vegan diet to gain muscle



strength and physique athletes, in particular,bodybuilders, tend to think that it’s impossible to build serious mass while eating vegan.well today my massive guest shares his epic whole-food vegan protein mass-building smoothierecipe and what he eats to bulk up even with a raging metabolism. hi it’s emily from bite size vegan and welcometo another vegan nugget. today is the second video with the incredibly built natural veganbodybuilder and aptly names derek tresize who with his stunning wife marcella torresrun veganmuscleandfitness.com and own virginia’s only plant-based personal training studio,root force personal training, the name of which i so enjoy.

if you missed my first interview with derekbe sure to check it out to hear how this former meat head who’d make fun of vegans becamea literal force within the vegan fitness community. today, derek’s going to share what he eatsto maintain his physique, including his rather unique epic vegan protein mass-building smoothie. so derek, i want to thank you so muchfor taking time out of your really busy schedule to be on the channel and help share your experience. happy to be here. thank you for havingme. going into what it is youeat because there’s...there’s kind of this obsession amongst vegans and non-vegansabout what vegans eat. especially one who’s

able to achieve the physique that you have.so, can you talk a little bit about what a typical day for you looks like? a typical day of eating, i mean, it does vary day to day. i’m not one of thosewho are on a set meal plan everyday. although i’ll do that before a competition but ido have a few meals that are exactly the same. breakfast is always a lot of oatmeal. usuallya cup and a half or two cups of oatmeal; that’s dry measurements with fruit like apple chunksor something like that. and if i did work out that morning because i work out in themornings, i’ll have a protein shake with it. so, that'll be like some sort of plant based protein withbananas or something like that. so, that’s

breakfast. my morning snack varies. it’susually either a smoothie or something like that, or sometimes i’ll just have a wholeheap of fruit. i love fruit. i eat tons of fruit but i’m not sure if you’re familiarwith, i’ve kind of coined the term, ‘bean shake’. i think i’m the first guy everto put beans in a smoothie. basically it was in 2010. i was trying tobulk up for the first time ever. i had always been athletic and everything, but never beenlike ‘i want to gain the weight’. i never really had that idea in my head. and i waslooking at, you know, there’s supplements that are called weight gainers where you have theseshakes that are just packed with calories. but i didn’t want to take a supplement andthere was nothing like that that was offered

for vegans anyway. so, i’m like ‘okay,what can i do to make it easy to get more calories?’. i already eating a ton. i havea fast metabolism and i figured out an easy way to get more protein, and just get morecalories into a smoothie was to add beans to it. beans pack a lot of ‘oomph’. theyhave a lot of protein. they have a lot of carbs. they’re pretty calorie dense. andi found out if you use white beans like cannellini beans or great northern beans they don’taffect the flavor at all. they have a mild taste so you can throw them in there and theyjust make it thicker. they don’t really do anything with taste. so, i took smoothieswhere i would normally have bananas, peanut butter, and soymilk, and berries, and spinach.things like that. just random things that

i threw in there. and i started putting in a cupof white beans as well and all of a sudden i was adding a couple hundred calories tothe smoothie, and you know, 20 grams of protein in it. it was starting to look...it had thesame statistics as some of these weight gain shakes but it was all whole foods. it wasall super nutritious. tons of antioxidants. tons of fiber. all of this stuff, and i wasable to gain weight really quickly when i added those in because i could get a smoothie,a 1 liter smoothie that was a thousand calories. so you know, if you add a 1,000 calories a day, you’regonna gain weight [laughs] for most of us. and i was training really hard, and i thinki gained 10 pounds within the first month. my weight just shot up and i wasn’t gettingfat either. i was putting on muscle so it

worked really well for me. and since theni refined it...kind of made a blueprint for, if you’re looking for a meal replacementshake, and you want to use whole foods, here’s the things you should look at. here’s yourprotein sources. here’s your fruits and vegetables. your carbohydrate sources, fatsources. i posted a great article on that in robert’s book as well as on veganbodybuilding.com.so you can look up just ‘blueprint for a bean shake’. and yeah, it’s helped a lotof people...a lot of my clients. people who are on the go or who have busy jobs like me.i was a trainer at gold’s gym at the time and i would work 8-10 hours straight. oneappointment after another and barely able to fit in bathroom breaks, let alone eat meals.so, i just bring in 2 or 3 of these smoothie

cups with these bean shakes in them and there’s3,000 calories right there. it was all good, whole food so. it’s helped a lot of peoplebut getting back to my meal plan, i might have had that as my morning snack. i’d havea bean shake. i’d have something else. and then lunch is one of two things. it has beenfor years. we always have a tofu salad. we’d have a big salad. a big ol’ mixing bowlsize salad with tons of greens, tomatoes, olives, cucumbers. the whole...all the veggies.and then some kind of seasoned tofu on top. usually it’s creole seasoning or maybe justsalt and pepper. maybe blacken it in a pan and throw it on top. so, that’s part oflunch. and then on the side of that we’ll either have lentil soup, and a sweet potato.and that’s definitely a lunch we’ve had

a 100,000 times. or we would just have thatand afterwards we’d have banana ice-cream. we’d put frozen bananas in a blender.sometimes cocoa powder. sometimes something else like vanilla extract. blend it up andyou have ice-cream. it’s basically just eating like 3 or 4 bananas in a bowl. so,that’s always lunch. one of those two things. and i love it. it’s super nutrient dense. tonsof good food, really filling, and really satisfying. afternoon snack again, is something like fruitor another bean shake depending if i had one in the morning or not. something along thoselines or, you know, could be something random. afternoon snack might change. and thendinner. dinner is the one that’s kind of a wildcard. if you go to our website veganmuscleandfitness.comwe have a recipe section where my wife marcella

posts a lot of our recipes. there’s like70 or 80 on there. and she’s a really good cook. i lucked out with that. so, she’smaking something different and really good every night. but it’s always based on wholegrains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds; lots of whole foods. we’ll occasionallyhave a whole grain pasta or something like that but nothing too crazy, and it’s alwaysdelicious. she makes really good recipes, so that’s dinner. we eat out once or twicea week usually for dinner. so, that’s a typical day for me. i mean, basically whati tell clients and everyone that i talk to is, the foundation of your diet needs to bewhole foods. and if you think about 4 food groups, it’s fruits, vegetable, whole grains,and beans. so, as long as you’re getting

those in everyday you’re covering your basis,and just eat a lot, you get a lot of nutrition. do you adhere to any particular macrosor any particular caloric goal with your meal plan? i tried a lot of different dietarystyles. i think as a lot of physique athletes have. i tried an 80/10/10 diet. i’ve donejuice fasts. i tried...i did the super high protein diet for awhile, especially when iwas first bodybuilding. trying to get a gram and a half of protein per pound of body weightwhich is a whole lot. i tried that for awhile. but now i've kind of settled on...i do track my macros. i do track mycalories almost everyday. not perfect unless i’m right before a competition. but i striveto get, and this is a guideline we use for our clients who are training hard as well,about ⾠of a gram of protein per pound bodyweight

which is roughly half of what i mentionedthe really high protein diet is. so, it’s definitely higher than the 80/10/10diet where you’re getting 10% of your calories from protein. that number that i said, 3/4of a gram per pound, that’s usually closer to 15 or 20% of calories from fruit if youwanted a ratio number which we don’t really use. i just kind of go for the actual number.and the same thing for fats. fats are usually like 15 to 20% of calories. and like i said,i’m a guy who exercises a lot. i have a fast metabolism. so i’m generally eatingbetween 4 and 5 thousand calories a day. and if i’m doing an extreme diet right beforea contest where i cut my calories way down, they might get down to 3,000 which is a lot formost people and that's not very much for me.

so, it’s primarily...i would say it’s90% whole foods. you can treats once in awhile. it’s really high carbohydrates. i’m getting60 or 70% of my calories from carbohydrates at all times. and i have no problem gettingdown to a central body fat for bodybuilding competitions so carbs aren’t scary. yeah,and it makes me feel very satisfying. well, i just want to thank you againso much for being so generous with your time and for being a literal visual testament towhat veganism...what you can achieve as a vegan. i hope you enjoyed hearing derek’s approachto building an epic plant-based physique using the power of whole foods. you can’t reallytell him it doesn’t work… this video was sponsored in part by cronometerwhere you can track your fitness and nutrition

to ensure optimal athletic performance andlog your epic bean smoothies. use the link in the video description or up there to make yourown free profile. if you want to connect with derek, see hislinks below- his website even offers a free diet planner and you can have him and histeam write custom meal plans and training regiments for your own fitness goals or nabhis ebook. i’ve personally worked with derek and he’sbeen a vital part of my fitness journey, giving me pointers, tips and tweaks to my own inexpertly-writtenfitness routine. and i’d say i’m getting results. now i’d love to hear your thoughts on derek’ssmoothie to end all smoothies and his approach to his meal plan in general. have you everhad a bean shake yourself? if you’re not vegan but

you're interested in building mass and startinga plant-based diet, did this help you find a possible way of accomplishing that goal?let me know in the comments! if you enjoyed this bulked-up nugget, givethis video a thumbs up and share it around to show just how to build serious mass asa vegan. if you’re new here, be sure to hit that big red subscribe button down there formore awesome vegan content every monday, wednesday, and some fridays, and to not miss out onthe rest of the vegan athlete series. if you want to help support bite size vegan, checkout either of the support links in the video description below and for perks and rewardsfor your support, you can click the nugget

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now golive vegan, grow your guns, and i’ll see you soon. [crowd screaming & applauding] subtitles by the amara.org community