Lifestyle
Fueling Workouts on a Low Carb Vegan Diet
Yes, you can get the energy you need
Using just my person for empirical human subject research, I can attest that the kinds of meals you can put together out of these recipes will support exercise, despite their low carb count. Exercise, of course, requires fuel, typically carbs, for the body to burn in order to produce work. Some research I’ve read suggests that fasted cardio workouts burn more calories during the workout, but properly carb-fueled workouts continue to burn more calories after the workout.
So, this may turn out to be a difference that just doesn’t make much of a difference, other than how you personally prefer to work out. I don’t like the feeling of working out without energy, and so am not a fan of fasted cardio exercising, despite its current popularity with Hollywood personal trainers who are very good at turning out comic book superhero bodies in their cinematic version.
I’ve found that with these low carb vegan meals, I can easily do resistance training, for instance a full-body workout for 90–120 minutes, or a half hour on an elliptical training (or equivalent shorter duration sprint training on similar equipment) even after resistance training. These meals can also easily fuel hot yoga for 60–90 minutes or a bike ride to a craft brewery 20 miles (32 km) away from my home.
What these meals do not fuel well is cycling or hiking for many hours, for which I have two solutions: pack into your bag either 1–3 (depending on how long your hike or ride is and how big your bag and root veggies are) boiled sweet potatoes or baked Japanese purple yams. This cookbook avoids overly processed foods such as typical energy or power bars that are marketed heavily to runners and cyclists.
Eat those dense pricey factory mass produced rectangular things if you want, but I’ve found that nutrient-rich varieties of potatoes do the job for fueling long hours of more intense cycling or long distance hiking very effectively (here in the Vancouver area, it’s not unusual to casually decide to go on a 20km hike on a whim, with the dog of course!).
I can’t comment too much on how this diet relates to folks who want to really bulk up from lifting weights. With this diet I have both lost weight (from shedding fat) and increased muscle mass from resistance training, at the same time, but not at Hemsworth or Cavill (superhero dude) levels. My understanding is that to build lots of muscle mass, you need to eat a lot of calories, which goes against the low-carb caloric restriction approach in this book.
For a superhero or professional body builder body, there is usually a bulking up phase through high calorie consumption, which includes adding a lot of fat to your body so that you can achieve appropriate levels of protein synthesis needed for increased lot of muscle size, which is followed by a slimming down phase, where you shed the fat to reveal the muscle.
And in professional practice, taking steroids is common, which is well outside the scope of anything I would write about! I wouldn’t recommend the recipes in the book for this kind of professional bulking up weight training, simply because those high calorie counts run counter to the goal of caloric restriction. However, in my experience at least, building muscle mass at more moderate levels is achievable within the dietary constraints of these recipes.
