Category Archives: powertraining

Picture of green protein smoothie

Green protein bomb

The big issue for people considering switching to plant-based food is: will I get enough protein?
Meat, fish and eggs are “easy” sources of protein, which have a relatively high protein content.
But ethically speaking, they are very tricky.

A plant-based diet has everything to provide us with sufficient protein, and is respectful of animals, people and the planet.

Let’s cite a few good sources:

  • peas, including soya, peas, and the dozens of varieties of beans and lentils
  • nuts and seeds
  • cereals (such as wheat, oats, rice, rye, barley, millet, amaranth …)
  • pseudocereals (such as quinoa, buckwheat)
  • vegetables (yes! Every vegetable contains protein)
  • algae and cyanobacteria such as spirulina
  • vegetable protein powder (of soy, rice, hemp, pea, pumpkin seed, sunflower seed or combinations thereof)

Anyone who takes a balanced and sufficiently varied plant diet will under no circumstances suffer from a protein deficiency.

And what about active sports and power training ?

But if you’re a strength athlete, or like me, have stepped into a fat loss challenge, along with purebred meat eaters and omnivores ? A challenge that expects you to eat almost twice as much protein as normal ? Up to more than 150 grams a day ?
How about that ?
Can you do that?
Can you provide meals and snacks that contain much more protein and at the same time keep your fats and carbohydrates under control?

Yes, it’s possible.
Let’s be honest: you’ll also need an addition of vegetable protein powder.
But that’s the same for meat and fish eaters. They only use concentrated milk protein, also called whey.

Here is an example of a vegetable “protein bomb”, which I prepared as a separate meal. With lots of greens, so also rich in vitamins and minerals.

These are the ingredients for the smoothie:

  • 200 gr peas
  • 70 gr spinach
  • 25 gr mixed vegetable protein powder of hemp, pumpkin and sunflower
  • 3 gr spirulina (about 1 teaspoon)
  • 3 gr chlorella (about 1 teaspoon)
  • about a tablespoon of peanut butter
  • 150 ml of unsweetened calcium-fortified soy milk

This was for the topping:

  • 70 gr fresh white or red currants
  • 100 gr soybean cottage cheese alternative (Provamel or Alpro)

Energy and macros

This one nutritious and filling meal with a total of almost 600 kcal contains no less than 49 grams of vegetable protein.
That’s a bunch!
The vegetable protein powder accounts for 14.6 grams of that. The rest comes from the other ingredients.
Macronutrients
You could also use the same combination in smaller quantities as a nutritious “post-workout” snack.

Plant Power

I was relieved.
Yes, this kind of special diet for sports or fat loss it is also feasible with only vegetable ingredients.

It’s time we built a society on the power of plants instead of the misery of animals. Don’t you think so?

Duoportrait before challenge

The eight weeks fat loss challenge

There you go. I left on August 3, 2020 for eight weeks.
Not on vacation! But still on a voyage of discovery. I made a commitment to an 8-week fat-loss challenge.
Now you might want to take a look at the attached photo that looks like a robot photo of someone condemned to jail for a decade. And then you might think, “That’s not so bad, is it, that fat?

Attaining results

The truth is, for over a decade, I’ve been thinking I’m eating totally healthy. And apart from that, I’m mildly to moderately physically active. The lack of periods of illness and doctor’s visits (none!) the last 7 years, point to say I am in the right direction.

If I wouldn’t do anything at all for my dear body, I would become “skinny fat”,. I call it myself: a fat skeleton. Not so much meat on the bones and the tendency to accumulate fat deposits in all the classic body areas. I do like physical activity, I’ve practiced sports for years, but only following a very irregular pattern.
I am one of those persons who eagerly longs for visible results with sport, but never manages to obtain real results.

And so I made the wise decision to descend from the realm of fantasy and supposition to the world of objectively measurable reality. The figures, measurement results and progress tables of the challenge bring me straight to the tangible experience, of what it means to work systematically and with great consistency towards a result.

Photographs are part of this. The classic “before” and “after” selfies. Because the image the photo shows provides more objective information than your own glance at yourself in a mirror. Because you view and judge yourself, depending on the mental filters through which you look, often too positively or too negatively.
Picture before the challenge

An objective view

Those pictures also help me to accept myself. There I am, a person of 58 years old in underwear, with all the dents and flaws and imperfections that belong to that body. I see things that I can’t change much. Like that spine, which is very assymetric. Or those deformed feet. I also see things I can handle. Like the fact that my legs can be a lot more muscular, or the back of my body that is clearly less muscular than the front side of it.
We’ll get to work on that.

Manifesting the best version of myself

These are some of the reasons for my participation to the challenge:

The motivations are:

  • I want to develop a strength training and maintain enough muscle tissue, good posture and mobility, now and in later life.
  • Less fat and more muscles, I find that aesthetically more beautiful. And it’s healthier.
  • Create the best physical version of myself, depending on my genetics, history and age.
  • Develop the mental discipline by adhering as strictly as possible to a well thought-out, planned and achievable practice schedule for sports and nutrition.
  • Learn from my own personal experience how the interaction between eating and being physically active actually works out.
  • Experience what works and what doesn’t for me in terms of nutrition
  • Get, once and for all, clarity about the protein story.

The challenges are:

  • To lose 500 grams of fat per week for 8 to 12 weeks
  • For 8 to 12 weeks, to track all the food I eat in a food tracking app
  • To do progressive strength training 4 days a week
  • To gain the know-how from this experience in order to sustainably maintain the result after the challenge.

No more guessing and supposing and fantasizing! I love my chaotic mind with its dominant right half, but that alone won’t get me there.

Oh yes. Almost forgot to mention, I’m doing it all vegan !

How is your relation with your body and its health ?
Are you entirely satisfied ?

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