[08] Plant-Based for Jiu-Jitsu

Last Saturday Jessica and I celebrated our anniversary.

We went for a seven course fine dining meal at the Ugly Duckling in Victoria's Chinatown.

Standouts were the sablefish and the 60-hour prime rib.

Delicious. The temptation was there to get the phone out and make photos of every single course, but the moment was for us.

It was fleeting.

It was real.

Also real was the hangover the next day—but not from drinking.

(I don't drink and Jessica just had the wine pairings with the meal.)

There was some puffiness in our eyes. Jessica had a small breakout happening and I could feel some inflammation and aches in unusual spots.

There was nothing wrong with the meal. We weren't getting sick. We're actually used to this sort of thing happening on Sunday mornings after a Saturday night dinner if there's a lot of meat because most of the time we're plant-based.

85% Plant-Based

Yeah, we're plant-based and still eat meat and other animal-source foods on occasion—actually a 24-hour window once a week, usually from Saturday evening to the same time on Sunday.

We revisit the old favourites. Try out new stuff.

Go to Ugly Duckling. Or order Dominoes. Or have some wings with friends.

Most people see this and go "oh, a cheat day."

I don't like that phrasing.

There's no transgression happening and we don't need to use the language of one and then wink and nod it away.

It's flexibility we've built in from the start. It doesn't really have a name. It's just something we do. 

It's why I never use the V-word to describe how I eat.

Almost everything I've learned about doing plant-based is built on those people experimenting on themselves since the Vegan Society split from the Vegetarians during wartime rationing in November 1944.

Their position is a moral one encompassing more than just food and I don't want to do anything to dilute the meaning of the term.

It's Jiu-Jitsu's Fault

In the autumn of 2019 I finished rolling for the day and noticed something strange—skipping meat for one day gave me what felt like superhuman stamina the next.

It wasn't a deliberate thing—I actually panicked the second time it happened and had to check my notes before I realized what was probably going on.

It was Penn Jillette's doing.

I've listened to his podcast from the beginning and read his book about losing 100 pounds on a monodiet of potatoes. I haven't stopped reading about plant-based since.

Jessica and I had been trying out plant-based food for a while, but that was the first moment breakfast, lunch and dinner clicked.

So I did it again. On purpose this time.

I thought to myself that if I feel better when I'm playing jiu-jitsu, when I'm at my (modest) physical limits, how would the rest of my life feel when I'm out and about doing the regular? Walking the dogs. Dayjobbing. Hanging out with the wife.

So I decided to give plant-based a proper shot.

I'd just ask around and then go buy the manual that helps people switch to plant-based.

How Hard Could It Be?

It turns out that there was no instruction manual.

And it's also really hard.

I heard that one of the guys at the gym was a vegan, so I went to him for advice.

The very first thing he told me was, "you can't be lazy."

All the books I'd read echoed this. I just accepted it and got to work.

I was doing it—but I was cooking almost every meal we ate.

And there were stumbling blocks:

The main one was impulse control problems between dinner and bedtime—I get hit by the munchies hard, and if marijuana is involved, I start behaving like I'm about to starve unless I have some cake or potato chips.

And the others were just the failures of a beginner—I'd run out of the food I wanted to eat.

I figured this would sort itself out, but a couple of months into it I realized that I was using motivation to pull all of this off and that none of it was sustainable.

I Needed A Different Approach

I had a couple of months of data in front of me and started unpacking the problem of omnivore to plant-based.

It occurred to me that every book on my shelf, every YouTube video, every podcast I listened to was about why and what.

Morality and health benefits.

Recipes and where to eat.

How was being discussed, but never seriously. Never with any depth.

My background in corporate sales and pest control is all about training people to obsess over how to fix a problem rather than dwelling on the symptoms. I'm trained to keep people focused on the solution.

What if I applied that thinking to plant-based?

The thought gave me a shot of optimism—it felt good.

Next, I realized jiu-jitsu has never frustrated me the way this diet change had. I'd been reading so much vegan and health literature that I'd inadvertently been building plant-based as an identity.

But what if I treated it like jiu-jitsu instead—as a skill?

I'd only fail if I stopped.

As long as I kept showing up—kept trying—I'd just be unskilled. Learning. I'd get better at it every day, every time I practiced it.

More optimism—it felt really good.

I was still figuring out how to put it all together—the manual—when I dumbassed my way into the silver bullet.

Convenience First

I'm leaving a grocery store after doing some work and grab a "protein bar". At the checkout I see a Wunderbar and grab that too, because I'm a glutton. I'm in the truck eating one after the other and it hits me—these choices were equally convenient.

In that moment, with a mouthful of candy bar, time felt like it slowed.

If there were options that were equally convenient, there would be options that were more convenient, and also less convenient.

All the meal prep. All the running around town to try different restaurants and specialty stores. All the deep diving into vitamins and supplements.

Until then everything I'd been doing was less convenient—no, actually much harder than what I'd been doing before.

And all at once, all of it haphazardly.

And from my research, it's what almost everyone does.

So I flipped it, and it occurred to me that I wouldn't even have to start with what was most convenient—I'd start with what I'd never have to give up, and three things popped into my mind immediately:

• black coffee
• Oreo cookies
• yellow mustard

It wasn't all about sacrifice.

Then I got to work where I was—where I still am—weakest: snacks.

In the most convenient and gluttonous way possible—I tried everything from all the grocery stores I work at.

Then I got my breakfast really right, then lunches and then Jessica sorted out dinner.

And at six months I had been 100% strict plant-based for several weeks—more than a month—and I didn't even realize it.

We Walked It Back

The final sticking point was sacrifice.

Korean fried chicken. BBQ with friends. Pizza. Cheese. Wunderbars.

I'd think about them and feel anxious.

It was the literature again.

I'm not trying to be vegan, and I'm getting enough of the benefits of plant-based that I can say good enough—jiu-jitsu has felt great since the switch and the day to day stuff is noticeably better too.

So we took the pressure off.

And discovered something unexpected.

The old favourites didn't satisfy in the same way any longer.

A burger was just a burger. A bag of chips or that Wunderbar was more about the packaging than the food inside.

Korean fried chicken and BBQ is just the venue to share a meal with friends. Ugly Duckling is something special to enjoy with the person I've shared my life with for 23 years now.

Plant-Based Made My Jiu-Jitsu Habit Easier—YMMV

First it improved my stamina—a night and day difference.

Then I applied the thinking—the obsession with how and convenience to everything I do off the mats. Attending class—being on the mats—has become as frictionless as eating that Wunderbar in my truck.

It worked.

I could have done all of this without the diet change, but I wouldn’t have.

The deep dive into plant-based was the catalyst for all of this.

The irony is that the approach is diet-agnostic.

The biggest hurdle in retrospect was the constant pull to conflate what we eat with who we are. Once I stopped doing that, all I was left with was the how.

And that’s just another skill to practice.

YMMV.

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