On May 10th I finished the 6th week of my vegan fitness challenge. At the time of this writing I’m actually almost finishing the last 8th week! I’m very excited. If you didn’t read my 5th week report you read about it here.
I remember that this week was quite good, specially because it was the first week where I ate meat (chicken) only once! I’m quite proud of myself that I was able to change to a vegan diet during the challenge.
Some days I didn’t have so much energy but maybe it was just my body adjusting to the change in diet. Could be something else, I actually don’t know what caused it but now that I’m already on week 8 and I feel very energetic most of the time, it somehow makes sense that it could be my body adjusting.
Unfortunately I didn’t do so many workouts because of that. People in the challenge are supposed to workout 5 times per week and I only did 3 workouts and two of them on the same day to try to somehow compensate, one in the morning and another in the evening. I was actually quite surprised that I had enough energy to do two one hour workouts in the same day.
Macros changed
During the whole challenge I was struggling a lot to eat just 44g of fat per day. I told this to the coaches and my macros were changed to the following:
Target Calories: 2000
Protein: 141g
Fat: 56g
Carbs: 234g
The change from 44g of fat to 56g might feel very small but for me it was a huge difference. I was almost never reaching my protein goals but almost there, which for me was good enough to not enter paranoid diet mode.
Vegan diet overview
Here I have to confess that it was actually much easier than I was expecting. I believe that my approach to gradually change things here and there to gradually achieve a vegan diet was the best approach I could take.
Some people prefer to do a hard cut and become 100% vegan regarding food from one day to the next but I know that it doesn’t work for me. I always prefer to do gradual changes so that the change becomes natural without much thinking.
Goals for week 7
Since my macros were changed, my goals for week 7 were to keep adjusting to the new calories, increase my water intake (extremely hard for me) and do more workouts.
Summary
The week by itself was not very good but having eaten vegan the whole week except one meal made me very proud of myself.