Why Vegans NEED To Track To See Results

Want to make real progress as a vegan athlete? The truth is, intuitive eating doesn’t work for most people. And intuitive training? Not even a thing. In this video, Pro Bikini Bodybuilder Alice Robeson breaks down why tracking your nutrition and workouts is essential for building muscle, losing fat, and reaching your goals. She also shares the best ways to track your food and workouts effectively. Stay consistent, lift heavy, and show what vegan athletes can achieve! 💪🌱

Transcript:

It is our responsibility to advocate for the vegan lifestyle. You are setting an example of what a vegan athlete can achieve. Hello everybody, thank you so much for tuning in to the Vegan Proteins YouTube channel.

My name is Alice, I’m a coach at Vegan Proteins and a bikini bodybuilder. Today I wanted to talk to you about why vegans need to be tracking in order to see progress. We kind of get sold this idea that somehow, going vegan, we’re going to wave a magic wand and automatically we’re going to be on the fast track to weight loss.

Not only the fast track to weight loss, but sort of like a vegan lifestyle is going to allow us to be lean, maintain this lean physique for life, right? And basically we’re told again and again and again, you can eat as many vegetables as you want and you will not gain weight. But we all know that that’s not true. Sure, it’s more common for people to consume vegetables and because they are so voluminous, when they consume those vegetables, they will feel fuller faster.

And obviously we all know that vegetables have very low calories, much fewer calories, but it doesn’t mean that they are zero calorie. And although most people tend to stop eating after filling up on a huge plate of vegetables, that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to gain weight. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to stop eating.

That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to eat over your daily calorie maintenance level, right? It’s still just as easy for plenty of people to eat in a calorie surplus. So we get sold this idea and I think it sort of goes along the same line as, oh, well, all vegans eat our salads and vegetables. That’s definitely a stereotype.

Untrue, completely untrue. I personally hate salads. So I don’t know if that makes me a bad vegan or what, but I know that I’m not alone.

So it’s kind of one of my pet peeves. It gets sold to us by the health experts in the vegan community, by some of the leaders, by some of the influencers. And it’s just, it’s just not true.

We do have tons of studies by the way, that have proven that yes, a plant-based diet will likely lead to weight loss and maintaining a leaner physique, having a better body composition, having lower levels of body fat, right? It will, they’re more correlated. So it’s more likely to happen. It’s more commonly going to happen.

Similarly, improve your health markers, right? So things like reducing your risk of cardiovascular disease, reducing cholesterol levels, reducing chances of getting diabetes, all the things, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a guarantee. It’s not a guarantee to the best health. It’s not a guarantee to the leanest physique.

Some people on the internet love to promise these things and I get it. I get it. It’s a wonderful way to promote veganism.

It’s a wonderful way to, you know, get people to make the switch, right? So it’s a huge bonus. Of course, I want a vegan world. I want us all to achieve that, but I think it’s just overhyped, right? Correct me if I’m wrong.

So I would argue that for most vegans, once you learn how to cook vegan in your household, once you find all of your favorite vegan restaurants, once you learn how to make all of those amazing vegan swaps for the nostalgic food and the treats that we all like to enjoy as Americans, I would argue that it becomes just as hard, right? It becomes just as difficult to be able to maintain a lean physique. Let’s face it. We all live in this crazy, busy society.

We’re going to come home from work. We’re going to be exhausted. We’re going to have no bandwidth and the tendency is to turn to convenience foods, right? So it doesn’t make it any easier.

It doesn’t make it any easier being vegan. You still have to make an effort to be healthy. Okay.

The intuitive eating crowd. I know, I know tracking is a tough subject for you guys, but trust me when I say that as a coach, I have worked with so many athletes and so many fitness junkies that I can promise you for the vast, vast majority of people, unless you are at the age where you are attending university in person, I’m not talking distance learning either. If you are at the age where you are attending university or you are younger than that going to school, or if you are working an extremely physically active job where you spend all day walking, lifting, anything where you’re moving, it doesn’t count if you’re standing all day, unfortunately, you are not going to be able to lose weight with intuitive eating.

And outside of that, the only exception I would say of people who are able to lose weight with intuitive eating, it comes with a cost. They usually have some sort of health condition that you would not ever wish upon yourself or anyone else that causes them to lose weight without very much effort. And even then, those individuals often end up losing weight too fast.

So that crowd is at risk of losing a percentage of your gains because the faster the weight loss, the more muscle you are likely to lose. So the smarter decision is always to track. Trust me that slow and steady is always the way to go.

And the same goes for the muscle building crowds. We’ve all heard of the dirty bulk, right? Just eating in a calorie surplus, not tracking, gaining a significant amount of excess body fat. And let’s face it, that can lead to results you don’t want as well.

Stretch marks, loose skin, worsened health markers, like your blood work getting worse. It’s just not a good strategy. Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, let’s get into it.

What should you be tracking and how should you be tracking it, right? For your nutrition, I am begging you, please, please, please do not waste your time to try and track your nutrition with a pen and paper and notebook. This is a tremendous waste of time. It’s an absurd amount of math.

Don’t try and make your own spreadsheet to do the math for you. It’s too much. Please, please, please, as a coach, I’m asking you to choose a fitness app and log your food into your app every day.

Plug in your macros. And if you are a beginner and you struggle with adherence, you don’t even need to necessarily be tracking every single one of your macros. You can start or even stick with only tracking your protein and calories and be honest when you’re logging.

Of course, that’s the tough part. Everyone thinks that the tough part is the gym and lifting heavy and getting in there consistently. But the truth is, the real hard part is being consistent with your nutrition and with your diet, right? Okay, so we talked a lot about the nutrition side of things and tracking your nutrition.

But now let’s shift gears and talk about tracking for your fitness goals, right? As an athlete, no question about it, you have to track your fitness progress. And if you are in the vegan proteins community, I am talking to every single one of you because all of you are athletes. In order to get better, we have to push ourselves.

No matter what your goals are, you’re going to have to track what you’re doing in the gym. Whether you are trying to build muscle, whether you are just trying to improve your strength in the gym or both, or if you are trying to lose weight and build muscle at the same time, which I know a lot of you are, you’re going to have to track just like every other athlete. It’s crazy.

I see so many people go into the gym and do their workout and they don’t log a single thing. They’ll just be listening to music or watching something on their phone that’s clearly not a fitness app. Now you might be able to get away with this for maybe the first month, or if you’re lucky, the first couple of months, but it’s not going to take long for you to just be absolutely wasting more time if you’re not tracking and trying to improve constantly.

There is no such thing as intuitive training, at least not if you’re a natural athlete. To build muscle and strength, you have to lift heavy. Not only that, you have to lift heavier and heavier.

Okay, but beyond that, I also want to talk about what are some of the other perks of tracking. I’d say the number one thing is that tracking means you’re going to go into the gym with a plan. Having a plan is ultimately going to get you through your workouts faster, and you’re ultimately going to have to spend less time in the gym.

You’re going to know exactly what machine to go to or what station to go to next. You’re going to know where you are as far as your progress. You’re going to know exactly what you lifted last week, so there’s no playing with, oh, could I lift heavier? Could I manage heavier? Or, oh, am I going too light? There’s no like having to reload plates constantly trying to figure out exactly where you’re at as far as your weight and reps are concerned.

Not only that, but the more often you change things up, the more you have no idea if you’re actually getting better and if you’re actually getting stronger. Just like any talent, weightlifting is going to take practice. Months and months of practice.

That’s the only way you’re going to get better. And let’s be real, being able to lift with proper form, especially your compound lifts, is going to be super important for making gains. And when you successfully lift one more rep or add another couple of pounds, it’s a victory.

It’s something to look forward to. In my opinion, there’s nothing better than setting performance goals and being able to celebrate a new PR in the gym. Gaining strength is one of the best indicators that you’re also building muscle for most people.

The relationship is not perfectly linear, but it’s a pretty good bet. And that’s reassuring to people who are natural athletes or advanced lifters because muscle building is slow. Let’s be real, way slower and way more difficult than just weight loss and fat loss alone.

My recommendations are tracking are a lot more flexible when it comes to tracking in the gym than tracking your nutrition. First of all, of course, there are so many apps out there. If you’re in the vegan proteins community, of course, utilize our app.

You can track all of your notes, all of your progress, get detailed videos on how to perfect your form, the works. If you’re not in our community or if you’re just looking for something else, one of my favorites is Fit Notes, mainly because everything you log can be turned into a beautiful chart of progress. So you can see nice linear gains or know when you’re plateauing or know when you are overtraining and potentially losing strength, right? I realize there are plenty of people who actually hate tracking in their phone when they’re in the gym, and that’s not a problem.

So simply do it on paper, right? Bring a notebook with you, something that lets you reference your previous lifts. Ideally, you have somewhere written in the notebook the full workout, the exercise, the prescribed number of sets, and your prescribed rep ranges. And then when it comes time, just the minimum amount of information is going to be fine.

You’re going to be writing the name of your workout, the date that you completed the workout, your exercise, and literally all you need to log is your weight and the number of reps that you did. You don’t have to make this super duper complicated. Specifically for weightlifting, I recommend that you focus your progressive overload on increasing the weight that you are lifting as well as increasing the number of reps you are lifting.

Track, track, track, and then after three to six months, you will be blown away. You will start to make some real traction. Your co-workers and your family will start to notice and comment.

You will reach your goals and you will transform your physical and mental health for years to come. So I hope that this convinces you guys. I hope that this inspires some people.

Also, I hope that you log for the sake of improvement just as a vegan athlete. It is our responsibility to advocate for the vegan lifestyle by showing our physique and improving our talents and showing it off. You are setting an example of what a vegan athlete can achieve.

Thanks again guys for tuning into our channel. Please like, subscribe, hit the bell, and if you are interested in custom fitness programs and nutrition plans as a vegan, it is what we do. Vegan Proteins has been coaching vegans online since 2008.

We are the most experienced and we’ve got more and more coaches and we’ve got the biggest and most awesome community too. So check out our website veganproteins.com or if you’ve got questions, feel free to email us coach at veganproteins.com. One of us will get back to you the same day. Take care guys.

I hope you enjoyed and I will talk to you soon.

buildmuscleonplants, fitnessmotivation, healthyveganlifestyle, plantbasedathlete, strengthtraining, trackyourmacros, veganbodybuilding, veganFitness, veganprotein, veganweightloss
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