- I'm used to eating burgers and fries and stuff.
- So you're a child.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- I miss you cheese.
Oh this is harder than I thought.
(upbeat music)
- So recently, I watched the documentary
The Game Changers on Netflix.
Which is all about how a plant based diet
can improve your athletic performance.
So I know that the athletes in the documentary
saw a huge difference when they cut
animal products out of their diet.
But I was curious to see if this would actually
work for some of my friends at the office.
So I decided to ask two of my most
athletic friends, Betsy and Troy,
to go vegan for 30 days to see how it would affect
their performance.
- I usually exercise about four to five
days a week and that routine
can be anywhere from a HIIT workout,
to yoga or Pilates, to a long run.
I often times play beach volleyball.
So I really try to find ways to stay active
on a daily basis.
I'm really excited to see how this plant based diet
will affect my energy levels.
As someone who kind of has hectic
and crazy schedules from time to time
I find my energy levels consistently fluctuating.
I'm really hoping that I'm able to maintain
my athletic performance, feel really good,
get creative in the kitchen, get my hands dirty.
- My current diet is a lot of meat.
It's probably 90& meat.
Growing up I played football through college,
and I was always told, "You gotta get your protein."
And the way to get protein was eating meat,
and that's how you get the gains.
So yeah that's what I've always done.
I typically do CrossFit about four to five times a week.
It's definitely a high intensity workout.
The thing I'm nervous about for this challenge
is that I won't have enough energy durin' the workouts.
I never cook, so now I'm gonna be having
to make my own meals.
My family has a history of Type 2 Diabetes,
high blood pressure, high cholesterol.
So, I'm excited to see if this can help
bring all my numbers down.
- So Troy and I are on our way to
One Medical in West Hollywood.
We're gonna get some blood work done,
our blood pressure taken.
That way we can compare our results
before and after the challenge.
- Yup, woo.
Just left One Medical, now we're gonna head
and do our physical fitness test.
It's gonna help us measure our athletic performance
and we're gonna do this again after the challenge
and see if we improve.
(upbeat music)
(pensive music)
So I just got back from Ralphs.
I needed to just get a couple things,
so that I can get through the first couple days.
It's a lot harder than I thought,
goin' by myself.
I'm trying to read things and so for now
I just got some Beyond Sausage, some Beyond Burgers,
and I'm definitely gonna be cooking and stuff.
But for now just to get through
the first few days I'm like okay.
- In the beginning of the challenge
it was a little hard for me to realize like,
oh I can't eat that, I can't have that.
Especially being a Tasty producer
and being surrounded by so much incredible food,
and delicious food all day.
And really realizing that a lot of the stuff
I eat is not plant based at all.
Or has very little nutritional value.
But I just tried to get excited
for the food that I was making myself
and I knew that hey this is making me feel really good.
- Just finished first workout
since switching to plant based.
Energy was a little low, but also,
haven't really been eating enough
so I just gotta figure all that out.
- Okay, so this might be a little TMI.
(laughs)
But I just finished a HIIT workout,
and I was farting like crazy.
I'm assuming that this is a side effect
of the plant based diet.
So I just wanna apologize to all those
who were just working out next to me.
I really hope that this is temporary.
So I feel like a lot of diets out there,
are very anti-carb or low carb.
People see carbs as like this horrible thing.
Is that a myth?
Is that factual?
- So carbs are very important as an energy source
especially for athletes because our body
stores carbs as glycogen.
And so when you're exercising,
your body gets it's fuel from it's glycogen stores.
So once your glycogen is depleted,
you start to fatigue faster.
So if you're not eating carbs,
or if you're on a low carb diet
you can imagine that your glycogen stores
are gonna be already baseline low.
Then when you start working out,
they're gonna be even faster depleted.
So it's really important that you have complex carbs
an hour before you workout.
Like whole grains, beans, lentils, legumes.
Make sure you're picking the whole foods
as opposed to refined carbs like white rice,
white bread, crackers,
to give you enough energy to keep your workout going.
- Is it possible to get enough protein
from a vegan diet?
- Plant protein is more ideal than animal protein,
for a few different reasons.
In the animal proteins you get cholesterol,
and saturated fat.
So cholesterol only exist in animal products.
The same way that fiber only exist in plant foods.
So when you're eating animal protein
you're getting that cholesterol,
getting that saturated fat.
Two things that lead to heart disease if eaten in excess.
Where as your plant proteins naturally
do not have cholesterol, have little to none saturated fat.
So the more protein dense foods
are your beans, lentils, nuts, seeds and whole grains.
But vegetables even to a certain extent
have a smaller amount of protein
so you really don't have to worry
about not meeting your protein needs on a vegan diet
as long as you're eating a wide variety of foods.
(upbeat music)
- Starting off week two.
Worked out this mornin', felt really good.
Crushed a workout.
Recovered pretty quick, made a little breakfast.
Some oatmeal with some like fruits and stuff in it.
Start off week two with a bang.
- After meeting with Delilah it definitely
became easier to think of meal ideas
because she kind of provided me
a nice foundation of easy items
to incorporate into every meal.
I was feeling more confident in my meal prep,
and actually really having a lot of fun with it too.
And my husband loved it.
One of BT's favorite foods is pesto.
So I just made some vegan pesto
that I'm gonna have him try.
I basically substituted Parmesan cheese
for nutritional yeast.
- It tastes exactly the same, like seriously.
- You think it tastes exactly the same?
- Yeah, I'll put that on everything.
- I noticed a change in my energy levels come week two.
I really noticed during my HIIT workouts,
or doing a long distance run
that I was taking fewer breaks and that I felt
like I could go longer.
I could've probably done a few more reps,
felt like I could maybe run farther.
It was easier for me to get up in the mornings,
I didn't feel like I had to sleep in
or hit the snooze button.
It was a really fun change for me to see.
- One of my close friends, Cassandra,
she really, really helped me a lot with this
'cause she took my food shopping the first time.
She was just explaining everything to me,
she was reading all the bags for me
like showing me what's what.
My homegirl, Cassandra made me vegan dinner.
Sweet potatoes, tempeh, and brussels sprouts.
I am eating it very slow.
(laughs)
- I'm like so, do you not like it?
- I do like it, I do like it.
I'm used to eating burgers and fries and stuff.
- So you're a child.
(laughing)
- I never would've ate brussels sprouts before.
And they were actually really good.
- I just back from a really long run,
usually after a long run I'll come home
and make a nice smoothie for myself.
Today we gotta change some things up,
because hashtag plant based.
I got some oat milk, instead of Greek yogurt
or regular milk.
Almond butter, some flax seed,
and some plant based protein powder
that a friend of mine gave me.
Really good.
Honestly doesn't taste too different
than what I usually make.
Easy substitutes.
- Just finished my first real cooked meal.
I housed it, all gone.
It was pretty damn good I gotta give myself
some credit for that.
And I'm gonna put that I'm a chef now.
I gotta start tellin' people that.
That I can throw down in the kitchen.
I was just cookin' a bunch of different things,
and tryin' out new things and it was cool.
And I was surprised at how good everything was comin' out.
Once I started eating enough,
my energy levels went way up.
I just felt great, I was like gettin' right back
on the barbell, gettin' right back on the pull up bar,
whatever I needed to do.
Get out for a run, 'cause I just felt myself
gettin' to it quicker and improvin'.
And it's not like I was working out
any more than I was before.
The only thing I changed was my diet.
(upbeat music)
- Living in Los Angeles provides me
with a lot of delicious plant based menu items.
Rachel just dropped off some vegan tacos for me to try.
(upbeat music)
It really tastes like an al pastor taco.
Maybe it's because I haven't eaten meat
in like three weeks now but,
like this looks like just like meat right?
(chewing)
- I was introduced to a new protein powder
which was a pea protein and I was so skeptical
about trying it but I actually really liked it
and so I ordered more for myself.
And I'm gonna keep usin' that.
So Rachel allowed us a cheat day,
because she knew Thanksgiving was comin' up.
One of the days I had a friends giving,
I think there was like maybe like one or two
vegan options and I was like okay this is the day.
I didn't go too crazy but when I got home
later on that night I felt a little shitty, you know.
And so for me it kinda was like, okay,
I did it, it wasn't as good as I remembered it all being.
And it helped me get through the rest of the month.
(upbeat music)
- Last week of the challenge, I'm just finishing
up my weekly long distance run.
And I gotta say, I am feeling really good.
Energy levels are definitely up,
and I might even tack on an extra half mile.
So, pretty pumped about that.
- I just finished a CrossFit class.
Three rounds of 30 squat cleans at 95 pounds.
30 pull ups, and 800 meter run.
Took me about just over half hour to do it.
Probably would have took me at least like,
closer to forty minutes or so.
Or like that 38 minute mark.
It's plants, they got powers man.
(pensive music)
- So we got your results back.
And we have blood pressure and lab results
from before and after when you guys
were seen at One Medical.
So Troy, you wanna start?
- Yes.
(laughs)
- All right, so your before blood pressure
was 138 over 86, and your after blood pressure
was 138 over 90.
They're both in kinda the border line range
of almost high blood pressure.
Betsy, your before blood pressure
was 108 over 72 and your after blood pressure
was 120 over 80.
So yours also went up a little bit.
But yeah, still totally normal.
This can be a lot of different factors affecting this.
We had talked about close to when you'd had this after
blood pressure taken that you had had
kind of a big bowl of ramen and salty soup.
- Right.
- Eating a vegan diet alone doesn't necessarily
guarantee that's it's going to improve
or decrease your blood pressure.
There are just a lot of other factors
that can come into play like salt intake,
alcohol intake, stress, caffeine levels,
all that stuff can affect blood pressure.
Let's go over your cholesterol results.
Betsy your LDL cholesterol started off at 84,
and dropped a little bit to 75.
- Oh cool.
- Troy, your LDL cholesterol was at 105,
a little bit higher than we wanna see it.
And then it went down to 85.
- Damn.
- [Jessica] So drop that by 20 points.
- Wow. - That's crazy.
- So that's definitely a good sign
and definitely shows that eating more veggies
and eating more fruits can have a great effect
on your cholesterol.
(high five)
(laughing)
- Can going plant based really
help us in our recovery when we're working out?
Does it give us more energy?
- There are some studies to show that
going plant based can reduce believe it or not,
inflammation and so there is some information,
you know out there saying that if we reduce
inflammation in our body our muscles
will recover quicker and therefore
it makes us you know, better athletes,
and doesn't necessarily show that you have to be vegan
in order to get those results.
But definitely benefits to eating overall plant based.
Exercise isn't everything,
it's definitely a huge component of it.
But you kinda see here with your results
especially with yours Troy,
with your cholesterol dropping so much,
that diet is a pretty big factor in our health,
and preventing you know long term diseases
like heart attack and stroke.
And so it's kind of multi factorial
in terms of improving your health overall.
(pensive music)
- So I have your before and after fitness test results.
So, the pre challenge fitness test,
you guys finished at the exact same time actually.
In three minutes and 42 seconds.
At the end of the month, we took the exact
same fitness test again and this time
Betsy you finished in three minutes and 17 seconds.
And Troy, you finished in three minutes and eight seconds.
- Damn.
And I actually like--
- Crushed it.
- I felt good after, too.
- Troy, you beat your time by 34 seconds.
- Damn.
- [Rachel] And Betsy you beat your time by 25 seconds.
- I will take it, all the gas was worth it.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
(calm music)
- What surprised me the most during this challenge
was the fact that I really didn't crave meat
as much as I thought I would.
By the end even when I was around
that type of food I wasn't really interested in eating it.
I don't plan to be full fledged vegan,
but seeing the results of this challenge
and knowing how good I really did feel,
is certainly tempting for me to cook
as plant based as I can.
Maybe like Sunday through Thursday.
And I think that's a step in the right direction.
And I'm excited.
- A big thing that I took away from this,
was the fact that I got into the habit
of cooking versus just constantly
going to get takeout.
So now I've been going food shopping,
and cooking, I'm prepping my meals and stuff.
But I feel like a real adult finally.
The fact that my cholesterol dropped 20 points
really made me feel like I am more in control
with my health.
It's not just oh your family has a history of this.
So that's just really impressive to me,
and it is motivating for me
to continue to eat more plant based meals.
(calm music)