A Vegan diet has actually provided me with consistent gains at the gym. I thus present a different outlook to looking at muscle growth, and look at it in terms of preserving a sustainable environment that can facilitate all types of growth, whether physical or mental.

For the longest time, we believed that an animal-based diet is needed to give us the best nutrition and specifically necessary to grow your muscles. Evidence towards it always in the way that animal-based meals are praised and others somehow less worthy of eating for muscle growth.

Optimal level of health and fitness is always going to be what works best for you. I ask that we question what is traditionally is accepted as the “quickest” route to muscle growth (and why quick, where is the rush?).

I wonder how many times we have been wrong before, have it be thinking that lifting weights provides instant results and that there is a quick, one-size-fits-all approach to a healthy lifestyle that literally every fit person knows to not be the case.

Weighing the adverse effects animal-based products have to your body, proved by Vegan centennials, Vegan athletes, myself (self-professed vegan fit freak) and regular people thriving without eating meat, I wonder if my idea of going hard and strong is really complicit with the mainstream garbage that goes on in my Instagram feed or the misinformation on Youtube. I wonder how going hard looks like in the long run. I wonder if going hard is going to do anything to my heart health, or to facilitate proper digestion and give me healthy sleep.

Exercise and body-building in particular is wonderful, hypertrophy requires constant effort with emphasis on maximising muscle growth and fat loss and I love the journey to optimal physical strength. I wonder as I write this if there is a way to facilitate and draw attention to other types of growth that happen outside of the gym.

If I know for a fact that by going Vegan, I decrease my risk of cancer, and no longer feel lethargic as a result of being weighed down by animal toxins, then is that not a step towards achieving better overall lifestyle choices? There are tons of bodybuilders out there whose lifestyle and health are not at all optimally enhanced when looked at in the long-term, are they who I would want to look up to for sound health advice? No, I’d go towards a diet that has long-term benefits and I would plan my lifting around those types of benefits so that I can know that I will be around to enjoy the muscles I worked hard to achieve. Problem is that not many people see it as a way towards long health, lifting weights is actually a good way of reversing ageing in terms of preserving (and building) muscle mass.

Why not adopt an overall harm-minimising approach towards fitness (lifting weights included, except for muscle damage which is the point) which includes less of the conventionally accepted garbage on where your nutrients are coming from and more emphasis on what is going to be beneficial to you 10 years from now.