The Plant-Based Diet for Athletes: A Typical Day
What do you eat in a typical day?
Even as the plant-based diet becomes more commonplace, people still ask me this question all the time.
And I like that — it’s an opportunity to explain that you can eat 100% plant-based and do it really, really healthily … without spending your life in the kitchen or subsisting on trail mix and sprouts (while living in a treehouse, I think).
I’m busy like anyone else. I have two kids and work hard, and as a result, I’ve streamlined my diet so that it’s affordable and doesn’t take a lot of time.
But I do make food a priority, like it should be. I’m very happy with my version of a healthy, plant-based diet, and I’m happy to share it with you in this post.
I eat according to a few simple guidelines (e.g., until I feel mostly full). My focus is on simplicity and health, and one of the amazing things I’ve found is that over time my palate has adjusted so that simple, healthy food is the food that tastes good.
But there’s another important point here. I’ve set up my diet so that I eat the same types of meals most days until dinnertime, adding variety only within a certain category of foods (like mixing up the fruits or nuts in the smoothie, or choosing different veggies or dressing for the salad).
And what that means is that each day, there are relatively few decisions I have to make around food.
This is important because:
- The fewer food decisions you have to make early in the day, the better the choices you’ll make later (see: decision fatigue), and
- When you know ahead of time the types of meals you’ll eat, you can “engineer” your diet to include exactly what you want and none of what you don’t.
But I should add that what follows is only a “typical” day — this is the stuff I’ve consciously decided to eat on a daily basis. But because I’m a human, I like eating a muffin when my wife bakes them for the kids’ school, or the times when I have leftover (delicious) pasta for lunch instead of my usual salad. I don’t stress a bit about these little indulgences, because know that what I do most of the time is what matters.
With that, here’s what a typical day looks like for me.
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