Live from Dominican Republic: Plant Based Diet & Training?

What up my brothers/sisters.

Recently i have decided to make the switch to a full raw plant based diet from my years of eating meat. I am a personal trainer, and have just moved to the Dominican Republic to get some more life experience for personal growth, and look for work while i am here in a gym. I have been a trainer for 5 years, and have kept in very good shape since i first started picking up weight training and cross fit years ago.

So while i am here, i have decided to utilize this countries abundance of fruit and veggies towards my training, and newly adopted lifestyle. However, I honestly have no direction in how to be structuring my diet, what i should be eating, and how often, especially as a gym and weight training fanatic! My workouts are intense and vigorous, which has naturally left me with very lean and muscular build.

So in regarding all of this, i was hoping that one of you kind people from the Raw Community might help to enlighten me on how i should be matching my diet with my training. I would love to talk to someone in regards to this, or if you are feeling extra generous, perhaps you might be inclined to write below for me a basic structure for my daily diet.

Any help would be much appreciated, and i thankyou in advance!

Thanks my bro's

Peace and Love,

Nate

I've had good results with 80/10/10 (by Doug Graham) although I know a few people here have mentioned that they didn't like it at all. Basically, it's a high carb, low fat, fruit based diet. But you need to get a bare minimum of 3000 calories a day, and a lot more if you are training really hard. Most of that will come from high calorie fruits like melon, bananas, dates, mango and citrus fruits if you can get them ripe (they don't ripen off the vine particularly well), or any other fruits you are into. Then your minerals and a little added protein will come from vegetables, particularly greens. I personally eat about 20 bananas a day, a handful of dates, some berries, a quarter watermelon, a few cups of grapes, a couple mangos, a 1/2 package of spinach (in my shakes), a salad in the evening where I add a little cooked rice/lentils (not recommended in the diet) with a few tomatoes, a head of romaine or green leaf lettuce, and some sweet corn. I usually get my fat in the salad by adding pumpkin seeds, brazil nuts, or an avocado.

That's not necessarily what the book (80/10/10) recommends exactly, but that's what I do and I enjoy the diet a lot.

As a side note, on a raw diet you basically have to get your calories from either fat, or fruits. Doug Graham offers a variety of reasons why he supports fruit as the most ideal food source for humans, and though I don't live 100% raw, I see a certain amount of logic in his case. Just out of curiosity though, why do you want to follow a raw vegan diet as opposed to a cooked vegan diet? Obviously I don't think it's a bad idea, but I'm just wondering what led you to it.