Driver

I'm back into the swing of the vegan diet but I need some help fine-tuning things. When I was originally vegan some years ago, keeping muscle was not a priority for me, so I'm unsure of the best way to go about keeping lean muscle mass without getting soft, manorexic, or "skinny-fat." I'm 34 years old, about 5'9", and between 155-160 lbs depending on what I've been eating. From experience, I know I'm pretty comfortable walking around at 150. I lift twice a week, walk a lot, get in some cardio on off days, etc. I have no desire to become a bodybuilder or powerlifter. I will be resuming my Brazilian jiu-jitsu training shortly, probably 2-3 days a week, and possibly adding a day of boxing or muay thai, as I am possibly the worst striker ever. So my activity level during the day is "sitting on my butt at the office" and most nights will be "moderate to high." So I'd like to cut 5-10 lbs of fat while preserving what little hard-earned muscle I have. The only supplements I take are nutritional yeast and ground flaxseed. I try to take in a good variety of legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, vegetables, fruit, and these awesome high-protein, high-fiber vegan tortillas (I try to only eat one of the tortillas per day, though). I need help figuring out: 1. How many calories I should take in per day to cut fat slowly and reasonably without sacrificing too much muscle. 2. How much protein I should take in per day. Thanks in advance for your help!

Hey, Dorothy. I grew up in one of the many really redneck parts of Florida (Okeechobee) and went to FSU for a while, although I eventually finished my undergrad and law school elsewhere. Haven't been back to Florida in a pretty long time, but may go back for my 20th high school reunion next year. I miss the beach a lot, but I miss the swamp even more. I guess I'm still a peckerwood at heart. Welcome aboard!

Mike Mahler is vegan but trains lots of people who aren't. Did that post up above say to put both nads on the ground for kidneystands?

If I am reading this correctly, you are saying that we (homosapiens) are poor digesters of protein? which is why we need to supplement? I must be in big trouble then, I haven't been supplementing with any protein. That would explain the poor? results I have been getting. I've only gained just under 30 lbs of muscle in 2.5 years, I can't imagine what kind of results someone who supplements is getting! Shirt splitting!! I'm saying that bisons and gorillas are, because of their digestive adaptations, better suited for diets of grass and leaves, respectively, than are humans. Bison are ruminant ungulates and are thus well-equipped to extract nutrients from relatively poor forage. Gorillas are hind gut digesters and can similarly extract nutrients from plants we'd have trouble surviving on. I'm certainly not saying that humans can't extract protein from plant matter. I'd be in the wrong place if I seriously held that position. I'm simply saying that the "bisons and gorillas can do it, so we can too" argument is specious. That's all.

Nothing like the motivational powers of a giant hottie to get one stoked. Welcome aboard! I'm not a kettlebell fanatic, but I have a homemade kb (about 35 lbs) made from pipe fittings and some spare 5 lb plates epoxied together and then welded, and occasionally I'll do a short cycle of swings and snatches to change things up. Two guys with whom I used to train Brazilian jiu-jitsu work out almost exclusively with kettlebells, and their strength is freaky.

I'm not a doctor, so my opinion is of little practical use to you, but my understanding is that people who absorb B12 "normally" maintain a large B12 reserve to the point that even if they develop a malabsorption syndrome, their reserve will carry them for a few years. That's why old people and long-time vegans are the populations most likely to develop nutrition-related B12 deficiencies - it takes a while for your reserve to dwindle and your symptoms to present even if you're pretty deficient for a pretty long time. In any case, I know it's got to be scary stuff for you, and I'd get to a doctor as quickly as possible. Best of luck!

Bison are ungulates, and gorillas are hind gut digesters, making their "extracting and synthesizing macronutrients from vegetables" technology just a little more advanced than ours.

Welcome aboard!

OK, here's a topic about which I'm interested in hearing opinions. I like carnivorous plants. When I was a kid, I had several pitcher plants and got a huge kick out of them. www.californiacarnivores.com sells a large variety of carnivorous plants - flytraps, sundews, pitchers, bladderworts, etc. I've been thinking about cultivating carnivorous plants again, and they sell excellent "sampler" packages to get started. I'd like to get a general sampler and a flytrap sampler. Obviously, the plants fancy animal products. Their recommended diet is dried mealworms or other invertebrates, widely available at pet stores. A flytrap, for instance, might require 4-5 mealworms a month. They're not supposed to be fed hamburger and the like - in fact, I think that's how I killed my pitchers years ago. So, what are your feelings on carnivorous plants? I know some members feed animal-based foods to their cats or other obligate carnivores ... my ferrets are obligate carnivores, and they get a ferret-specific animal-based food. But what about carnivorous plants? They're not really "pets," but they thrive on a bug diet. How would you feel about keeping a flytrap in your home and office and feeding it a dried worm a few times a month? I just happen to think these plants are fascinating, and not just out of some sense of "delicious irony."

Welcome! I'm also a lawyer, and will be starting up Brazilian jiu-jitsu again as soon as we're settled into our new location and have the spare cash on hand. There seem to be a lot of lawyers who practice martial arts and combat sports ...

Welcome!

I'm curious about the "tool use," as I've never heard of this sort of thing. From fish, I mean. I'm familiar with the concept of tool use.

Welcome!

Does decaffeinated green tea have the same health benefits as "regular" green tea? I love green tea, but I'm off the caffeine and I'm not going back on, I have trouble with moderation and end up drinking a 12-pack of Tab a day.

My nice fellow associate took me to lunch today, and she even paid. The restaurant is one of those wannabe-downscale yuppie havens, but has a lot of ovo-lacto stuff. I had a very nice "French Provincial" sandwich - artichoke hearts, avocado, sun-dried tomatoes, mixed greens, all on a really crusty roll, left off the cheese and pesto. Good sandwich - living in a city again has its high points.

I'll find a hosting service and try to get some pics of my ferrets up tonight. For now, it's off to another twelve-hour day in the law mines.

About the best way I know to analogize is that they're like kittens that never turn into cats. They're very intelligent, loyal, and affectionate when socialized adequately. However, they're high-maintenance. They're very social creatures, and demand interaction with their humans. I spend about three hours a day with mine. They're *miserable* if they're just left in their cages. They also have several expensive conditions to which they're predisposed, especially adrenal tumors and insulinoma. I've got a stupid amount of credit card debt from ferret illnesses. My ferrets have a gigantic cage with hammocks, sleeping sacks, blankets, litterpans, etc. They're daytime critters, and sleep about 16 hours a day. When they're not playing with us, they're in their cage - "free range" ferrets have an unfortunate tendency to get stuck in things, get squished, or escaped, and I would be absolutely done for if anything like that happened to any of mine. My first ferret, Rorty, had a long-running bout with cancer. The last year he was alive, he had four or five surgeries and two cycles of chemotherapy. When it became obvious I wasn't doing him any favors, I let him go. Worst day of my life. Unfortunately, ferret shelters are generally over-full, as many people buy ferrets on impulse thinking that they're like gerbils, and can be left in the cage to look cute. So, they end up neglected, or abused for being themselves, and then wind up in the shelters. Most of them don't get adopted out. I used to help at the shelter a lot, and I've seen some messed-up stuff. But I also used to watch the shelter for 9 days each year so the operators (it was run out of a home) could go on vacation, and I got to have a lot of fun playing with them. Two of our ferrets have turned from skittish, reclusive little things (after nightmarish experiences) to absolute bundles of joy. Plenty of pics, but I don't see an "upload" button here. For someone who's supposed to be compassionate and who reads a lot of Buddhist dharma, I'm really a misanthrope, don't particularly like most people at all. I just clicked with the ferret, he was like my little dancing shadow, hung out with me all the time, always happy to see me, and you have to be a pretty screwed-up person not to have fun with a bouncing ferret. I got where I spent more time with him than with any other person but my wife, and even that was a close thing. I considered attending either Stanford or SUNY-Stony Brook for grad school, but elected not to because both campuses are in locations where ferrets are illegal. So, I ended up in law school, in part because of a little white ferret. Who was named after a professor at Stanford. Yeah, that's freaky as hell - I didn't know vegans could get so vascular, very impressive. That's more muscle mass than I'm realistically ever going to put on - I'd like to stay roughly in my same weight class - but it's certainly inspirational, and that's a fact. Any natural bodybuilder, vegan or not, would be happy with that physique.

I'm from Florida, but I drifted around for a while after high school and ended up in West Virginia. I consider myself a West Virginian now, haven't crossed the Florida state line in 9 years, I think. West Virginia supposedly has one of the easier bar exams in the US. It's only two days and has a relatively high pass rate. In retrospect, I over-studied by a mile. However, I didn't know that going in, and I didn't want to flunk, as I couldn't afford (financially or mentally) to take it twice. I practice in Charleston, WV, which is the biggest city in WV but is still pretty small. I clerked in a very rural circuit - no stoplights, no parking meters in the entire county - and planned to open my own office there. You wouldn't have known to look at it, but there was an insane amount of money to be made there. However, my wife was going nuts from the isolation, so I took a job with a civil defense firm in Charleston. My workload has more than doubled, but the money is good and my wife can also find a good job here. I like to think I can be happy nearly anywhere, so I've accepted the necessity of moving. I'm certainly not a hyper-consumer - I'm a staunch advocate of frugality and voluntary simplicity on my own part. However, I'm also a staunch advocate of individual liberty and free-markets. That said, there is nothing I avoid with more fervor than political discussion. I also like to think I'm making the world marginally better by my being here. Off the top of my head ... * I didn't take a bar review course - didn't have money or time, as I was working - so my experience may not be typical. Down here, at least, nearly everyone seems to take expensive bar review courses over the summer. * I got the most mileage out of a) making my own flash-cards to study and b) devising obscene mnemonics. When I sat down to take the essay portion of the exam, we had a large sheet of scrap paper, and I spent 15-20 minutes writing down all of my horrid mnemonic sentences. They collected the paper after the exam, and they probably think I'm history's greatest pervert/monster based on what I wrote on that paper. As for the flashcards, I went through (I think) three iterations of the flashcards, and just transcribing them helped me learn a lot. I'd go through the flashcards repeatedly, over and over, *all the time*, and when I got where I knew a flashcard cold, I'd retire it for a while. Gradually, the piles of cards got thinner, and then I knew everything. (Don't worry, I forgot it within a week of the exam and am now having to re-learn it every day on the job.) * You absolutely must retain some balance in your non-studying-life. I didn't. I was an utter wreck, physically and emotionally, I made my wife miserable I'm sure, and I lived on dry ramen and Diet Faygo Redpop. I couldn't afford to fail, and I really burned myself out. * It did help me, I think, to take a couple days off right before the exam. My head-traffic had an unacceptable signal-to-noise ratio, and two days was about right to clear it up. * Once you pass, and you will, remember that nearly everyone, no matter how well-intentioned, is full of crap. They'll tell you all sorts of horror stories, or that you can't practice law a certain way, and they're wrong. As I'm sure you've noticed, lawyers can be overly self-assured and a bit arrogant, even when they mean well. There are many, many ways to practice law, and few lawyers wind up in homeless shelters. There isn't any one best path, and there are pros and cons to any mode of practice. My personal preference has always been for solo work, but I've ended up doing something completely different, and it's all right too. By the way, I'm not sure how it is in your part of Canada, but despite the fact that most of my peers down here have radically different worldviews than I do, I've found *at least* 75% of the lawyers with whom I've dealt to be extremely forthcoming and cordial, and at heart to be good people, even if we aren't on the same page. I work for a very conservative firm - one of the charter partners is a former Republican appointee to our state Supreme Court - and everyone treats me (and the staff) as well as I've ever seen anyone treated in any workplace. It may be different here, as we're a pretty rural state with a relatively small bar and only one law school, so the legal communities tend to be tighter-knit than in more metropolitan locales. Anyway, as is becoming rapidly obvious, I can bloviate about the profession until your ears bleed. If you have any questions at all, ever, please feel free to let me know. Most lawyers, including me, are only too happy to assist other members of the fraternity. People helped me on my way up, and I love helping other people on their way up.

When I was on creatine, I drank a gallon of water every day and still had problems with my quads, calves, and the bottoms of my feet cramping up *hard* under strain. I liked the results from creatine but I could not drink enough water to keep from cramping up.

Oh, I forgot to mention, we have 5 ferrets who are basically being raised as our children. Believe it or not, my first ferret was literally my best friend, and was the impetus for me becoming vegan in the first place. He died in March. We've had 9 ferrets total, all but 3 of which were rescues from a ferret shelter at which I used to volunteer. So, yeah, ferrets.

I've always thought capoeira looked interesting, but have never lived near a gym that taught it. I suppose there were probably some in Florida, but I didn't know anything about that kind of thing when I still lived there. One of the main reasons I think it looks interesting is because I'm told that capoeira classes are filled with smoking-hot, ridiculously flexible girls.

Congrats on finishing up law school, and good luck on the bar exam. The bar exam was the first time that I ever really studied, and it nearly killed me. In all honesty, if I hadn't passed, I don't know if I'd have taken it again. I was absolutely wretched, and I *still* catch myself feeling guilty when I'm "having fun instead of studying." Do you have employment lined up already? I've honestly never seen vegan business shoes that I thought passed muster, but I'd love to be proven wrong. As for suits, I just can't wear synthetic suits and still have a job, and there's only so much seersucker one can wear, even in West Virginia. (By "so much," I mean "very damned little.") Unfortunately, I've ended up in a clothing-conscious profession, and the people who notice that sort of thing *really* notice it. For what it's worth, which isn't much, I still dress like a typical aging-scene-kid in my off time. I suppose any day now that's going to start looking ridiculous. ("Any day" probably meaning "last year.") I really do feel bad about the clothing thing, but I try to feel good about the steps I do take.

I was regarded as the class "Gumby guy" when I trained BJJ in Morgantown, but I've never, ever been able to do a side or front leg split. I've got a very good range of motion through the positions in which I actually find myself. Just out of curiosity, as I've never done anything that involved high kicking - does the ability to do leg splits really come in handy, or is it just something neat to strive for?

You might try Pavel Tsatsouline's "Power to the People" program (found in an overpriced book, but you can likely find the gist of it for free on the web). It's basically *very* low volume, *very* abbreviated, relatively heavy weight, and very high frequency. I had good luck training with it for strength without hypertrophy, as have others. Unfortunately, Pavel is something of a salesman, which I suppose is like saying the Pope is something of a Catholic, and his signal-to-noise ratio is not particularly good. He has some fairly radical ideas by traditional strength training standards, but I've done well on some of his programs. Just discard the chaff.

I found this board after posting on the veganfitness.net boards. Since those seem to have more of a UK emphasis, I decided to register here. I was vegan for four years, but fell off the wagon hard during law school. During my first time as a vegan, I was very skinny and weak, as I didn't strength train, mind my protein, etc. I started eating meat again when I started training Brazilian jiu-jitsu and lifting weights. I got fat and strong - I ate everything in sight. In terms of weight and strength, I'm finally back to, for me, a happy medium - I'm about 160 lbs, 5'9", and as I have no ambitions to bodybuilding or powerlifting, I'm happy with the way my strength and definition are progressing. Long way to go, but better off than I was. Anyway, I've just moved from one of the most rural counties in the state to the state capital, and I have access to a fantastic health food store. I can afford things like quinoa, the odd block of tofu, decent dressing assorted beans, etc., but I can't really afford much "specialty" food yet. I've decided to go back to a strict vegetarian diet - I'm not really comfortable calling myself a vegan, as my wardrobe still has a lot of wool and leather, and in all honesty, it always will. I kept the animal products out of my wardrobe through law school, but now I have wool suits and leather shoes. So I'm not a "vegan" by the usual definition, I know. But I feel healthier and less bloated on a "vegan diet" and I feel like it's at least a step in the right direction. My main concern is maintaining the little bit of muscle and strength I have. I'm actually planning to keep my diet mostly on the q.t. as I really get tired of my every meal being a political debate. Anyway, I wanted to introduce myself. I realize that because of my wardrobe, I'm not technically "vegan" now, but I'm hoping I can still ask questions and participate in the community. If not, sorry and I'll get bent.