Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life

abundance of energy for high-performance training, while eating fewer calories than most people. One of the most important factors is that I select food with the net-gain concept in mind rather than by the conventional calorie-counting method. Let’s consider white bread. In the old days, when dining out, I would wolf down the French bread typically served before the meal. My stomach would be physically full, yet I would still be hungry. Since white bread is void of any useful nutrients, my body wanted me to continue eating despite that I felt full. To digest, assimilate, and then eliminate the white bread requires a large energy expenditure. The net energy gain from it is very low. If the bread is buttered or if a spread containing trans fat is added, the result can be a net energy loss.
     
    In today’s hectic, fast-paced world, we are inundated with nutrient-deficient foods. Consumed mostly for convenience sake, processed and refined foods have led us to a decline in health and to elevated medical costs. Because of their absence of usable nutrients, we find we have to consume more and more of these foods to fill ourselves up. Thanks to their high refined sugar and calorie counts, we have become an obese, energy-depleted society.
     
    A calorie is defined as a measure of food energy. It might seem logical, then, to assume that the more calories consumed, the more energy our body is supplied with. Of course, we know this is not the case, otherwise people with the highest energy would be those who eat at fast food restaurants. By simply consuming more calories, we are not guaranteed more energy. Many conventional nutrition books would have us believe that if we expend a certain amount of energy, it can be quantified and replaced. They suggest that by simply adhering to calorie counts, with no consideration of other factors, we can accurately gauge the amount of food we need to consume to maintain low body weight and high energy. But it doesn’t work that way.
     
    Several years ago, before I had created the Thrive Diet, I did try to gauge my caloric intake requirements based on my activity level and body weight. Eating about 8000 calories on heavy training days, the number of calories I determined I required, I usually needed a rest day soon afterward. I realize now that a large part of my need for the rest day was not so much to recover from the energy expended during training as to recover from the energy expended digesting all that food. I ate lots of starchy, high-carbohydrate foods such as white pasta and bread. Roasted nuts, usually in the form of peanut butter, were also a large part of my high-calorie yet low-nutrient diet. These are hard for the body to digest and assimilate and have little to offer in terms of nutrients, and so I was robbing myself of energy with every bite.
     
    I also discovered that there were several other ways in which standard foods cause the body to be in a constant state of elevated stress. Fortunately, as many problems as conventional foods can cause, high net-gain foods can alleviate.
     
    I found that by consuming more easily assimilated foods, I could conserve a large amount of energy, therefore reducing stress in my body. There are two main reasons for this. First, foods in their natural, nutrient-dense state can be digested and assimilated with less energy expenditure than processed, refined foods. Second, when more nutrient-rich foods are present in the diet, the body does not have to eat as much as if it were fed less nutrient-rich foods. In addition, when the body is fed the nutrients it needs, the brain turns off the hunger signal. And so, the need to continually consume, a state many people who subsist on a refined-food diet experience, ceases, and not as much needs to be eaten and digested. And since, as I noted above, the digestion and assimilation process for many processed foods is an exceptionally large energy draw, cutting out such foods will immediately translate into a net-energy surplus, meaning more usable energy. And with this extra energy, the body will likely choose to improve immune function and quicken restoration of cells damaged by stress—essentially, anti-aging activities.
     
    Once I realized the value in nutrient density, assimilation, and absorption of food, I began eating in terms of net gain, rather than to calorie-consumption guidelines. I focused on consuming nutrient-dense, easily assimilated foods. As a result, my recovery rate has