Finding Ultra (15 page)

Six months into the experiment, I'd already lost
forty-five pounds
, lowering my body weight to a lean and mean 165 pounds. Not only was I ripped, I was hooked. And then I really put my regimen to work, testing my body's absolute limits.

I'm a forty-five-year-old man. A husband and a father who just five years ago crouched winded in my bathroom, fearing a heart attack. If you had told me back then that I'd be sitting where I am today, enjoying a level of fitness and vitality beyond anything I previously thought possible, I would have said you were a lunatic. I simply couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams that my life would unfold as it has. And yet here I stand. How is this possible?

I can say with full confidence that my rapid transformation from middle-aged couch potato to Ultraman—to, in fact, everything I've accomplished as an endurance athlete—begins and ends with my PlantPower Diet
.

Along the way, I've sought and been blessed with the support and wisdom of many others—medical authorities, professional
athletes, spiritual guides, not to mention Julie, who was my very first mentor in finding a food lifestyle that worked for me.

And that food lifestyle has meant removing all animal products and most processed foods from my diet. No chicken, no eggs, no fish, no dairy. All plants, all whole foods, all the time. It's what I live on. It's what I train on. It's what I compete on. It's what I thrive on.

I'm not a doctor. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm just a guy who started paying really close attention to what he was putting into his body. A guy who undertook some study to better understand which foods do what and why. And a guy who liked the results so much that he started taking on challenges that he'd never even dreamed of before.

When people ask me what and how I eat, I sometimes hesitate before I use the word “vegan.” Of course, that
is
what I eat; my diet is absent of any and all animal products. But the word “vegan” is a loaded term, connoting not just a nutritional regime but a code of ethics and a sense of political activism. For better or worse, there's a stigma to the word, which all too often alienates those who could most benefit from embracing what the word represents.

As I talked about in
Chapter One
, I was at first quite skeptical about such a way of eating—simply because of the undertones that the word “vegan” brought with it. To me, “vegan” meant a far-fetched, hippie way of not just eating, but living. I imagined dreadlocked students at Humboldt State, kicking around a Hacky Sack in Birkenstocks and tie-dyed T-shirts to the melody of the Grateful Dead. Cool for them. But not my scene.

My turn from a dairy- and meat-based diet to a plant-based
diet resulted not so much from a desire to adopt a certain lifestyle as from a simple question:
What makes my body run the best?
And the answer turned out to be simple. Plants make it run the best. And so I prefer to call my own eating lifestyle
PlantPowered
, a term that gets more to the heart of my relationship with food. Plants are what I've used to repair my health. They've given me the strength to do what I do. My pro-plant bias is not about being liberal or conservative. It's about optimizing both short- and long-term wellness. My diet is PlantPowered, and therefore I am PlantPowered. Never in my life has the equation of food to body been more clear. The old adage is true: You
are
what you eat.

In this day and age it can be hard for even the most “aware” consumer to know which foods are healthful. We're so inundated with conflicting advertising and marketing messages telling us what to eat. Low-fat, non-fat, low in saturated fats, high in omega-3s, drink this, eat that, grass fed, red wine, no red wine, eat chocolate, you need more protein, don't eat chocolate—it can make anyone's head spin. Just walk the aisles at any typical grocery store and read the packaging—almost every product is adorned with a banner slogan about why it's good for you. And then there are the supplements—vitamin tablets, protein powders, energy bars, weight-loss shakes, nutraceuticals, and cure-all smoothies. The totality of it all can literally cause vertigo.

What do I see? A preponderance of disinformation, artful misdirection, creative advertising taking liberties with the truth, and sometimes downright lies, all market-tested and carefully crafted to dupe and confuse.

But when you cut a wide swath through the blinding morass of
obfuscation and advertising to boil nutrition down to the basics, it turns out that eating right—eating the
PlantPower
way—isn't complex at all, or all that difficult or expensive to adopt. What I've done is to get back to fundamentals. At times I
can
get fairly “scientific” about what I eat, because I'm aiming for specific athletic performance goals—but my approach is probably not as complex as you think. So if you're interested in the PlantPower way, you can jump in with both feet without a whole lot of thought or planning. There's no need to be intimidated. This kind of diet doesn't have to be rocket science!

In the most general sense, I eat and recommend plant-based, whole foods and advise staying away from many—but not all—processed foods. I don't like to overcomplicate the eating part of my life, and I don't obsess. I don't prepare elaborate or expensive dishes. I don't weigh my food, count grams, or overthink my proportion of carbohydrates to proteins to fats. Why? Because getting overly caught up in such minute details leads to burnout. And burnout always leads back to old habits. The name of the game is sustainability. And simply put,
if it's too complicated, it's not sustainable
. And if it's not sustainable, what's the point? Not only does it have to work, it has to be user-friendly, operating with relative ease within the framework of the modern busy family.

The general take-away is this:
eat plants
. Lots of different kinds. Vegetables, fruits, grains, seeds, legumes. Every meal. All the time. All colors, all sizes, and simply prepared, close to their natural state. Keep it varied. Stick to the perimeter of the grocery store and avoid the middle aisles, which generally feature processed and refined foods. Don't eat things with ingredients you can't pronounce or that aren't found in nature. Try to eat organic and locally grown produce when at all possible. Go easy on the sugar. And as for oils—one of the few technically processed foods I support in moderation—use sparingly or avoid altogether.

Eating this way doesn't have to be hard or complicated. And after you adjust to the change, you very well may find, as I have, that it's often easier to eat the PlantPower way than you imagined, since most of the foods are close to their natural state and thus very simple and easy to prepare. Keep in mind: The closer your plant-based foods are to their natural state, the better.

I didn't invent my regimen from whole cloth. It's built on a foundation of scientific data generated by leading medical professionals and other experts in the field: people like Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University and author of
The China Study
, a groundbreaking book published in 2005 that examines the close relationship between the consumption of animal proteins and the onset of chronic and degenerative illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and obesity. In one of the largest epidemiological studies ever conducted, Professor Campbell and his peers determined that a plant-based, whole-food diet can minimize and actually
reverse
the development of these chronic diseases.

Equally influential is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's book
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
. A former surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, as well as a Yale-trained rower who garnered Olympic gold at the 1956 Melbourne Summer Games, Dr. Esselstyn concludes from a twenty-year nutritional study that a plant-based, whole-food diet can not only prevent and stop the progression of heart disease, but also reverse its effects.

You might have seen former President Bill Clinton in 2011's CNN special
The Last Heart Attack
speaking with Dr. Sanjay Gupta about his decision to adopt a whole-food, plant-based diet as a means to combat his own struggle with weight and heart disease. If you did, you know he cited Dr. Esselstyn, along with Dr. Dean Ornish, as key influencers in his decision.

Dr. Esselstyn's son Rip, a former swimmer and triathlete and later an Austin, Texas–based fireman, authored a book called
The Engine 2 Diet
that in plain English demonstrates the power of a plant-based diet by chronicling the astounding health improvements of his Engine 2 firehouse colleagues who undertook his regime.

And yet another influence on me was former pro triathlete and ultra-runner Brendan Brazier's
Thrive
—a go-to primer that details all the hows and whys of plant-based nutrition for both athletic performance and optimum health.

The irony is that, despite the consistent and unequivocal findings of these readily available books, from the moment I undertook my own personal experiment in nutrition and fitness, I met with resistance. Naysayers and critics, ranging from nutritionists and trainers to doctors to concerned family and friends, have tried to persuade me from this path. Whenever I advocate for the PlantPower Diet, I'm pummeled with well-meaning but myth-based objections:
Aren't you anemic? What you're doing is dangerous. How can you stand all that bland food? You can't be an athlete without steak and milk. It's impossible to build muscle without animal protein. You can't get enough calories without meat and dairy. I've never seen a vegan who looked healthy. You're missing key nutrients. You're harming yourself. Man evolved to eat animals. It's not natural!

It's crazy how emotional and threatened people can become when the subject turns to food and diet. Merely mentioning plant-based nutrition often prompts immediate debate. But I relish the dialogue. It's been a kick confronting head-on the arguments of the critics and dissenting voices and putting them to the test. I've done my homework. I know how I feel. And my results speak for themselves.

I should make one thing clear: The PlantPower Diet is
not
a fad diet. I like to think of it as a lifestyle. The word “diet” can have
a negative connotation and is almost always construed as something temporary, with health improvements and general wellness almost always taking a backseat to the primary goal—weight loss. But proper weight maintenance is only one aspect of living in optimum health. If you're overweight, you'll undoubtedly shed pounds if you adopt the PlantPower way. Maybe not as fast as you would on a starvation-based regime. But over time you'll achieve your proper body weight. And most important, you'll keep it that way. However, weight loss is not the focus of being PlantPowered; it's the natural by-product of adapting to
a new perspective on food
that is keenly focused on achieving balanced, long-term wellness.

But despite PlantPower's obvious benefits, I have no doubt that many of you reading this are starting to feel a low-grade panic, envisioning all your favorite foods vanishing from the fridge and the cupboard as you stare blankly at barren shelves. You're thinking to yourself,
No way
.

Believe me, I'm sympathetic. But I can assure you that banishing favorite foods from your diet doesn't mean sentencing yourself to a life of humdrum eating. It's all about retraining your taste buds. Also, remember: There's nothing wrong with starting slow. Let go of trying to be perfect right out of the gate. Use as guideposts the detailed nutritional information and additional reference materials in this book's appendixes, and feel free to ease into it. Maybe avoiding fast food is all you can handle the first few weeks. That's fine. But after that, try incorporating more plant-based meals into your daily rotation. For example, make that beloved chicken breast a small side dish to a plant-based entrée until you're ready to let go completely. Next step: Remove the most tempting and unhealthy animal products and processed foods from your fridge and pantry. After that, replace dairy with almond and coconut milk. Small steps such as these will help your mind and body to adapt.

Over time, as you begin to feel better, you just might discover,
as I have, a growing appetite and craving for truly nourishing foods. And with the experience of positive results might come a resolve to expand the proportion of plant-based foods that make up your daily menu. Before you know it, you'll be a convert. The point is to change habits. Alter those and you'll create
sustainability
.

Believe me, if I can do it, so can you.

We live in the most prosperous nation on Earth, yet as a society we've never been more unhealthy. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and a vast array of very preventable diseases plague us unnecessarily. But rather than address these ailments' underlying causes, our culture emphasizes pharmaceutical fixes. Just watch television for an hour and count how many ads you see for prescription medications.

If we want to heal—truly
heal
—and thrive, then we must embrace preventive medicine. A plant-based, whole-food diet has been shown, for example, to prevent and actually reverse heart disease (America's number one killer) and impede or even arrest the development of a litany of other maladies, including the growth of cancer cells. Even erectile dysfunction is often symptomatic of circulatory disease. Overall, eating a plant-based diet is the easiest, most cost-effective—and environmentally conscious—way to vastly improve not just your own health but that of America and the world at large.

I'm not alone in my advocacy of this alternative approach to eating. In fact, plant-based nutrition has begun to go mainstream. Practitioners of veganism range from martial arts fighters such as Mac Danzig and Jake Shields, to Georges Laraque of the Montreal Canadiens, to Dave Zabriskie, who made headlines in 2010 as the
first professional cyclist to ride the Tour de France as a vegan. And it's not just professional athletes who've caught the fever. Among the converts to plant-based nutrition: Twitter founder Biz Stone, real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, and Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn. The list is growing daily.