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Talking About Eating

• August 2008
• Hi Steph Vegan Training

Hi Steph
Can u pls post something on your blog about veganism.
Why vegan?
What’s on your food list when training and climbing ?
I’m a vegan climber myself and I’m very happy that there r vegan athletes like u r .
Be good 🙂
XVXDX Daniel

Dear Daniel,
I’ve been vegan for about six years. A year or two before that I had a funny experience in Patagonia.
It’s much more first world down there, in the town of El Chalten, nowadays. But when I first went there in 1996, you couldn’t even buy real stove fuel for your camp stove. We would travel down with a couple bottles of clean white gas, saving it for climbing attempts. That fuel burned clean and perfectly, making a very hot flame and not using up very much gas. We couldn’t afford to waste it for basecamp use. So for daily camping in the basecamp, we would go to the gas pump in town and buy some unleaded gas pumped into an old soda bottle.

For some reason this gasoline was colored green or purple. Burning this fuel in an MSR XGK (which is designed to be able to handle bad fuel) was a total nightmare. The stove had to be primed over and over, and constantly created a black carbon layer which clogged the tiny holes. Then the stove had to be taken apart over and over and cleaned, and then primed over and over, etc., etc. When it finally would start to burn, the flame was weak and not very hot, and it went through way more fuel than normal. Which meant running out frequently, and hiking down three hours to the gas station and hiking back up with more bottles full of purple gas.

Since I had a lot of time to reflect on this while coating myself black with carbon deposits and taking the stove apart every time I wanted to make some hot water, I thought about how humans really aren’t different than stoves. We take fuel, and we burn it and convert it into energy. And then I thought about how interesting it is that the stove actually would burn on the bad fuel, but it worked half as well, became very dirty, clogged up a lot, and used up twice as much fuel. On the good fuel, it burned efficiently–super hot, clean and with half the amount of fuel. And I thought, am I burning the right fuel in my body? Probably not! So what would be the best fuel for the best performance…..? This started me off on a (sort of) scientific effort to check out different nutrition styles and decide if they were making me healthier and a better athlete….or not.

At the time (seven years ago), the things that I thought sounded pretty reasonable were the Zone diet, the Blood Type Diet, the Atkins Diet, and the classic “lowfat/no fat” approach. For years, especially hanging out in Patagonia and Hueco Tanks all winter, I had been conditioned by my fellow climbers to believe that you must eat meat to climb and hike strong. So I never even considered the vegan diet! It’s funny how much the mentality has changed since then!

I read books about each of these eating programs, and tried each one for three months. One thing they all had in common was cutting out refined sugar, so I just did that across the board.

Basically, the only significant result I experienced was that on the Atkins diet I lost huge amounts of weight quickly, which I liked a lot at first. It was great when I was climbing at Rifle, not so good when I wanted to carry a backpack full of cams up the hill at Indian Creek (I had to put on 5 pounds to have the energy to do that, seriously), and totally backfired when it was time to go to Patagonia, and I immediately gained tons of weight and felt very bad when I got home…..So it turned out not as great as it seemed.

In fact, I felt so bad that I decided to do a cleansing fast. I got the recipe from a river rafter neighbor. Basically, you eat lemon juice and maple syrup mixed with water. And salt water in the morning. Yum!!

I did that for a week or so, and oddly enough it was hard to actually start eating again. Everything sounded gross. I was unbelievably finicky, and found myself eating things like cooked five grain cereal, plain. And quinoa with lentils and yams, plain. I had no idea why I was craving stuff like that. Honestly, it was kind of hard to even start drinking coffee, but since I am a devout coffee drinker, I kind of forced it down til I got used to it again! Anyway, after about two weeks of that I suddenly noticed…..”Hey! I think I’m a vegan!” This was extra bizarre for me, because veganism was the one eating system I had categorically dismissed as hopeless for athletic performance. But it seemed like what was going on, and I was feeling healthy and great, so I figured I may as well go with it and see. The one thing not vegan was the half-and-half I was still putting in my coffee.

After a few months, I was really amazed. I was climbing better, running better, having better yoga sessions, and feeling really strong and healthy. It was a significant increase, much more than with any of the other eating programs I had tried. So I decided being vegan seemed like it worked pretty well for rock climbing. I did still have doubts about long endurance. I wondered if I would do well on big walls or in an alpine environment. I was truly stunned when I freed El Cap in a day, and then went to Patagonia and climbed Torre Egger in a day. Everyone in Patagonia was totally surprised that I was vegan too. We all thought you wouldn’t have the stamina you’d need in the mountains…..but apparently you do. Interestingly enough, I also found that I needed much less food than I used to, and than my partners, which is a real advantage for those types of climbing where food weight is a significant element of strategy.

A few years after I became vegan, I realized that my athletic ability had made a huge jump, and I liked that a lot. But I also started to learn a lot about the mass meat industry. It really affected me a lot, because I wasn’t really educated about it before. But the more I learned, and the more I thought about what it means to live compassionately, I realized that I simply couldn’t feel good about eating animal products that I was not personally responsible for. It bothered me that I was still using half-and-half, a dairy product, so I started using soy milk in my coffee. I make soy cappuccinos every morning, and plain powdered soymilk if I’m big walling, which is almost as good.

So although my switch to veganism began as a search for better health and performance, reducing the harm I cause to other creatures has become equally or more important to me. It’s lucky that I get all those benefits anyway by eating vegan, and don’t have to choose 🙂 I think a lot about the most simple idea of what it is to be a good person….someone once summed it up as “Be good. Do good.” That’s pretty simple. I think that is a goal really worth aspiring to. Not causing other living creatures to live unnatural, painful lives seems like a big, simple step in the right direction.

Kate C wrote a nice comment on this site, under Love and Breakfast, and talked about having trouble with weight gain as a vegetarian. I do think it’s important to eat very well, for everyone, vegan or otherwise. If we step back a little, and take it simple, I think we naturally will eat more healthfully. Almost all prepared foods have sugar, corn syrup, and refined grains in them. If you become vegetarian, you might still find yourself eating white bread, white sugar, corn syrup, and white rice. In fact, you might eat more of them than before. This is guaranteed weight gain, and not very good for your health or performance.

I try to avoid all refined grains and all sweeteners except for fruit, and I also avoid wheat flour and too many bread products. I love dark greens, such as kale, chard and spinach, and whole foods like quinoa, beans, lentils and tofu. In the summer, grilled tofu and grilled corn, mushrooms and red onions are really good! It’s amazing and annoying to me how many products, even things like organic tomato soup, turn out to contain sugar or corn syrup if you read the label. At first you will have to spend some time reading food labels, or making decisions to stop eating foods that require you to read the label. But eventually you will find the things you like and always buy, and shopping is as easy as ever, and usually cheaper too.

If you get really curious about nutrition, you can start researching a vegetable-based diet, and you will find some amazing things…..for example, you can actually absorb more useable calcium from cooked dark green vegetables than from cow’s milk, even though the measurable calcium appears higher in the milk. And your body can only absorb a small amount of protein at a time. Any more than that is just wasted. That amount is about equivalent to the protein in 3 ounces of meat…..As a vegan, I get more protein than I need, and it’s not something I even put much thought into. It’s all pretty fascinating, the more you research.

I guess the only tricky part is the fact that eating is fun, and it’s sometimes hard to draw the line between stove fuel efficency eating and recreational eating 🙂 I think that when you make a strong decision to change your eating habits, and you start to enjoy the results, your tastes change too. Occasionally I taste something with refined sugar in it, and I actually don’t like the quality of the sweetness! My tastes have changed, because I used to be a sugar junkie. No matter what your choices about eating systems or eating styles, being more conscious about food and what you eat and why, can only have good results…..

Thanks to all of you guys for being conscious eaters! As climbers, we are among the athletes who probably think most about performance on both the physical and the spiritual levels.
xx Steph