bluebabe

Maybe you could start saying what you eat? It's easier to suggest changes that way.

This is me practicing a backbend http://i59.tinypic.com/2mpbp54.png

Cooking grains-legumes changes the nutritional density, probably from added water that enters the cells, therefore you have extra weight without calories-nutrition. You may notice this when you soak grains, they often double in size (or even more) because of absorbed water.

Hi all So glad I found this forum, it's always great to share and learn everything about veganism+fitness. All my life I felt awful, I had no energy and every time I tried some physical activity it was very strenuous to me, even if I wasn't too much overweight. My life began changing when I became a vegetarian. I started to get more interested on diet and noticed how if affected my overall wellbeing in a dramatic way. It took me some time to become a vegan. After 6 years being a vegetarian I became a vegan and quickly adopted raw veganism (80-10-10 style) and it was by then that I found a real interest in exercising regularly. The fact that diet made me feel better contributed a lot to start working out. Sadly, about 18 months later I ended up falling off the vegan wagon, and went on and off vegetarianism for about 3 years. I see how the poor diet also contributed to me stop doing exercise, it was a vicious cycle, hard to break, since i felt bad and that contributed to me making poor choices in other areas of my life. About 2 years ago, feeling so crappy, I made the decision to start lifting weights again, but made poor choices in diet (I was doing a paleo-keto diet with a lot of animal fat), combined with overexercising, after a few months I crashed. I knew something was really wrong and I began moving towards fruits and vegetables to heal myself. Then, about 1 year ago I became a vegan again. Nothing compares to this diet in terms of well being. For the past months I had been practicing yoga, acrobatics and some martial arts. For some reasons I had to quit those classes and began lifting weights again 2 months ago, even though I still practice a form of martial art once a week. I made adjustments on my diet following some guidelines from Brendan Brazier's The thrive diet book, and even if some principles were similar to things I had seen before, I guess the fact that he's a top athlete really inspired me. I made up my mind about lowering my body fat (it had been 20% for over a year), and now I'm finally seeing results, results that I never believed I could achieve. I'm very excited about it and I hope I can keep improving my fitness level and my diet everyday. I also find motivation in being able to be a healthy and fit vegan, so the world can see how great this lifestyle is. I'm always looking forward to learn more and if I can share my own knowledge with others it is a great pleasure. Thank you for this forum! Veganism for the win!

I've found that eating smaller frequent meals (on average every 2 hours) has helped me shed fat much more than intermittent fasting. IF can be very stressful on the body. Even if I'm having a considerable calorie deficit and working out 5x a week (3x lifting, 2x spinning on alternate days) I have not felt lack of energy. It's important to notice the quality of the food though. I'm focusing on alkalising foods like lots of greens (trust me, LOTS of greens) and quinoa. For anyone interested in improving their diet i recommend Brendan Brazier guidelines (check his book The thrive diet, it has helped me a lot) I always make a small meal before exercising, even if it's cardio day. I find that if I keep a regular schedule of meals, I'm able to maintain a bigger caloric deficit without losing energy, in the end, the deficit will take the fat away, no need to be worried about keeping an empty stomach to lose fat.

I believe that some people who have problems with starch diet may actually have a problem with certain starchy foods and not the starch per se. Then ,when they change diet and stop or reduce eating those foods that were causing the problem, they feel better and believe the problem was the high starch instead of those specific foods. Myself, having to deal with leaky gut, while following a starch solution program, make use only of roots and avoid all grains. To some people, avoiding gluten grains could be enough. I rarely see this issue addressed in such discussions and imo it's an important one.