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

a point this is true, but I think that most people would like more from life than just survival. We know that ambition and mood can be adversely affected by poor diet. Lack of motivation, and the belief that you can’t change or that what you want to achieve is out of reach, is often nothing more than a sign of a chronically poor diet. How do you break the cycle? The answer is applied knowledge.
     
    I know people who started eating “health food” a few days before a race, shocked their body with the sudden change, had a bad race, and then surmised, “Health food doesn’t make a difference.” Healthy food is not a drug. Even though the change it brings about is positive, it takes the body time to adapt. Be patient. Convert gradually to a healthy, whole food-based diet. Allow your body time to adjust. Your overall health can only improve. And over time, improved health will lead to improved performance.
     
    It’s true that some great athletes eat junk food. “Look at his diet, it’s full of refined, processed foods and doesn’t seem to hurt him,” some people like to point out. I believe that these are cases of an athlete being great in spite of a poor diet, not because of it. Take cigarette smoking, for instance. I could start smoking today and I could probably smoke for years, possibly decades, before any clear-cut, directly related problems arose. There would be underlying health issues, but they may not appear to be symptoms of smoking. It would be wrong for me to conclude that because I smoke and seem okay, smoking is not unhealthy. Similarly with poor nutrition: Suboptimal performance will be the result in the short term, while the serious health problems will manifest later.
     
    As you could probably guess, I’m an advocate of preventative methods. By eating nutrient-dense whole foods now, we continue to reduce chances of disease later in life and we extend our life expectancy.
     

applying the thrive diet
     

change is stress
     
    The body perceives any physical deviation from the routine as stress. Even if the change is a positive one, the body must adapt. The best way for someone who has smoked for many years to quit, for example, is to gradually reduce the amount of nicotine in her system. This is what the nicotine patch does—it slowly weans the person off cigarettes’ addictive properties. With this method, the chances of success are greatly improved, simply because withdrawal stress is reduced.
     
    A cold-turkey approach to quitting smoking is often not successful and can possibly be counterproductive. That it is easier and less stressful (and therefore healthier) to continue to smoke seems illogical. Yet, the smoker who instantly quits will experience more stress than the one who quits gradually by continuing to smoke but at a reduced rate. Over time, the body will adapt to the stress of withdrawal, overcome it, and be healthier. The point is, it takes time.
     
    The same goes for nutrition. When you adopt a new way of eating, it takes time for your body to adapt. If you’re following the Thrive Diet, the body will also need to contend with detoxification. Detoxification is the body’s elimination of the toxins accumulated over years of consuming poor-quality food. It is a tremendously positive process. Our body is equipped with coping mechanisms that allow it to function as optimally as it can, given the nourishment it gets. The first few days of an optimal diet may not be pleasant. Years of eating less than ideal foods have rendered our body nutritionally stressed. The poorer the quality of your previous diet, the longer the detoxification process. It will likely take people converting from a typical North American diet to an exclusively whole-food plant-based diet more than six weeks to cleanse their body of toxins.
     
    Chlorophyll in particular has a cleansing effect, helping the body extract toxins from the liver. As toxins are removed, withdrawal symptoms will be intensified, but overall withdrawl will be shorter. Eating chlorophyll-rich foods have been shown to help people break the addiction to nicotine and stop smoking.
     
    Common detoxification symptoms include headache, bloating, diarrhea, nausea, fatigue, and sleep disturbances. It’s important to remember that detoxification involves cleansing symptoms. Severe symptoms, however, are an indication that you should reduce the rate at which you are implementing the change. Keep in mind, though, that the worse you feel