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 smoothie recipe and what he eats to bulk up even with
a raging metabolism.
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. Today is the second
video with the incredibly built natural vegan bodybuilder and aptly names Derek Tresize
who with his stunning wife Marcella Torres run 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 Derek be sure to check it out to hear how this former
meat head who’d make fun of vegans became a literal force within the vegan fitness community.
Today, Derek’s going to share what he eats to maintain his physique, including his rather
unique epic vegan protein mass-building smoothie.
So Derek, I want to thank you so much for 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 having me.
Going into what it is you eat because there’s...there’s kind of
this obsession amongst vegans and non-vegans about 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 those who are on a set meal plan everyday. Although
I’ll do that before a competition but I do have a few meals that are exactly the same.
Breakfast is always a lot of oatmeal. Usually a cup and a half or two cups of oatmeal; that’s
dry measurements with fruit like apple chunks or something like that. And if I did work
out that morning because I work out in the mornings, I’ll have a protein shake with it.
So, that'll be like some sort of plant based protein with bananas or something like that. So, that’s
breakfast. My morning snack varies. It’s usually either a smoothie or something like
that, or sometimes I’ll just have a whole heap of fruit. I love fruit. I eat tons of
fruit but I’m not sure if you’re familiar with, I’ve kind of coined the term, ‘bean
shake’. I think I’m the first guy ever to put beans in a smoothie.
Basically it was in 2010. I was trying to bulk up for the first time ever. I had always
been athletic and everything, but never been like ‘I want to gain the weight’. I never
really had that idea in my head. And I was looking at, you know, there’s supplements that are
called weight gainers where you have these shakes that are just packed with calories.
But I didn’t want to take a supplement and there 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 have a fast metabolism and I figured out an easy
way to get more protein, and just get more calories into a smoothie was to add beans
to it. Beans pack a lot of ‘oomph’. They have a lot of protein. They have a lot of
carbs. They’re pretty calorie dense. And I found out if you use white beans like cannellini
beans or great northern beans they don’t affect the flavor at all. They have a mild
taste so you can throw them in there and they just make it thicker. They don’t really
do anything with taste. So, I took smoothies where 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 cup of white beans as well and all of a sudden
I was adding a couple hundred calories to the smoothie, and you know, 20 grams of protein
in it. It was starting to look...it had the same statistics as some of these weight gain
shakes but it was all whole foods. It was all super nutritious. Tons of antioxidants.
Tons of fiber. All of this stuff, and I was able 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’re gonna gain weight [laughs] for most of us.
And I was training really hard, and I think I gained 10 pounds within the first month.
My weight just shot up and I wasn’t getting fat either. I was putting on muscle so it
worked really well for me. And since then I refined it...kind of made a blueprint for,
if you’re looking for a meal replacement shake, and you want to use whole foods, here’s
the things you should look at. Here’s your protein sources. Here’s your fruits and
vegetables. Your carbohydrate sources, fat sources. 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 lot of 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. One appointment 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’s 3,000 calories right there. It was all good,
whole food so. It’s helped a lot of people But getting back to my meal plan, I might
have had that as my morning snack. I’d have a bean shake. I’d have something else. And
then lunch is one of two things. It has been for years. We always have a tofu salad. We’d
have a big salad. A big ol’ mixing bowl size 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 just salt and pepper. Maybe blacken it in a pan
and throw it on top. So, that’s part of lunch. 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 that and 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 and you 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. Tons of good food, really filling, and really satisfying.
Afternoon snack again, is something like fruit or another bean shake depending if I had one
in the morning or not. Something along those lines or, you know, could be something random.
Afternoon snack might change. And then dinner. Dinner is the one that’s kind of
a wildcard. If you go to our website VeganMuscleandFitness.com we have a recipe section where my wife Marcella
posts a lot of our recipes. There’s like 70 or 80 on there. And she’s a really good
cook. I lucked out with that. So, she’s making something different and really good
every night. But it’s always based on whole grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts
and seeds; lots of whole foods. We’ll occasionally have a whole grain pasta or something like
that but nothing too crazy, and it’s always delicious. She makes really good recipes,
so that’s dinner. We eat out once or twice a week usually for dinner. So, that’s a
typical day for me. I mean, basically what I tell clients and everyone that I talk to
is, the foundation of your diet needs to be whole 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 macros or any particular caloric goal with your meal plan?
I tried a lot of different dietary styles. I think as a lot of physique athletes
have. I tried an 80/10/10 diet. I’ve done juice fasts. I tried...I did the super high
protein diet for awhile, especially when I was first bodybuilding. Trying to get a gram
and a half of protein per pound of body weight which 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 my calories almost everyday. Not perfect unless
I’m right before a competition. But I strive to get, and this is a guideline we use for
our clients who are training hard as well, about ¾ of a gram of protein per pound bodyweight
which is roughly half of what I mentioned the really high protein diet is. So,
it’s definitely higher than the 80/10/10 diet where you’re getting 10% of your calories
from protein. That number that I said, 3/4 of a gram per pound, that’s usually closer
to 15 or 20% of calories from fruit if you wanted 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 eating between 4 and 5 thousand calories a day. And
if I’m doing an extreme diet right before a contest where I cut my calories way down,
they might get down to 3,000 which is a lot for most people and that's not very much for me.
So, it’s primarily...I would say it’s 90% whole foods. You can treats once in awhile.
It’s really high carbohydrates. I’m getting 60 or 70% of my calories from carbohydrates
at all times. And I have no problem getting down 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 again so much for being so generous with your time
and for being a literal visual testament to what veganism...what you can achieve as a vegan.
I hope you enjoyed hearing Derek’s approach to building an epic plant-based physique using
the power of whole foods. You can’t really tell him it doesn’t work…
This video was sponsored in part by Cronometer where you can track your fitness and nutrition
to ensure optimal athletic performance and log your epic bean smoothies. Use the link
in the video description or up there to make your own free profile.
If you want to connect with Derek, see his links below- his website even offers a free
diet planner and you can have him and his team write custom meal plans and training
regiments for your own fitness goals or nab his ebook.
I’ve personally worked with Derek and he’s been a vital part of my fitness journey, giving
me pointers, tips and tweaks to my own inexpertly-written fitness routine. And I’d say I’m getting results.
Now I’d love to hear your thoughts on Derek’s smoothie to end all smoothies and his approach
to his meal plan in general. Have you ever had a bean shake yourself? If you’re not vegan but
you're interested in building mass and starting a 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, give this video a thumbs up and share it around
to show just how to build serious mass as a vegan. If you’re new here, be sure to hit
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Now go live vegan, grow your guns, and I’ll see you soon.
[crowd screaming & applauding]