[MUSIC]
I'm an Olympic athlete, and I followed a plant-based diet for
the last six years of my life.
I don't eat meant and I don't eat eggs or dairy.
But it hasn't always been this way.
When I first started competing, meat was a big part of my life.
I competed as a lightweight rower in a four person boat.
And I had to weigh 150 pounds just two hours before a mile, and a half sprint.
To give you some perspective as to how much weight this is,
I normally weighed 170 to 180 pounds, and I'm six feet two inches tall.
So I had to lose anywhere from 20 to 30 pounds before rowing race.
Food and dieting were a big part of my life then.
And it still is today.
I want to talk to you today about how I made food,
a competitive advantage in my life and how it could be in yours too.
I hope to convince you that eating more fruits and vegetables and less meat will
not only help you row faster If that's what you're into, but to think quicker,
to have more energy, and most importantly, to live a longer and healthier life.
Preparation for weighing started months ahead of time.
But the really intense part, was the week of racing.
On a Monday before Friday race,
I started weighing all my food with a little tiny scale.
Three days before racing, I drastically reduce all salts and fibers from my diet.
With six hours to go before the weighing, I stopped eating and drinking completely.
Finally, with two hours to go, I'd sweat in a hot bathtub and
weigh myself every ten to 15 minutes to make sure I didn't overdo it.
It was an intense experience that I don't recommend for anyone.
It even sounds kind of crazy saying it out loud now.
Although making weight was important leading up to race day,
maintaining a healthy weight was an even bigger struggle,while I was training.
I had to consume an average of six to 8,000 calories a day,
just to make sure that I didn't lose any weight while training.
On a typical day, before I stopped eating meat, I would have 5 eggs for
breakfast, a couple of sausages and Greek yogurt.
For lunch, I'd have 2 giant hamburgers with some bacon.
And for dinner, I'd have a T bone steak with about a pound of rice and beans.
Meat was an important way to maintain my weight and
to help me recover from all the training that I did.
Or so I thought.
In 2015, I failed to make the national team because of over training and
because of not recovering quickly enough.
I was devastated.
I'd been training for the last 15 years to make the Olympics.
I trained four to six hours a day, seven days a week.
But the rest of the time I spent thinking of how to get better at rowing.
Whether that was stretching, watching video, or eating.
But it wasn't happening.
I wasn't getting better.
I was stuck and I felt powerless.
Not making the team in 2015, made me question everything about my approach to
training, including my approach to eating.
I learned that food was not just a box to be checked in my daily routine, but
a tool that I could use as a competitive advantage.
The first lesson I learned in 2015, was that food can make my life a lot better.
There's a new field in biotechnology called inflammation and
it theorizes that inflammation in the cells is what causes most chronic
heart disease and chronic disease and what leads to a shorter life expectancy.
Billions of dollars are spent a year on drugs to reduce inflammation in the cells,
but we don't have to wait for these miracle drugs.
Fruits and vegetables already do this.
A recent Harvard public health study found that consuming
five servings of fruits and vegetables a day can reduce your
chances of chronic heart disease and stroke by 20%.
To put this number into perspective, 20% is comparable to
the reduction that a smoker gets after 10 years of quitting smoking.
The best part about the study is that each additional serving of fruits and
vegetables that you consume, can reduce your chances of chronic heart disease and
stroke by an additional 4%.
To all the business school students out there,
I can't think of a better return on investment.
You can literally eat your way to better health.
The second thing I learned in 2015, was that food can make my life worse.
Remember all those t bone steaks and
hamburgers that I was eating, each meal was making my blood more viscous.
It was making it harder for me to recover from training and
for my heart to work during hard workouts.
Think about the last big thanksgiving meal that you had, or
your trip to your favorite barbecue joint.
How did you feel.
I usually feel tired and sleepy.
Over time, this means plaque in your arteries.
It means a heart that can't work as well for as long.
The third thing I learned in 2015, was that maintaining a good diet is hard.
I don't need a scientific paper to tell me that bacon tastes better than broccoli.
I know that, I love bacon, it's delicious.
So, how did I overcome this crave.
I reduced the number of decisions that I had to make.
I prepared my meals on Sundays for the week and
I ordered vegetarian premade meals for the rest of the time.
Over time, I didn't have any meat, eggs or dairy in my refrigerator and
I had no choice but to eat what I had already planned.
The second thing I learned to maintaining a healthy diet,
was to draw distinctions like, I don't eat red meat, or I don't eat dairy.
Rather than picking and choosing for every meal.
The reason for this is again, you narrow your decisions, and
you use less willpower over time.
So the diet becomes more effective and sustainable.
Because I don't eat meat, some people will call me a vegetarian or a vegan.
But that's not what I'm about.
I don't want to tie my choices to a better health to a certain identity.
I think it's more important than that.
I want to encourage you to be conscious of the food choices that you make,
and to use data to back up those decisions.
Because whether we want to think about them or not, our food choices
are some of the most important decisions that we'll make in life.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]