Finding Ultra (33 page)

Overall, the calories and the nutrients that you gain from eating the steak have to be counterbalanced against the toll you've paid to digest and eliminate the waste of that steak. And when you do the math, the net energy gain is often not worth the high price extracted.

By contrast, my blends require very little energy to digest, because the blender has done most of the job already. Vegetables that would ordinarily be somewhat difficult to break down are now easily assimilated, availing the body ready access to all the nutrients offered by the food product. It's why you feel good immediately after drinking it.

Moreover, the high nutrient density of these smoothie blends, and plant-based whole foods in general, leads to a natural curbing of the appetite, giving you greater control over weight gain and loss. This is because the body is being properly fortified with all the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients it needs to thrive.
It is sated
. By contrast, when we eat “empty” calories—starchy or processed foods, refined wheat and sugars that may be high in calories, carbohydrates, or fat—we feel full, but only temporarily. Soon we're hungry again, craving to eat. This is because despite the often high calorie count of these foods, they're very nutrient poor. The stomach is full, yet the body remains starved for nutrients, which in turns leads to overeating and inevitable weight gain. Such cravings are often the body's way of alerting you that it needs not just to be fed, but fed
properly
.

People often say to me, “You train so much, you must be gorging on food all day long.” But the truth couldn't be more opposite. Back when Brian Nicosia and I were slamming back those doughnuts, we'd convinced ourselves that our bodies needed all that sugar and fat—that we couldn't swim like we did without it. Turns out, the opposite is true. To be sure, my appetite is healthy, but if I'm eating clean-burning, nutrient-dense foods, it stays balanced. In fact, there's no question that despite my training load, I eat far less than I did in my sedentary years prior to 2008.

Ultra-marathon legend and vegan Scott Jurek claims that his body has become so adept at absorbing his nutrient-rich foods that he needs to eat less and operates at a higher efficiency. I can honestly say that I know what he's talking about. I've discovered that the more reliant I become on nutrient-dense foods, the less hungry I become, irrespective of training load. My body is satiated.

Typically, I'll make a blenderful in the morning, drink one large glass, and store the rest in a thermos, taking it with me to sip throughout the day when I begin to feel hungry or feel my energy levels beginning to wane. I find this very helpful in a work/business context. Many people have said to me, “I really want to go plant-based. But there's just no way I can do it because of business lunches and dinners. What am I supposed to do when I have to meet a client at a steak house?” Here's my answer. Brew a large Vitamix in the morning. Bring it in a large thermos to work, along with some other plant-friendly and easy-to-carry snacks like almonds and fruit. And just before you have to head out to that steak house for a work-related lunch, drink a healthy portion of the Vitamix blend. You'll find that your energy increases as your appetite wanes. Then you can attend your lunch and order a light salad, baked potato, or whatever meager offering the plant-unfriendly restaurant has to offer, without starving or cheating.

Post-workout and/or in the evening, it's back to blending. I prepare another Vitamix before or after dinner as an appetizer or a dessert. I tend to mix it up to keep things fresh and interesting, experimenting with different ingredients and striving not to be rigid about exact ingredients or proportions. But subsequent to training, or as night nears, I always bear in mind what my body needs most to recover from the day's training and professional or life stressors, to ensure I maximize the window to rebuild myself overnight. So the focus shifts away from energizing foods to reparative foods—from catabolic (exertion mode) to anabolic (restorative/growth mode). I'll take some antioxidants to combat stress and exercise-induced free radical damage, but I'm not talking about vitamin pills. I'm talking about blueberries, strawberries, acai and goji berries, spinach, kale, carrots, and spirulina. I'll also think about eating some walnuts for protein and drinking coconut water for electrolytes. And when I crave dessert, instead of ice cream or pie I'll try blending banana and berries with coconut milk and cacao—a chocolate-flavored nutritious superfood high in antioxidants. A guilt-free delight.

PLANTPOWER DIET

MICROBES, THE BRAIN, AND THE EMOTIONAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL MECHANICS OF CRAVING

The most common and relatable objections to embracing the PlantPower Diet that I constantly entertain go something like these: “I wish I could be like you, but I just can't enjoy life without my
cheese.…” “I can't help myself, I just have to eat ice cream.…” “I don't care what anybody says, my body needs eggs.…” “I'm powerless when it comes to a nice juicy steak.”

In my opinion, the
number one
—and sadly all too often insurmountable—factor that condemns people to persistent unhealthy eating habits is
irresistible cravings
.

Anytime you want something, you have to make a bit of a sacrifice. For better or worse, good things in life come at a price. Training for Ultraman is hard. Often painful beyond my limits. But the reward makes it all worthwhile in the end. So my inclination is to respond harshly with something like “Yeah, you might miss your bacon. But you'll also miss your heart attack. Is it really worth destroying your health?”

But fear tactics, browbeating, and bootstrap shock therapy never really work. They didn't with me, that's for sure. If they did, everyone would eat healthy all the time. So why don't we?

To answer this question we have to take a look at the very nature of cravings—the physiological and emotional underpinnings that cause us to behave and eat the way we do.

At Springbrook, I began to truly understand the emotional nature of human craving in the context of addiction and compulsive behavior patterns. I came to see that our attachment to, and often obsession with, certain substances, behaviors, and even people is often rooted in a form of psychological and chemical imbalance. And food is no different—its pull is capable of creating the same addictive response found in drug addicts.
^§
In fact, studies have shown that for some people, the sight of ice cream stimulates the same pleasure centers in the brain as images of crack pipes do for crack addicts. Over time, we begin to heavily associate certain
situations and emotions with a particular type of food. These associations become cemented pathways in the brain, establishing addictive patterns that can be seemingly impossible to break. The grip is tight, and more often than not, willpower proves futile. The comfort of your favorite food that can be relied on to take you out of a painful moment becomes a go-to drug of choice, and the more you indulge the more ingrained the habit becomes. What ensues is a cycle so entrenched, it quite literally becomes who we are.

In my case, I had to become introspective about why I ate the foods I did and take an honest inventory of the motivations behind my unhealthy food choices. I had to be honest about how I used food to cope with, deal with, or escape from reality. And so I implore you to do the same: get in touch with your inner workings and explore your psyche, your motivations, and your pain. Develop an understanding of the emotions that drive your unhealthy cravings so that they can be confronted, processed, and ultimately overcome.

Not ready for self-therapy? Well, don't lose hope just yet. There's another aspect to craving that is only recently becoming properly understood—
microbes
. What on earth do microbes have to do with anything? I hope you're sitting down. Because it's time to blow your mind.

We harbor the notion that we're sentient beings commanding full authority and power to control our thoughts. But recent studies provide a new perspective, challenging just how much control we truly have when it comes to our cravings.

What we don't consciously realize is that our bodies are not entirely ourselves. To be certain, our cells cluster together to form tissues, and these tissues compose the organs and systems that make us what we are. And yet we overlook the fact that our bodies act as hosts to trillions of microorganisms. I'm talking about bacteria, fungi, and other invisible organisms that symbiotically inhabit our skin, proliferate in our saliva, and thrive in our GI tract.

The typical human body is composed of about ten trillion cells. And yet we harbor microorganisms
ten times
that number in our digestive tract alone, as many as forty thousand different bacterial strains. In other words, it can be argued that head to toe, we're far more microbe than human. But fear not; to a large extent, these microorganisms are not enemies but friends, performing a wide variety of crucial functions imperative to our health, such as breaking down foods we cannot otherwise digest. And although too often overlooked, maintaining a healthy ecology of these microorganisms is absolutely crucial to optimizing health.

An emerging field of study has begun to evaluate the extent to which this
gut flora
impacts food choice, establishing a fascinating link between microorganisms and the foods we pine for. In other words, there's evidence to support a
microbial basis for craving
.

To illustrate, a team of Swiss researchers recently determined that people who crave chocolate actually harbor different types of microbial colonies in their gut than those who are indifferent to chocolate. And there's evidence to suggest that this may indeed be the case for many other types of food as well.
^‖

But what does this mean? Certain scientists, including microbiologist Compton Rom, founder of holistic nutrition products company Ascended Health, submit that there is in fact a very direct and causal connection between our intestinal microbial ecology and the way we think. That, in fact, these microbes message our brains, effectively telling us what to eat. Turns out, it's our microbes that hold sway over our cravings.

Sound fantastical? Consider this. If you saw the documentary
Super Size Me
, you recall filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's quest to see what would happen if he ate nothing but McDonald's food
for thirty consecutive days. For the first few days, we watched him cringe, even vomit from his relentless fare of Big Macs, fries, and shakes. He felt sick. He suffered terrible headaches. But then a funny thing happened. That feeling of sickness went away. The headaches disappeared. Suddenly, he began to crave the food that just days prior had him cringing and buckled over. Then he began to wake up each morning with a headache that wouldn't quit
until
he got his McDonald's fix. How can this be explained? According to Compton, Morgan's dietary shift from a primarily plant-based diet to an entirely fast-food regimen effectively and quite rapidly replaced his healthy gut flora with a pathogenic microbial ecology that thrived specifically on the ingredients present in McDonald's food. This new unhealthy, or “bad,” ecology of microflora simply required McDonald's to live. Thus, it hijacked Morgan's nervous system, sending messages to his brain and throughout his body that translated into an acute craving for more of these foods.

But this cycle can be broken by replacing the unhealthy foods you crave with healthy alkali-forming, plant-based foods, which will introduce the proliferation of an entirely new and much healthier microbial ecology to your digestive system. It's a process that can be assisted and expedited with (nondairy) probiotic supplementation (such as that offered by Ascended Health—see
Appendix III
, Resources). And once established, this new ecology will in turn signal your brain to replace those powerful unhealthy urges with an equally powerful craving for the foods that nourish you. And before you know it, that yearning for ice cream or pepperoni pizza just might vanish, replaced with a longing for a kale and pineapple smoothie, a red lentil pilaf, or even, you might be amazed to discover, sprouted mung beans over brown rice. It happened to me. Once a cheeseburger fanatic, I'm now rarely tempted by McDonald's. And if it worked for me, it can work for you.

A WORD ABOUT GLUTEN, GRAINS, AND SPROUTING

Once I began to clean up my diet, I noticed that some technically vegan foods, in particular items containing refined flour—such as pasta, white bread, processed snacks, and pizza crust—left me feeling lethargic, congested, and even puffy-eyed. On occasion, my feet would even swell. I did some research and came to understand that my system has a certain intolerance for gluten, a sticky glue-like (hence the Latin derivation of the word “gluten”) protein present in a variety of foods processed from wheat and other related grains, such as barley and rye.