All raw vegans are so used to getting that question from everyone!

As you all know, I eat a primarily raw  diet, and I try to be as vegan as possible, although I don’t like to label myself!  I do eat a good bit of fish, especially sushi and sashimi,  and eggs, usually raw.   I struggled with that decision after being completely raw vegan for two years, but decided it was the only way I was going to reach my goals of winning Figure championships.

I am training to compete in Figure Competitions, and my goal is to win a national NPC Championship and obtain my IFBB pro card. I won my first NPC show–the 2009 Fort Lauderdale Cup in October 2009! And I just finished competing in the 2009 NPC National Figure Championships in Hollywood FL in November. I placed 12th in the nation on my first time out! I was thrilled, but motivated to come back bigger and better next season!!! I still need to put on a good bit of muscle to win a national show, especially in my legs, back and shoulders, so for all intents and purposes I am a bodybuilder. Many people completely dismiss the idea that the human body can get enough protein from plant-based sources to feed the nutritional demands of a bodybuilder. This shows just how pervasive the protein myth is throughout our society, and most of it is fed by the meat industry trying to sell more product!

Remember, competitions are NOT real life! For example, I can’t eat fruit on a precontest diet. Is fruit bad? NO!!! It is fabulous, but the reality is, it causes your body to retain water because it is high in sugars. So it just doesn’t work for stage. The only truly raw vegan pure protein I have found is Sun Warrior, which I discuss in detail later. Other than that, all the raw proteins are combined with either carbs or fat, which is perfectly fine for anyone, unless you are on a crazy-strict precontest diet!

I also eat some ‘cooked’ vegan proteins, like seitan, “Gardein” products, Amy’s burgers, etc.  I just try to make sure that most of what I eat as my sides is raw vegetables and has live enzymes in it.  Leafy greens and green vegetables are the key! We have a joke on my competition team that “If you want to run with the big dogs, you gotta eat your asparagus”. Precontest, I eat 30 spears of raw asparagus per day!

The Importance of Amino Acids

The human body cannot use whole proteins.  It uses amino acids in their basic form, and each person has a unique combination of amino acids that their body will use.  Your body will not put together the same ‘cocktail’ of amino acids that mine will, as your needs are different than mine.  Maybe your body is fighting off an infection, or rebuilding a weakened organ.  Hopefully mine is building bigger quads, hamstrings, and lats! When you eat a ‘complete’ protein like animal meat, yes, it absolutely is a complete protein like it says.  To the surprise of most people, however, eating a complete protein may not be the best way to get your protein.  Your body must break the protein down into individual amino acids before it can put those amino acids back together in the customized manner that satisfies your particular needs.  So there is the extra step of digesting the protein, and our digestive tracts aren’t designed to digest meats to begin with, so this is a very difficult step for the body that creates a lot of waste products and feeds candidas yeast unnecessarily.

So it makes sense that eating the amino acids in raw form is the most effective means of assimilating protein for our bodily needs.  There is a surprising amount of amino acids in plant-based foods, especially in greens and vegetables.  Broccoli, spinach and kale are particularly high in protein.  None of them are a complete and perfect protein by themselves, however, except for a select group of superfoods like acai, raw cacao, maca, etc.  The key is to eat a wide variety of vegetables and especially greens, and your infinitely intelligent body will do the rest by creating its own perfect proteins.

Here is a great article by Viktoria Boutenko, famous for introducing Green Smoothies to the world, on this very topic:   Abundance of Proteins in Greens

Let’s Look at How We Build Muscle

I agree that bodybuilders do have higher protein needs than the average person.  Lets look at what weight training does.  When you stress a muscle by heavy resistance training, you create tiny tears in that muscle and the body responds quickly to repair those tears and rebuild the muscle.  Since the muscle was stressed, the body figures it better get that muscle ready to be stressed again, so it tends to build it back bigger and stronger.  When does it do this, by the way?  When you are at REST.  Especially when you are asleep.  Goji berries are shown to trigger the pituitary gland to release growth hormone, so they are an excellent choice for a post-workout recovery smoothie or a great addition to your last meal of the day.  (Don’t eat right before you go to bed!)

When you stress the muscles through exercise, there is a 30-minute window of opportunity to really accelerate your muscle gains and fat release.  From the time you complete your last repetition, you have 30 minutes in which to take in high-quality and highly-digestible carbohydrates and proteins.  The ideal ratio is 2 to 1 carbohydrates to proteins, such as 40 grams carbs and 20 grams protein.   You want fast-acting carbs to get your insulin levels up quickly.  The body is sending growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) to the muscles to repair them as quickly as possible, and these hormones cannot work unless they are in the presence of insulin.  I am not talking about a big blood-sugar spike, just a nice rise in the insulin level.   I like to use bananas, mangos and other fruits for the natural sugars.   And don’t have any fat in your post-workout shake!  Fat slows down the absorption of the carbs and protein.  Sun Warrior protein, which I discuss in detail later, is the ideal post-workout protein because it is bio-fermented and pre-digested, so it absorbs instantly.  In a recent 12-week study, participants who consumed a post-workout shake lost significant body fat and gained muscle, while the participants who did the same exercise and did not consume a post-workout shake actually gained fat and lost muscle mass.  Yikes!   Post-workout nutrition is absolutely essential!

So muscle building is a result of stressing the muscle and pushing it to new levels of resistance.  That’s why you need to lift heavier and heavier weights over time to push through plateaus.  Yes, you need protein to do this, but you don’t need truckloads of it!  One reason the mainstream thought is that you need so much protein is that your body is so inefficient at breaking down animal proteins that it needs much more to digest the amount of amino acids you need.  If you are assimilating amino acids at a very high absorption rate, then you don’t need 300 grams a day to meet your needs, unless you weigh 300 pounds of solid muscle!

The Perfect Raw Vegan Protein–Sun Warrior!

Case in point, one of the most perfect proteins on earth is whole brown rice–including the bran and endosperm.  A new company, Sun Warrior, has found a way to deliver a raw vegan brown rice protein with full 98.2% digestibility, with a perfect amino acid profile.  They sprout the whole rice grain, so it is a true living food, and then use enzymes to digest the carbohydrates, leaving the protein behind while never raising the temperature above 100 degrees, preserving the precious enzymes while bio-fermenting the protein, making it even more usable by the body.  It correlates to mother’s milk in highly bio-available protein.   Did you know that most soy protein is processed using hexane, a flammable chemical?  NOT what I want to be drinking in my shakes!  Not to mention, there is a whole host of evidence coming out about the dangers of processed soy:  Dangers of Soy! And whey, which is a concentrated dairy waste byproduct, tends to cause gastric distress in most people, plus since it is dairy, it is highly acidic and mucus-forming.  Sun Warrior has a higher amino acid profile than soy & whey, and is even slightly superior to egg white protein.

I found out about Sun Warrior and began using it with great results, after seeing Mike Adams’ enthusiastic review, which is rare for him (www.NaturalNews.com).  And even more amazingly, it tastes great!  I had tried rice and other vegan proteins before, and they were unpalatable, even for me.  I usually don’t care how nasty something tastes, if it works for me.  I was so impressed I contacted the company with a testimonial and ended up being invited to be on their Team Warrior!  Look for me at SunWarrior.com under Team Warrior  Bodybuilders!

And here is the link to the  new promo video, featuring yours truly!      Who Uses Sun Warrior Protein?

Can’t Argue With Results!

The results speak for themselves.  These pics were taken at the end of 2009, and I  about to be 41 years young for crying out loud!  When I first went raw vegan, I did lose some muscle as my body went through a cleansing process, but the addition of Sun Warrior to my diet made my muscle-building explode and my bodyfat drop like a rock.  Now, my body is in much better health and more efficient at utilizing all the fuel I am feeding it, without having to deal with all the toxins from before.  I am much leaner, but my scale weight has actually increased about 9 pounds, which tells me I am losing fat and gaining muscle.  Whoo-hoo!  Follow me through the next competition season in 2010 and I will share my results with you. You can order Sun Warrior through the link at your right, or by clicking here.  Yes, I do get a small commission if you order through me, since I am on the Team.  I really appreciate your helping me out!

And I am writing a recipe book using Sun Warrior Protein and Activated Barley, and these are recipes that I use for my muscle-building and contest preparation–which includes smoothies, awesome home-made superfood protein bars, and even pies!  A nice excerpt from the book is yours FREE if you just email me and let me know you got your protein through my site!  I’ll send it right over to you!

I do want to stress that you can get ALL the protein you need just from your raw vegan diet.  I only mention supplementation and additional animal-based proteins for those who really feel they need it to reach their fitness goals.  It’s not necessary.  You can get all you need just with organic living foods from the grocery store!

Defy all the know-it-all muscleheads who think you have to eat a whole cow every day to get ‘enough’ protein!  Stand out, think for yourself and be a black sheep.  You will be much healthier in the long run.  Think about it, how many ‘elderly’ bodybuilders can you think of?  One or two?  Joe Weider & Jack LaLanne are a couple I can bring to mind.  Exercise is already heavily oxidizing and aging to the body.  The extra stress of a really bad diet accelerates aging to warp speed.  Defy aging!  Get your antioxidants, phytonutrients, live enzymes, etc through living foods, and the protein will take care of itself.

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Be Defiant, Misbehave, and Change History today!

Hugs,

Christy