Whisper it, but there’s a quiet revolution going on in performance nutrition.
Everyone in fitness seems fixated with packing more and more meat into their diet to get bigger gains, more muscle and better recovery.
But there are an increasing number of elite athletes and sports stars shunning meat and dairy altogether and still getting bigger, faster and stronger without them – from Nate Diaz to Serena Williams.
UFC legend Dan Hardy is another high profile athlete who has gone vegan and cut out animal products from his diet.
The British fighter explains how eating only plant based food has improved his weight and boosted his athletic performance.
Hardy, who has been sidelined from the UFC with a rare medical condition since 2013, tells JOE why you don’t need all that animal protein for performance or recovery and shows us exactly what he eats in his diet plan.
It’s fascinating stuff…
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When did you make the change and what drove you to switching to a vegan diet?
One thing was realising how sluggish I felt after eating red meat. I started to notice my performance was in training was suffering consistently after eating red meat the day before. I took that out and then started to play around with other things. Milk was something I took out early on because it always used to dry my skin out badly.
When I took that out there was a big improvement and taking red meat out was another step. I was slowly whittling my diet down to what it is today, which is predominantly vegan with a few eggs and very occasionally a piece of fish if I’m comfortable with the source of it.
But more than anything it was that I realise the quicker the fuel sources that I was consuming – you know the fruits, vegetables and complex carbohydrates – my body felt lighter because I was digesting things quicker so my training was a lot better. My performances were a lot better.
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Is that kind of something that you felt your performances were better or is it something quantifiable like looking at your fitness data? Or just reflecting on your performance session to session?
Different things work for different people. Obviously genetically we’re all very different. I think different diets work for different people. I’ve done the complete vegan diet and I found that a few eggs really make a big difference to me. I make a conscious decision as to where I get the eggs from.
You can imagine how much fruits and vegetables I’m consuming throughout the day. They’re very light in calories, they’re very dense in minerals and vitamins and they are very high in water content as well, so when you’re training all the time you want to be taking in as much fluid as possible.
So you can consume a lot of that through diet alone.
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You must be consuming an obscene volume of food. What kind of calorie levels are you eating too? Do you have a macronutrient balance you aim for?
I always struggled with diet and training camp when it took over when I started. I had to weight myself every morning and weigh my food. But when I started taking animal products out I found that my body didn’t gain weight nearly as quickly.
So I was able to increase the amount of stuff I was eating so I felt fuller and I never felt I was starving my way through training camps where I could eat as much fruit and vegetables as I wanted. I felt that the more simple and the more streamline my diet became with less animal product in it, the easier it was to get weight off before a fight and stay energetic throughout the fight.
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This is something we see in fighters’ training camps as they get closer to the fight, they start to deplete their calories so they can get their weight down for the weigh in.
I never felt like my energy levels dropped off when I did that. I was always alert and always had energy for training and I was always enthusiastic for training.
If you don’t have the energy for it or your mind’s not on it, that can affect when you’re utilising that time in training as well.
I just noticed along the way the benefits and people I’ve spoken to along the way have had success with it across different sports.
They all say the same things – their energy levels they notice are just through the roof.
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Do you have a set amount of calories – or set amount of protein you have to get in to be able to recover from the training you do?
I really don’t, no. I think the volume of protein people eat is massive. I think that the fixation with animal proteins as well is. People think if they’re not eating an animal protein they’re not getting a good quality protein that’s going to aid their recovery, but it’s just not the case.
There’s rice, pea protein, hemp protein and various things as far as supplementation goes. But it’s amazing how much protein you can get from combining different foods. Rice and beans is a great combination.
The old British favourite beans on toast is a complete protein – I have that one a week and that’s my cheat meal because I’m having something that comes out of a tin.
More than anything I realised that as long as I’m taking in enough calories to fuel my training, my energy levels are up and my recovery is fine.
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My body wants to recover anyway, so as long as I’m taking my calories in and fuelling my body in some way, the recovery is not an issue.
I have found my performance was far more affected when my body was dividing its energy sources to 20% is going to digestion because I’m still digesting yesterday’s steak and only 80% on the performance.
Whereas now I can eat a meal and an hour later I can eat again, but I can also go and do a good, hard training session and have lots of energy to do it.
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I know MMA nutritionist George Lockhart recently mentioned how red meat can be detrimental to performance and you only have to look at Conor McGregor’s performance against Nate Diaz after proclaiming he’d swapped salads for steaks every day. Do you think people are becoming more aware that red meat might be harming performance?
I think our perspectives have been massively skewed by marketing over the past 100 years. There was a belief at one point that everyone should drink milk, but more and more research is starting to come out now showing that these high protein diets could potentially be carcinogenic.
There’s a really good book I’m reading called The China Study and it’s a fascinating look at diets across China and given that most people live in relative poverty, they don’t have the means to afford animal proteins. Their diet is 80-,90-, even 95% plant based. So there’s no animal products in there apart from the occasional piece of fish or eggs.
The amount of disease that affect Western culture – like heart disease and diabetes – that don’t affect people in this China study book is amazing.
We’ve got to compare diets and the amount of animal proteins people are taking in, as a habit. Literally every meal in the Western world is based around meat or based around fish.
I travel so much, if I pick up a menu in a hotel I’ll be lucky to find more than one option that’s vegan on there.
Every meal is based around an animal protein. We seem to have been programmed to the idea that we can’t survive without consuming other creatures.
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What does your daily or weekly diet look like? People will probably struggle to get their heads round this – when you take out meat and dairy, what do you eat?
I have a lot of salads. My wife makes great food so we often have salads with a lot of dense calories with things like hemp seeds, nuts, different kinds of seeds like sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds, we use a lot of coconut oils and avocado. We have a lot of foods that are high in fat and full of energy. Then other than that we combine rice, beans and a lot of stir fry-type dishes and sometimes we put egg in there if we feel we need the additional calories or protein.
But a lot of the time it’s seeds and nuts. I don’t use any meat substitutes – like soy-based stuff.
I much rather eat a handful of nuts. I do a lot of snacking throughout the day. If at any point you stopped me and asked what was in my bag, it’s likely I’ve got three oranges, three apples, two bananas. For me I carry around a fruit bowl so I’ve got something to snack on. The beauty of that is I can walk into any supermarket anywhere and pick up fruit. It’s such a simple diet to live on.
You just have to be a bit more disciplined with it.
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It’s gaining a lot of traction in America that higher fats are good and healthy for you. Does eating good fats help you get the calories in and give you a quality alternative energy source?
Definitely. I’ve actually noticed my brain functions better when I’m on a higher fat diet. When I’m having an avocado a day or a handful of nuts – I always function very well on Brazil nuts. Everything I have is cooked in good oils. If we make any treats too.
My wife makes these amazing chocolates too – they’re pretty much made up of peppermint oil, cocoa, maple syrup and coconut oil she blends them up and freezes them and it’s just like dark chocolate.
They’re little pockets of really good quality energy.
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Where do you get your information from to put together a vegan eating plan?
There’s so much good information out there on the internet – particularly Instagram is a real useful medium to get new information.
People like to share recipes. I also use an app called Happy Cow for when I’m travelling and the amount of vegan restaurants that are springing up all over the world. I’ve used it in Australia, South America and all around Europe.
There are vegan communities in every area now and people are sharing recipes and ideas – it’s a real thriving community.
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It seems there are more and more mainstream athletes and sports stars that are becoming paragons of the vegan lifestyle. Is it something you have noticed?
I think we have got some very good representatives. One person that always really inspires me was Matt Danzig. I remember training with him when I first started my UFC career and I was always so impressed with his condition.
If you say that vegans look skinny and soft, then look at Matt Danzig when he weighed in on the scales. He is probably the most strict vegan ever met and his condition when he was on the scales was amazing. He was always in great shape.
The other guy is Tim Shieff who is amazing. He is a real lively, energetic guy with lots of good ideas.
There are a lot of vegans people don’t know about like the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena. There are so many people who don’t even mention it that are benefiting from a vegan diet.
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Where can people start with this or even start to introduce more of a vegan lifestyle into how they eat?
There are a couple of ways of doing it. To do a basic recipe search or vegan diet search will take you to different companies like Onnit and others who push the vegan lifestyle and products that help people with it.
The other option is to do a day or two a week or have a vegan weekend where you and your family try vegan food for a day and see if you notice a difference.
The other thing as well, which I think is really useful, is to start altering the snacks you have during the day. You start with vegan based snacks like fruit, nuts and vegetables snacks like hummus. Then you start taking meals out.
So in the morning if you start with bacon sandwiches, you take that out and add in a vegan protein shake. So you can have a hemp protein shake with a bunch of fruit and vegetables in it.
You can get various pre made stuff now too.
It’s realising you now have the option to take the animal products out and putting something else in just as beneficial, if not more so.
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