athletic and health goals without meat, I would probably not eat meat unless I was able to get it from animals humanly risen and compassionately taken care of. It completely goes against my morals to support the treatment that factory animals get. Right now, I don't eat a ton of meat as it is, just enough to satisfy my protein and fat requirements. I fully understand the ethical problems that many people have with eating the factory meat.