In 2008, I made a very big decision. I wanted to gain 30 lbs of muscle and improve my physical appearance. My dream was to have low body fat and a muscular physique. With six months of intensive training with my friend Carlos, I accomplished just that. It was very hard to do and I trained six days per week and consumed thousands of calories per day to support my obsession. After about a 18 months of keeping this up, I had to travel for two months and within no time, I started to get fat.

In December, I read this book and things changed very quickly. Tim made me realize that you don’t have to run 30 miles a week to keep body fat low and you don’t need to lift heavy weights everyday to build muscle. It’s all about what he calls the “Minimum Effective Dose”. Anything beyond this M.E.D. is a waste of time and calories. While reading, I couldn’t help but tell myself “there’s no way this could work”, so I decided to give some of his experiments a try.

January 1st, I decided to do his slow carb diet. I weighed 190 lbs, was 20% body fat, 5’11″, with a 34 inch waste. Here are some highlights on what I went through:

• 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up—I drink an unsweetened protein shake
• Meals can only include one simple carb, one simple protein, and vegetables and have to be eaten four times a day. Here are typical meals I consume:

Breakfast (9am): Protein shake, 5 eggs, lentils, broccoli, black coffee

Lunch (12pm): Chicken breast, pinto beans, and spinach

Dinner 1 (3pm): Steak, black beans, and green beans

Weight Training/Cardio (4pm-5pm)

Dinner 2 (6pm): Chicken breast, lentils, and peas

• Rules: no rice—including brown rice, pasta, wheat, whole grains, cereal, or anything white—except for eggs. Basically the meal plans I mentioned above are the only thing allowed to consume on the diet.
• Oh, and you get a cheat day every Saturday—designed to spike your caloric intake. It does make this diet sustainable.

Think that’s hard to do? I thought so too, until I did it. Having a plan makes this diet effortless. You just grab your prepared Gladware package out of the refrigerator and throw it in the microwave. It’s cheap too. Planning a month’s worth a meals cost me no more than $80 bucks total.

This journey didn’t come easily in the beginning. The first two weeks were not fun at all. In fact, the only thing I could think of was “this isn’t working”. I weighed myself constantly and got so frustrated when the number on the scale would go up and down. I even had one of those fancy body fat scales—which I later learned measures total bullshit. How you measure makes a huge difference. Once I started measuring inches instead of total weight, things turned around rather quickly. If you decide to do this diet, I highly recommend using calipers to measure body fat over bogus body fat scales. There are more expensive services you can employ at hospitals and universities that give you the most accurate reading, but measuring inches will give you something tangible to work with for free.

Another thing I learned on this journey is how much protein matters in weight loss. If I found that I was starting to lose momentum, I increased protein intake and continued to burn fat at 4-5 lbs a week. The trick is to ask yourself what you’re doing that is getting in the way of losing weight. For example, I found that skipping a meal or not eating enough slow carbs stalled my progress. I even figured out a little trick that wasn’t in the book that ended up giving me drastically better results: drink an unsweetened protein shake before you go to bed. I found that it helped me sleep better and gave me more energy when I woke up.

Another thing I learned was that it’s not all about calories in and calories out. In fact, the data doesn’t lie: working out a lot was making me fat. I cut my cardio from 4 hours a week to 1 hour a week and my fat loss skyrocketed. Basic weight training was more than effective in cutting fat and building muscle.

February 1st, I got measured again—but I didn’t need the scientific evidence to tell me how different I am. I now look amazing. Here are some highlghts:

• Went from 190 to 178 — 12 lbs total lost
• Reduced by body fat percentage to 12% — losing a total amount of 17 lbs of fat
• Gained 5 lbs of muscle — while losing 4 inches off my waist. I can see my abs

My goal for March 1st is to get my body fat below 10%, be able to clearly see my abs without having to flex, and have a more defined muscular physique.

I found that statistically, vegetarians live longer, are healthier, and hardly ever suffer from the major diseases that plague American’s today. More and more people are choosing this lifestyle because it makes them stronger, smarter, thinner, calmer and happier than their counterparts. After 7 days into it, I’m beginning to understand why.

I started to read “The Kind Diet”, by Alicia Silverstone, and formulated recipes based on her cookbook to jumpstart my Vegan fast. I’ve already learned a ton from her and I encourage you to check it out!

When I decided to go on this journey, you would not believe the responses I got from people. My mother thought I was going to kill myself because of a deficiency in protein (which BTW, is incredibly uncommon among Vegetarians and somewhat unheard today when there are so many food choices). My friends thought I was going to loose a ton of muscle and I’ve had people ask me constantly “What are you going to eat if you can’t have chicken, pork, beef, or fish?”.

Well, it turns out that there are hundreds of different varieties of plant-based food you can get in any grocery store. As I started to research, I came to a bunch of conclusions that just made sense to me. Did you know that cup of beans has more protein than a steak? Also, more calcium, iron, and other vitamins. Of course, you don’t have to live on beans, there is a significant source of protein in sea vegetables, tempeh, miso, soy products, nuts, seeds, and tons of other veggies too. Whole grains, like legumes, are also a significant source of protein.

So why do we all think we have to eat animals in order to be healthy? If you do a little investigating, you’ll find that the meat and dairy industries spend billions of dollars to make you think this is true. The fact of the matter is, American’s consume way too much dairy and meat products. In most countries, meat is not the main ingredient in a meal. Usually a tiny bit is mixed in with their whole grains, vegetables, beans, and other organic ingredients. That might help explain why we are the fattest country in the world.

Let’s face it, meat is freakin’ awesome. Where most people in the world would consider it a great luxury, thanks to a thriving meat industry, we get to have it every single day. It’s cheaper than vegetables and it has most of the nutrients we need in it. If you stop for a minute and consider WHY these meats have so much good stuff in them, you’ll realize how they got there in the first place: cows, pigs, and chickens are all plant eaters. Yup, the nutrients you get and benefit from when eating that chicken breast, got there from the plant-based foods they consume. Vegans and Vegetarians are just getting them straight from the source—except with none of the bad stuff attributed with meat (like heart disease).

One scary thing to think about is the ingredient list on popular foods and trying to avoid eggs, butter, and milk. It’s in EVERYTHING! For example, I’ve made one or two slip ups already because I didn’t realize that my veggie burger was held together with a tiny bit of mayonnaise or that my Morning Star meal starter had a small amount of eggs in it. On my first day, I went to pick up orange juice from the grocery store. There were two kinds on the shelf, one that was just regular juice and another that was enriched with calcium, protein, Vitamin A and extra Vitamin C. When I read the ingredients, I realized that the second choice contained dairy products in order to achieve this nutritional fact.

I’ve committed to this for 21 days and now that I’m 1/3 of the way through it, I have already started to feel the benefits. I’ve lost a lot of water weight that I’ve been holding onto for months. When my alarm clock goes off, I’m able to wake up more peaceful rather than hitting the snooze button and crashing back to bed. I have a lot more energy throughout the day, where before it was only after a Monster energy drink in the morning and afternoon.

I’ll keep you all updated on my progress and I invite you to give it a try with me. Here is a recipe from tonight’s dinner:

AJ’s Vegan Chili Mac

• 1 can of organic tomatoes (or fresh if you can get them)
• 2 cans of variety organic beans, usually labeled chili beans
• 1 can of tomato sauce
• 1 can of water
• 1 whole onion
• a handful of chopped bell peppers
• 4 tablespoons of chili powder
• 1 package of ground beef replacement (don’t use Morning Star though, it contains eggs and dairy)
• 1 package of whole wheat rotini (again, watch out for eggs and dairy)

Cook on high the ground beef replacement in medium sized pot. Add tomatoes, beans, tomato sauce, onions, bell peppers, and chili powder.

Cook in a separate pot the rotini. Strain.

Combine pasta and chili into a bowl. Top with Vegan sour cream and vegan cheddar cheese and enjoy. Also delicious with a nice tall glass of almond milk.