Today is the end of week 2 of the vegan fitness challenge I’m working on. If you have missed my review of week 1, you can check my previous post here.
My macros for this week were changed to have 300 calories more:
Total Calories: 2000
Protein: 141g (28%)
Fat: 44g (20%)
Carbohydrates: 259g (52%)
This actually made a huge difference on my dinner. I didn’t have to eat just chicken or just tuna anymore.
Daily vegan products
For week 1 I had bought a vegan hand washing gel and since washing my hands so much made them very dry, for this week I bought a vegan hand lotion. This way I’m also changing not just my food but also the products that I’m using regularly.
Improvements to my diet
If you have read my review of week 1, only my breakfast was changed to become vegan and I focused just on that for the whole week. The less I have to focus on, the easier it is for me to take this challenge to the end. For this week I focused on my preworkout meal while keeping the breakfast vegan. For the whole week my breakfast was either the same as last week or slices of spelt bread (Dinkelbrot as we call it here in Germany) with avocado. Either 1/4 or 1/2 of the avocado. I was experimenting to see how it would affect my macros. For example, on Tuesday, April 7th my breakfast was three slices of spelt bread with 1/2 avocado, which has this macros according to MyFitnessPal.
Breakfast: 632 Cal
Carbs 83g – Fat 23g – Protein 20g
1/2 Avocado (120 Cal)
Dinkelbrot 186g (512 Cal)
The problem with this kind of breakfast is that if I have 23g of fat just for breakfast, I only have 21g left for the rest of the day, which is a disaster as you can imagine and this is what leads to me just eating chicken or tuna for dinner because after lunch I’ve used all my fat for the day. This made me realize that eating bread with avocado for breakfast is definitely not a good option for me. I will keep experimenting with the breakfast.
For my preworkout meal I decided to just go with a shake. Protein powder, berries or banana or kiwi or everything mixed together and mixed with a blender. Mixing the kiwi was not so good so I will probably eat it separately just for the vitamin C because one kiwi has 106% of vitamin C for the day.
What I learned from week 2
The biggest learning from week 2 is that I can’t buy pre-cooked things from the supermarket because the fat content is ridiculously high for my macros. Since I don’t know how to cook couscous or bulgur I bought couscous and bulgur salads from the supermarket assuming that these would easily change my diet to a vegan one. Tofu was also sold out and the only tofu I could find was already mixed with peanuts so the fat content was also high. I also tried with different vegan and vegetarian options that you just have to fry or grill. I didn’t take pictures of all the packages unfortunately.
As you can see from the CousCous salad from the picture, it contains 8.5g of fat per 100g, which means that if I eat everything, which I can easily do, you finish lunch and you check your calories and boooom, you just ate 21g of fat. By having a bread with avocado breakfast, my fat intake for the day is done.
Eating tuna last week like medicine just to reach my protein intake for the day to make sure I just get protein and no fat and no carbs started making me dislike the taste of tuna more and more. I don’t even feel like buying it anymore.
Experiments for week 3
I will search on YouTube how to cook couscous, bulgur and lentilsso that I can introduce those during week 3 and see how they affect my macros. The idea is to get ready to change my dinner in week 4 to a vegan dinner every day. Week 3 will be just to focus on learning how to cook and changing my postworkout meal to a vegan one.
Conclusion
A lot of effort is coming up for week 3 but I have the feeling that I’m on the right track. Learning how to cook is something that I’ve been wanting to learn for a long time and now I have the perfect excuse if I really want to make the transition to a vegan diet before the end of this challenge. Let me know in the comments below what you would like to see more from my weekly reviews and thanks for reading.