On Sunday, March 29th I started a vegan fitness challenge. I actually look at it as both a challenge and a transformation. I have been following Nimai Delgado for a while on Instagram and he was recently promoting his new vegan fitness challenge.
I decided to try to enroll on this vegan transformation mainly to learn more about nutrition and with the added benefit of hopefully seeing some body changes in this quarantine period. He had three possible programs for this challenge: increase muscle mass with a gym, fat loss with a gym and fat loss with home workouts. Since my gym is closed I decided to go with the fat loss program, which is something I never tried in my life. I have absolutely no idea what to expect about this 8-week program but I’m willing to commit to is to best of my abilities.
Before the program started we’re supposed to track our weight and we’re suggested to upload the before picture. Every week, ideally every Friday we’re supposed to check-in both the new weight and the new pictures (front, back, left and right).
My initial macros that were defined for me were the following:
Total calories: 1700
Protein: 141g
Fat: 38g
Carbohydrates: 199g
I have no idea about the reasoning behind these numbers, maybe I should ask, but I tried to follow them as strictly as I could. I started counting the calories on paper for two days but quickly noticed that this would not be sustainable for me because it just takes too much time. I decided to pay for a premium membership of MyFitnessPal. This app makes it super easy to track all the macros in seconds. It has a huge database of food that you can use. It even had exactly the products with the local supermarket brands here from Berlin.
You can’t even imagine the enlightenment that counting macros caused in my mind. It was unbelievable! My mind was blown away!
I had two bottles of Pringles at home at that time and some chocolates, Twix and Bounty. I was shocked to see how much Pringles destroys your potential fat loss diet. I mean, everyone knows that Pringles is not good, but when you see it in numbers… it’s mind blowing! The same for Twix and Bounty because if you can only eat 38g of fat per day, even a simple Bounty can destroy the macros of all your meals for the rest of the day. I was ending my days having just chicken breast for dinner or just tuna. Definitely not the most pleasant dinner experience as you can imagine. You can consider it as a punishment for eating Pringles and chocolates. 😀
My biggest problem during the first week was actually not the fat but the protein! Eating 141g of protein is an enormous amount of protein for me. I’m totally not used to it. I was eating tuna like it was medicine just to reach my recommended daily protein intake.
By this point you’re probably thinking…
Chicken breast and tuna? Isn’t this supposed to be a vegan challenge?
Yes, it’s supposed to be a vegan challenge but at least for me, I’m realistic enough to not assume that I will change to a vegan diet from one day to the next.
During this first week I was at least able to have a vegan breakfast every single day. It was always the same but at least I could stick to it.
It looked something like this every day:
This meal is more or less composed by this:
200ml Oatmilk
50g Oats
1 banana
62g raspberries
63g blueberries
A little bit of cinnamon
According to MyFitnessPal this is 434 kcal.
Carbs: 80g * Fat 4g * Protein 9g
Learnings after week 1
After one week of the challenge my biggest learning was the following:
- I can’t buy Pringles anymore! (I definitely don’t care!)
- I can’t buy Twix anymore! (Maybe other chocolates?) 😀
- I need to drink at least 1 liter of water per day on week 2
- You can get totally destroyed just with a body weight workout!
I can’t wait to see the body results of week 2 and what I will learn along the way!
Checkpoint. Good article