Category: Chat with a Vegan

Why did you go vegan?

So, I went vegan because of my love for animals. So, it started out as me learning about the animal agriculture industries and how terribly the animals were treated, and I just started to wanna honour my love for them. So, I started to eat more grass-fed meat, and I started to find the free-range eggs and that sort of thing.

Not only did that become expensive, but I started to learn that I wasn’t really saving any animals’ lives. In the end, they were maybe having a slightly better life, but also, there’s some loose regulations around those terms. Let’s say that. So, as I continued, I just started to eat less of them.

I started to feel better and eventually they just completely got off my plate. There was definitely a time where I could not look at what was on my plate and not see the animal that it once was. And I knew once that started happening, every time I thought, ah, I need to completely give this up.

And along with feeling better and starting to perform better, I just thought, ah, this is definitely the way.

Did going vegan inspire you to start a YouTube channel?

I started my YouTube channel to actually bring traffic towards the nutrition consulting services that I was offering at the time. Because I figured what a better way to let people know who I am and give a little bit of free information out there, you know, then start a YouTube channel.

So that’s what I did, but the YouTube channel kind of took off and I decided I really wanted to do that because I figured I could reach a larger audience than doing the one-on-one consulting. And that is how, that’s how it all started. So, it, yes, it kind of did in a sense. I wanted to show people how to live a healthful vegan life.

What do you talk about on your YouTube channel?

My YouTube channel is mostly focused on helping people make healthy, plant-based foods taste good. We can talk all day about the, you know, the minutia and the details and this study says this and this and that, but really, we know that we have to be eating more whole plant foods and a lot of people just don’t know how to make them taste good or they don’t know how to cook them.

And that’s where a lot of people stumble. So, I do that, but I do talk about how much we should be eating, proper supplementation, and that sort of thing as well.

How do you stay in shape as an athlete?

It’s funny hearing someone call me an athlete, but yeah, I guess I am, you know, I do that, I do activities every day. I live a healthy and active lifestyle, so I do definitely go to the gym every single day or at least, you know, five or six times a week. But another big part of me staying, uh, healthy and fit is to exercise outside of that.

And it’s just going for bike rides, you know, jogs. I try and do some sort of movement every day, if not twice a day if I can. The gym is like my main thing though. And there I do a lot of calisthenics and weight lifting.

How do you think being vegan impacts your training?

The one thing that I noticed right away when I went vegan, I was a runner at the time and I had a lot of joint pain in my ankles and just really all over my body. And I noticed quickly that I didn’t have that and I also recovered a lot faster and I could then go for longer runs sooner.

So that was sort of the first thing I noticed. And now I feel like it’s the same thing. I recover really quickly. My muscles hardly ever get sore, so I’m able to continue to train quite often. I don’t get sick very much. So, I think just, you know, a bunch of different reasons.

What’s a day of eating like for you?

Well, I wake up, usually I’ll have warm water or some lemon water, and then I’ll have a bit of toast and peanut butter or maybe just some fruit. Then usually after that I’ll go to the gym. Sometimes I’ll have a cup of coffee in between that, if I don’t have that jump in my step that I like to have.

And, then after that come home, I’ll have a smoothie or just some leftovers, and then I’ll have usually a small lunch, which could be something just like, oh, probably more, more leftovers, like a small stir fry or something like that. And then for dinner, basically the same, but such a wide variety of foods, whether it be, you know, pastas, like I said, stir fries, lots of tofu, tempeh, beans and lentils.

We absolutely love cooking a bunch of stuff in the Instant Pot. So that’s one of my favorite things to do, make stews and chilis and that in there.

What do you eat after a very heavy workout?

Usually a smoothie is what makes me feel the best. I’ve tried to switch it up and eat other things, but I know that smoothies always make me feel best. For a post-workout smoothie, I’ll have a few bananas in it, and then I will have a cup or so maybe two cups of frozen berries.

I’ll have some ginger. I will have some turmeric in there, a little black pepper to help with inflammation and recovery. And I’ll have a scoop of plant-based protein powder and then some sort of source of omega threes like usually either flax, chia or hemp seed in there. And then I try to get some greens in.

Cilantro is one of my favourite. I know people find that weird in a smoothie, but it’s one of my favorite things to have in there. But also, like parsley. And if I don’t have that, handful of kale or just any sort of mixed green.

What’s your favourite vegan protein?

So as far as food sourced protein, that would definitely be tofu or tempeh. I just never seem to get tired of those. Another one that I’ve been eating a lot lately is actually from a British Columbia-based company called Big Mountain Foods. And I’m not sponsored or anything by them, but I love this product that they have.

And it’s actually a soy free tofu, and I believe that they’re the first company to do this least in Canada and they’re making a tofu out of fava beans. And it’s amazing. It’s a really high source of protein and it’s very similar to tofu.

What’s your favourite hack to make cooking easier?

Definitely making large batches of the calorie rich sources of food at one time. If I’m going to have rice and you know, broccoli and maybe some tofu or tempeh for dinner, I will make a whole bunch of rice rather than just making enough for that meal. And then I have some for the next day. And the same thing goes if I’m cooking potatoes or sweet potatoes, squash, lentils. The Instant Pot has been a huge help for us. I don’t like to meal prep because I get tired of eating the exact same food over and over again.

I don’t like to see this thing sitting in the fridge that I know I’m going to eat like four days from now. But, I know if I have something that I can just take a scoop or something of, and then kind of create a meal around that, that’s always really nice for me. So that’s probably the best hack I have.

What advice would you give to a new vegan?

The biggest mistake that I see new vegans make is they just don’t eat enough calories. It’s because whole plant foods are just not as calorie dense as the animal foods.

So, what I usually recommend or I suggest to people is that they check out a total daily energy expenditure calculator. It’s a lot of words, but it’s a T D E E calculator and that takes in both your basal metabolic rate, but also the energy that you expend throughout the day, whether it be at work or at your activities.

You have to plug in like your age, your height and all that sort of thing, so it’s quite accurate. Then if your goal is to, you know, gain weight, obviously you want to be a hundred, 200 calories above that, if you want to lose weight, a hundred to 200 calories below, and then go into a program like Chronometer or MyFitnessPal and track your calories from there. You shouldn’t have to do it for long because you really can get a good idea of how much you’re eating after just a few days of doing it. But I think that’s a really good way.

And then also you can see sort of the nutrient breakdown to see if you’re getting all your nutrients. But I don’t track very closely myself. I just make sure that I eat enough foods from a variety of plant sources every day. Include a few higher protein sources like tofu, tempeh, lentils, beans. That sort of thing.

And yeah, that’s kind of my best advice.

This interview from PlantUniversity’s “Chat with a Vegan” series was hosted by Brighde Reed of World Vegan Travel and featured Derek Simnett of Simnett Nutrition.

More posts like this

Where are you from and what are you passionate about?

I’m a dad to three children, and two lovely dogs as well. I’m married and living in Chilliwack, BC. We are entrepreneurs. We run a marketing firm, an online marketing firm – email and Facebook – a lot of stuff with Google, Facebook, that kind of thing. We also are launching a brand new app in the automotive industry in September targeted at the automotive enthusiast. We’ve also developed a completely different type of GPS than the world is currently using.

I’ve always grown up very into sports. I don’t get to play as much, but I still keep very active in the gym. The last competition I did for men’s physique was back in 2019. COVID ruined a lot of the shows but I still do photo shoots prepping for just men’s physique promotion.

Our other personal hobby is the automotive world, which is where we developed the app for I’ve developed my supercar out of a Mercedes AMG. The whole concept of it was veganism.

I have owned that car for four years. I always didn’t like that I couldn’t find a high-performance vehicle without leather in it. So I decided to take the car because I still wanted a four-door. After all, I take my kids with me to every car show and car event that I go to. We ripped out all the leather from inside the car and we replaced it all with Alcantara which was expensive. We branded it Vegains, which is my bodybuilding name Vegains online. So I branded everything Vegains inside and we turned it into a full show car.

It sparks a lot of conversation at the different car shows. And, when I get into it and talk about how the interior is redone. It’s not tuned on gasoline anymore, it’s tuned on ethanol, which is a plant so it’s fully vegan. It gets a lot of conversation started and we win many trophies at different shows.

How did you get into bodybuilding and how did that turn you vegan?

I moved back to Canada from England when I was 18. I was very thin, I only weighed about 120 pounds being just under six feet, which is common for the British lifestyle. All my cousins were all farm boy builds, very wide, a lot bigger than me. I wanted to gain some size, fit in, and defend myself against my cousins who would push me around. 

I started working out, not knowing what I was doing though it was more ego-lifting. I was young and immature and I just enjoyed being at the gym.

I trained throughout my twenties. I didn’t learn how to work out properly until I was 27. I met a bodybuilding coach who taught me how to lift properly, taught me a lot about nutrition, but more the traditional fitness way of eating, keto lifestyle, high protein, low carb days, that kind of thing.

And while I saw results, when I turned 29 going on 30, I got sick. It came from food poisoning from either chicken or cheese, we never could identify it. But my bodybuilding took a turn for the worse.

Everything went downhill, food poisoning lasted about six weeks. It wouldn’t go away. I had doctor appointments, MDs, and naturopaths, but nobody could identify it besides the fact that I had lost about 20 pounds in weight, nothing was healing. I couldn’t digest food anymore. I went on a journey after the MD agreed with my naturopath saying it appears I was allergic to animal proteins. At that point, I had no idea what vegetarian or vegan even was.

They said, I needed to change my lifestyle and go plant-based to heal my gastrointestinal system, which I did with the help of my mom cooking lots of traditional east Indian food – lentils, quinoa, garlic, ginger, and a lot of really healthy things.

I ate no junk food, no meat, and no animal products at all. When I got healthy again, a different coach asked me to start eating chicken again and eggs and train to compete the next year to gain everything back. I had a moment where I went to cook a chicken breast and I cooked it and sat down to eat it and I couldn’t eat it.

Not because at that point I had made any sort of ethical connection. It just looked disgusting. I went back to my lentils and I went back to my chickpeas and went back to eating that way which he wasn’t happy with because he was more the traditional bodybuilder. He said, okay, how about fish? I decided to eat fish. After two months of eating specific tuna, salmon, and cod, I got mercury poisoning. I went through a nine-month detox after that was officially diagnosed and got my reflexes back.

Then I started to make the ethical connection shortly after that, just comparing things with my dog Lola.

How did going vegan improve your life?

I just felt better-being plant-based and started to question everything about the fitness industry based on, what my MD and my naturopath said I probably got sick due to the aggressive keto dieting. They educated me on a lot of topics the fitness industry will never educate you on.

I was shocked to hear it all went down my own rabbit hole of research, which lined up everything that I was taught by the MD and the naturopath.

How do you get your protein?

I use Ergogenics protein powder. They have a hemp protein powder so I use that in my smoothies. I use hemp seeds in my smoothies as well, along with peanut butter. So it’s very easy to get a smoothie up to 40, 50 grams of protein to what my current coach still wants me to hit per meal.

My other sources are vegan meats, Yves Ground Veggie, Beyond Meat, and Impossible Burgers, I’ll have one, I go out to eat at restaurants. I still use it in my meal plans at home as well, more of the healthier sources would be tempeh, tofu, lentils, and chickpeas.

You kind of get protein from everything. Like when I write out all my meal plans with macros and the calories involved in them, so I can understand and envision what I’m intaking. So like when I’m making my meal plans and I add in even the rice that I’m having or the bread with the gluten protein along with the soy milk when I’m having smoothies or even a bowl of cereal, it all adds up very quickly. So hitting protein amounts is very easy. When somebody asks me in the gym, where do I get my protein?

I relay that question in a different way to say, do we even know how much you’re supposed to in terms of how much protein per day, based on your body weight and your activities and your goals in the gym?

What’s a typical day of eating for you at the moment?

So for breakfast in a general off-season meal, I do a large hash brown veggie meal. The protein source will be like the Yves Ground Veggie and tofu mixed. Sometimes, tempeh diced in just to keep a diversity: hash browns, then, veggies I’ll have like zucchini, spices, onions, garlic, and any veggies I have on hand. I do stick with the majority of low-fiber veggies. I found going plant-based originally, I didn’t need that much fiber in my diet, so I don’t eat broccoli, cauliflower, or asparagus every single day just once or twice a week. I stick to low-fiber veggie foods throughout the day which helped my gut stay consistent and just continue healing. 

For lunch, I’ll make a smoothie. I’ll have a large smoothie, chia, hemp, soy milk, my protein, peanut butter, and a greens powder also from Ergogenics and then a pre-workout meal, I’ll usually make a small sandwich and then I’ll have simple sugars, like a bowl of cereal with some light granola in it so it’s higher, simple sugars and lower in fat. Doesn’t need to be high in protein, it’s just so my body has that energy at the gym to fill up the glycogen in the muscles and have a great workout. Post workout I’ll usually do another smoothie with cream of rice.

Again, get some simple sugars to heal the body, heal the muscles, and get, the energy it needs to start recovering. 

For dinner, we’ll usually do some type of rice bowl with tofu, whatever protein source we’re eating as a family, I’ll do something similar to that. And then before bed, I’d usually make a peanut butter sandwich to make sure I’ve hit my macros for the day.

Because I generally eat a lower fat diet. So I started adding avocado toast, peanut butter, chia, and hemp, to my meals, especially in the off-season. Use more of the fat content to help gain some weight and make sure I have enough calories to keep scaling and then when I look to cut in the summer, it’s very easy for me.

What’s your favourite meal?

My favourite vegan meal would probably be my wife’s Shepherd’s Pie with the gravy, or she makes a heck of a Mushroom Wellington, it’s an occasion meal. It takes a lot of effort to make, but it’s just absolutely incredible.

What’s your favourite restaurant in Vancouver?

I’d probably say Chi Vegan. Yeah, we became good friends with Chi, the actual head chef. She’s amazing. The food there is fantastic as well.

This interview from PlantUniversity’s “Chat with a Vegan” series was hosted by Brighde Reed of World Vegan Travel and featured Ravi Boghan.

More posts like this