Need a reason to eat more vegetables?
How about improving recovery after hard athletic efforts?
You may look up these Foods to Improve Athletic Performance & Recovery. on NutritionFacts.org.
I’ve been running a lot longer distances this season. With two or three runs in the weeks between before, I ran 30 miles (50 km) two Saturdays ago, 20 miles (32 km) last Saturday, and a short 14 miles (22 km) this Saturday (I was tight on time). My experience has been amazing. I am running pain-free = no threat of injury. I am running a lot of hills, especially on these long runs since I am preparing for mountains. Toward the end, after 20 miles or so, my joints may be tired, and I really have to concentrate on holding best form, but I am not feeling wasted and I am not in acute pain when I finish.
However, once I stop running and sit down for a while, my joints stiffen up and let me know they don’t want to start running again. (Stopping more than a couple minutes on really long efforts is not a good idea!) But, even so, I sense I could get up and go again if I needed to. They are stiff and tight in response to the fatigued once I cool down, but they are not strained.
What is more amazing is the next day – I am not sore; not in any one particular spot, nor generally all over. My energy is not fully replenished yet – I may need three of four days to feel the muscles recover and the energy tank full again. But I get out of bed 20 hours later and am not reminded that I ran so far the day before. This is not the way it would have felt 10 years ago running for much shorter distances, or even four years ago, before I became (mostly) vegetarian.
Vegetables Make Things Feel Better
I certainly connect this to good technique and appropriate training. But more importantly, I connect this to the effect of my strongly plant-based diet. I eat a lot of vegetables and they make it easier for my body to knock down inflammation, and repair and replenish energy. There is simply less stress on my body when I get my nutrients more from plants than from animals. I do eat some dairy and occasionally some fish. But even now I am finding my craving for those diminishing. I am doing so well without, my incentive for eating animal products is going down.
Let me note – for most of my life, I already had a reputation with family and friends for having an admirably healthy diet, including meat, and had every sign of being athletically healthy. In these last several years I simply ran across more and more high performing people talking about being plant-based and decided I needed to try it out myself, to see if it could help me with some negative sensations in my body I didn’t have better solutions for. I have been so pleased and amazed and how much better I feel. Take it or leave it, but I have no reputation on the line to be one way or the other – I am simply reporting to you what I have experienced and what I am learning about the benefit of an emphasis on plants.
My family’s functional medicine doctor has a strong focus on nutrition. This is the primary reason we switched away from our conventional doctor to her. She has her own home-raised meat and does recommends that we get some nutrients from ‘clean’ animals. In our previous conversations she even expressed skepticism about vegans when I told her of my preference to first find my nutrient solutions in plants. She said, ‘There are a few vegans who are some of my least healthy patients.’ Then she saw my comprehensive series of blood tests and had to concede that I was probably the healthiest person she has seen, on many critical markers.
One of my athletes – a guy in his late 40’s – is preparing for his first Ironman triathlon next summer – I big leap for him. I pointed out that training over the next year to be prepared for working continuously for over 12 hours is going to put an enormous load on his metabolic system. We need to make it as easy as possible for his body to fuel and remove waste. Knowing about my approach and following my progress this last year, he asked me what to do about nutrition because he doesn’t have a plan for it. He acknowledged that he needs to eat a lot more vegetables, but he doesn’t know how to make that happen.
So this post is going to be an outline of certain pieces of my advice I would like to give for how to get more vegetables in to his (your) daily meals.
View Vegetables As Gems
Initially, let’s not worry about all the different kinds of vegetables you may or may not need to eat. Just regard all vegetables in the produce section of your grocery store as powerful, performance enhancing substances. The more you can eat the better. View it that way, and cultivate an eagerness to get as many into your mouth throughout the day, at any opportunity.
The more colorful the vegetables, or rather, the more colorful an array that you can take in over the course of a day, the better. Let the different seasons of the year provide you with a different variety as well. This will get you a long way towards getting a wider range of micro-nutrients without having to study that topic yet.
Eat Veggies First And Fill Up
As a new habit, always start each meal eating the vegetables available, and fill yourself as much as you like with them.
(Wait, don’t the French eat their salads later?) I know there could be an argument for eating the vegetable fiber later in the meal to help the heavier stuff move through the digestive system, but right now we’re talking about building a habit in the face of the temptation to eat high-caloric, yet less nutrient dense foods (like meat, pasta or bread) that would fill you up first and greatly reduce how much vegetables you end up eating.
Fill The Frig
Make sure the grocery shopper in your family keeps the refrigerator stocked each week with a list of standard vegetable items. Refill the frig on the same day each week so you can get a good idea of how much you use an need to buy.
Don’t let the stock run out; error on the side of maybe buying too much. I don’t like to waste food either, so if I see extra veggies in the frig about to go to waste, I think up something to make that I can include them in. Or, while cooking another meal, I cook these extras as well, then freeze them so they can be used later.
Prepare Extra For Later
Some veggies need to be cooked to be more palatable or to make nutrients more bio-available – but not as many as we think. Barely cooked, or steamed is better. Raw is the best for many kinds. The more that you eat raw, over time your body will crave the raw form over cooked. Raw veggies may last much longer in the frig than cooked ones will.
Whenever cooking vegetables – on the grill, saute, baked, boiled, steamed, or pressure cooked – make way more than needed. You need leftovers sitting in the frig ready to go for quick meals.
Use a pressure cooker or large baking pan. Wash, and slice up enough potatoes, yams or sweet potatoes (my favorite) to fill that pot or pan. Cook them and then leave some in the frig to eat for the next two days. Freeze the rest so you have a stash of these ready to grab and microwave at any time.
Buy three pounds of beans (get a different kind of bean each month). Soak them for 8-16 hours. Use a pressure cooker to cook, cool and then scoop them into ziplock plastic freezer bags (enough to fill a flattened bag with a layer of beans about two beans thick) then stack these bags like pancakes on a cookie sheet and freeze them. If they are frozen in the shape of a square plate, they stack nicely in the freezer, and you can quickly thaw them in a pan or break off a chunk if you don’t need the whole bag. Three pounds of beans will fill about 4 or 5 gallon-size ziplock bags, and they are much less expensive than canned.
Buy big jars of simple marinara (red) sauce. You can dump some of this on many different cooked vegetables to make them more palatable. You can grate or mulch up so many different veggies, sautee them lightly and then add them to marinara to make a thick and nicely textured sauce to pour over your rice (notice I didn’t say ‘pasta’).
Oh, make an extra big pot of rice each time too, so that you a pre-cooked stock of that sitting in the frig or freezer also.
If nothing else, buy a large bag of pre-washed, pre-cut frozen vegetables (I buy organic).
It Will Cost Time
That’s part of the health reality here – you either put in the time to prepare healthier food for yourself (or another person in the home does), or you pay someone else to do it for you. But cheap (in terms of time and money) convenience food is what is killing us slowly, killing us early.
It’s a budget and values issue: we have to give up something in one area of life to gain something more valuable in another.
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More in Part 2…
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I just got back from Mont-Tremblant last night after finishing my first IronMan. I placed 2nd in the 70 age group. I have so much appreciation for the TI method and TI community and coaches for their thoughtful swimming instruction, particularly to you Mat — your blogs have been very very helpful and thought-stimulating in my preparation for the IM and now for my lifelong process of self improvement.
One dissent — I am not a vegetarian, but rather a low carbohydrate eater and in dietary ketosis for the past 3 years. I am a retired medical doctor, and followed the conventional mainstream viewpoint of decrying low carbohydrate, and other Atkins-like diets. Since retirement more time has allowed me to do extensive research and reading, and more importantly to put my new findings into personal practice. I am mortified to find to my chagrin that I was wrong for 40 years and gave bad advice to my patients. I am trying to remedy that.
Hello Su-Chong Lim,
I am so appreciative that you feel comfortable sharing your comments, kindly, even if you feel they are dissenting.
A few responses…
1) For the record, as a TI Coach I talk about TI alot, of course, but I am an independent person and business, and I obviously like to think and write about a lot more than just TI or swimming. I consider myself loyal to what works, and under continual test and examination, TI just happens to be and continue to be the primary method that really works for helping me teach people to swim well. So, I may have opinions on things that do not necessarily have anything to do with TI, nor represent other TI coaches and swimmers’ opinions on things.
2) If everyone who read this blog easily and readily agreed with all I thought, that would be boring and disappointing! I do value thoughtful, respectful discussion and debate.
3) My writing is more of a workshop for me to express my current thinking on a topic, to hear what I am thinking. A sounding-board. I continue to seek new information and reserve the right to change my viewpoint. It would be suspicious if I never did. I try to express my views on things in such a way that I don’t lose too much face if I need to back away from that viewpoint later, in light of new information.
4) I am torn between the advantages I see in a ketogenic (or maybe what think of as a low-glycemic) diet, and those I see in the plant-based diet. Those two don’t necessarily need to be exclusive of each other, but it seems incredibly challenging to be ketogenic on only plant sources of food.
5) Perhaps it is implied by plant-based that the diet must be high carbohydrate, but I don’t necessarily view it that way. The type of carbohydrate, whether high quality or low, may influence how much is good for us. It is challenging to accomplish a a higher fat and protein ratio in a plant-based diet – hence the reason it is associated with high-carb – but maybe not theoretically impossible.
6) I’ve read and listened to literally hundreds of hours of doctors, scientists and nutrition specialists. It is likely my selection of sources is skewed, but I hear a much more data and a much stronger case for plant-based diet (mostly or completely plant-based) being more effective for disease prevention and longevity. And those are my two primary motivations for diet selection, not short-term athletic performance. If you could point me to podcasts with specialists, meta-studies and longitudinal studies on the efficacy of a ketogenic diet for disease prevention, reversal and longevity promotion, I would be grateful.
7) People who study these topics (especially doctors) who come to a conclusion about nutrition or lifestyle, advocate for it, yet do not themselves adhere to it have serious credibility problems – preach but do not practice. So, I don’t find it discrediting when the people who are studying ketogenic or plant-based also happen to practice those diets. It would be strange if they didn’t. I hear some people trying to discredit plant-based diet researchers because they also happen to be plant-based eaters, and it could be turned in the other direction. An unavoidable ‘conflict of interest’ since every researcher must eat.
8) The ‘sterotypical’ paleo argument is inherently unconvincing. A diet of thermodynamic convenience in that particular environmental context, that was used by people who died around 35 years old, just long enough to reproduce then natural selection was done with them, is not helping me understand how it contributes to longevity, when 120 years is our target. I am more easily persuaded by the cross-disciplinary analysis of proven, longest-living communities found in the Blue Zones study – of their 9 characteristics found across all the discovered blue zones, being mostly plant-based (about 95% plants) was one of the most prominent.
Again, I appreciate your kindness and boldness to dissent, though I am not so eager to disagree with you. If you care to continue the conversation I would be glad to receive more information and insight from the sources you have drawn from to come to your convictions about a ketogenic diet.
I am fully aware that exclusive plant based does not imply high carbohydrate. In fact, following your blog closely, I know that you avoid (and recommend avoidance) of refined (high sucrose, fructose and glucose) foods, so, in that respect, we are on the same page. Your advocacy for complex carbohydrates does allow for lower, less intense blood sugar spikes, which of course is a beneficial thing for prevention of heart disease, neurological degenerative disease and generally cell wall disruption and inflammation, but eventually, at least with daily carbohydrate loads, even if complex carbohydrate, approaching and exceeding 75g/day for the average size person, the cumulative insulin response, even if modest, will tend to suppress lipid metabolism (fat-burning), and to encourage fat formation and storage, not to mention abolishing ketone formation, if one finds that desirable.
I also agree that being vegetarian need not bind you to consumption of high carbohydrate vegetable products such as rice, corn, potatoes and wheat-products, although for many vegetarian practitioners, it essentially does. I avoid these and also limit my intake of carrots, peas, processed food. I eat a lot of lettuce, spinach and will eat berries (generally, by rough calculation 7% CHO by weight), as a pragmatic means to keep my CHO intake below 25g a day (I am 49kg, so my ketogenic threshold would be lower than normal sized people). The essential benefits of adhering to a vegetable or vegan based diet remain questionable to me, whether for pragmatic or ethical reasons. I would posit that, if your intent is to lower the intensity of blood sugar spikes, and if your ethics will tolerate use of animal based products, then you would achieve many of the perceived benefits you seem to be aiming for by the adoption of selective animal based food intake.
We haven’t talked about fat, and I would straight off the bat clarify that I have unlimited (well, to satiation, anyway) consumption of monounsaturated and saturated fats, particularly of the medium length fatty acid chain types. I will consume enough poly-unsaturated fatty acids to get a generous amount of Omega-3 fatty acids, but I don’t see any benefit to consuming more than that. Therefore I consume copious amounts of butter and cream, bacon, and other fatty meats. I haven’t got around to increasing my coconut oil consumption but I’ll get around to doing so — I just haven’t got around to that part of the experiment yet. And yes, I ingest a lot of Extra Virgin Olive Oil and avocados.
Being a good fat metabolizer now, and being in ketosis, I don’t have to rely on intensive carbohydrate fuelling during endurance events to keep up my blood glucose. I eat very sparingly during training and races (in fact I generally don’t eat during training — pure laziness, I know, I should practice eating in preparation for race conditions) and I no longer “crash” like I used to near the end of marathons, and I never used to race longer duration events than that! As I said Half IronMan and Full IronMan races do not present nutritional problem for me now (the actual swimming and biking, well, that’s a different story!).
We don’t have to extrapolate and hypothesize (guesswork, really) the actual details of Paleolithic Man’s diet and survival and other outcomes. The Canadian Inuit Culture, the North American Plains Aboriginal Bison Culture and the African Masai were all observed thoroughly, documented, and even successfully emulated by various “Western Scientific Culture” researchers to generate objective scientific data to bolster the direct cultural observations and recording of oral folklore from the natives themselves, before these various cultures were forever changed by the intrusion of the now dominant European Colonial and Agro-Industrial culture.
Sorry, don’t intend to lecture — this is just my viewpoint, and my own dietary practice based upon my understanding of the science of carbohydrate, protein and lipid metabolism.
The careful observations of the Canadian Inuit were done by US Army Lieutenant Dr Frederick Schwatka who himself got lost during an expedition in 1878-80 in search of the lost Franklin Expedition, and ended up living among the Inuit for 2 years, by Raold Amundson the Norwegian Polar Explorer and by Canadian explorer and anthropologist Vilhjamer Stefansson in 1908-1918 both of whom also lived and travelled with the Inuit, eating the same fat and meat based diet, which we now understand today would have been ketogenic.
In fact, Stefansson later, stung by criticism that his observations of the Inuit diet were not compatible with survival undertook a prospective trial of a similar diet on himself exclusively of fat an meat as an inpatient at the Bellevue hospital in New York for 3 months in 1928. Not only was he documented to be alive after 3 months but he went on for a whole year on this diet.
Dr Stephen Phinney performed studies on healthy humans and with elite cyclists, putting them on low carbohydrate diet for 3 weeks and repeatedly testing their performance to exhaustion over this duration. He has since continued to do research in this field. His book with Dr Jeff Volek “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living” (and “the Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance”, particularly for athletes) is extraordinarily clear on history and theory, and helpful in a practical sense with useful tips and recipes for those undertaking dietary transformation. The books explain things clearly and thoroughly way better than I can. I highly recommend them.
Sorry to be so verbose.
Great comments! This is the kind of discussions that can really help us map out the topic, though the comment section may not be the most appealing place to do it.
Give me time to digest this and perhaps we can continue our conversation here or by email, if that makes it easier to read and respond.
I think I should clarify — I am not against eating vegetarian products — as it stands I have demonstrated that when it suits my purpose of consuming what I want from the vegetable world that is pleasant, palatable and does not overload my daily carbohydrate budget, and does not release glucose rapidly into my blood-stream, I am happy to eat vegetable products.
It’s just that I do not see a defensible coherent logical argument, ethical or pragmatic (supported by objective evidence) to limit my intake to the vegetable/ including dairy or vegan category.
That is a good summary, which I might also use to describe what I am aiming for. I too would like to reduce glucose dependence in my system, taking advantage of a more steady, fat metabolism, not only for my endurance activities, but for the way my mind feels more steady and clear on that kind of fuel.
I would like to fulfill that as much as possible from plants, and even stretch myself to find plant-based solutions… but in ways that are still pleasant, palatable, and practical in terms of time and money.
Why emphasize plants? We all know that plants provide vital stuff that animal products don’t. Besides that, it is my understanding that animal products, for all the benefit they provide (some better than plants do), they also come with more metabolic stress and health liabilities than plant sources do. So, for quicker, easier recovery and for lowering the demands on my immune and metabolic system to clear waste and toxins associated with modern (USA) animal products, the more I can solve the low-glycemic puzzle with plants, the better. I am still taking in some fish and some dairy products because I haven’t developed those practical solutions yet in my case.
This post is very useful. Will stock up on the veggies this week. Thank you for the reminder ✨