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

FERRUGGIA, author of Fit to Fight and chief training adviser to Men’s Fitness magazine
     
    “ Thrive has revolutionized the way I go about fueling my body and helped push me to a higher level of performance and workout recovery. The guidelines in Thrive work to help maintain your body’s optimal health level, whether you’re a world-class athlete, a nine-to-fiver, or a stay-at-home mom. Brendan gives you his years of knowledge in diet and athletic achievement in an easy-to-read, fully digestible form. There’s no other resource like it out there.”
     
    —MAC DANZIG, elite UFC fighter and Ultimate Fighter 6 Champion
     

Brendan Brazier is a professional Ironman triathlete and creator of VEGA, an award-winning whole food, plant-based, nutritional product line widely available in natural and health food outlets. A two-time Canadian 50km Ultra Marathon Champion, he is a renowned speaker and sought-after presenter throughout North America. In 2006, Brazier addressed the United States Congress concerning the significant social and economic benefits that can be achieved by improving personal health by means of a plant-based diet. Named one of The 25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians by VegNews magazine, Brazier is a guest lecturer at eCornell in New York and has appeared on ABC, NBC, and Fox News. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.
     

 

To Lynn, Seymour, and Stanley
     

introduction
     
    The Thrive Diet grew out of necessity. At the age of 15, I decided that I wanted to become a professional athlete. My goal was to ultimately be a professional Ironman triathlete. Consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile cycle, and a 26.2-mile run (a marathon), Ironman triathlon racing is not the easiest way to make a living. But it appealed to me. I enjoyed outdoor exercise, hard work, and a challenge, so why not make a career out of it?
     
    As you can imagine, I needed to dedicate a huge amount of time and effort to training for this event. As I got more serious about training and pursuing my goal, I searched for ways to improve my performance. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I looked at how other athletes were training.
     
    What immediately stood out to me was how little their training programs varied. From the top pros in the sport right down to the average performers, the variations in their workout routines were only slight. Taking training out of the equation, then, what then allowed some athletes to improve at an exceptional rate, while others became stagnant or made only modest gains? What separated the top athletes from the average? As I found, there are only two prime components that make up an athlete’s routine: training and recovery. Often referred to as stress and rest, both elements are of equal importance, yet usually only one gets attention—the training.
     
    While training programs are meticulously plotted and each workout is planned in detail, little thought is given to recovery. We know that recovery occurs when the body is at rest, but, as I learned, there are varying states of rest that are not well understood. Maximizing the quality of rest is key. Removing other forms of stress from the body during times of rest will speed the rate of recovery. In doing so, the athlete will be better physiologically prepared for the next workout and therefore will benefit from it more. It was the recovery that needed to be my prime focus, not the training.
     
    After reading many articles and speaking with a wide variety of top professional athletes in both strength and endurance, I found that the major variant among athletes was diet. They ranged from very poor to pretty good. So did their performance: The better the diet, the better the recovery rate. But what constituted a good diet? What were the best foods to eat for recovery and which ones should be avoided? Which foods helped the body function in a reduced state of stress so that it could recover faster?
     
    My focus, which had begun on training, now shifted to recovery and, more specifically, diet. I tried different diets, not restrictive ones, as is a common theme of many diets, but supposedly performance-enhancing ones. I tried high-carbohydrate, grain-based, low-fat, low-protein diets, and low-carbohydrate, high-fat, high-protein diets, and several others that fell in between. Although learning the basic principles of the various diets was helpful, I couldn’t find any one diet that really gave me the edge I was looking for.
     
    Then I tried a diet that