Bulking is harder than it looks, but you can get it done! Meet Coach Sawyer and get a sneak peek of vegan van life as he takes you through a full day of high-protein meals.
Transcript:
Sawyer:
All right, peeps, time to take you along for a ride in van style. And I want to show you guys what I eat on a daily basis as a vegan bodybuilder fitness coach. So I didn’t show this, but I had a couple of golden kiwis this morning before I worked out. And right now I’m in a bulking phase, so I’m going really, really slow. Very, very slight surplus. So it’s not going to be very, you know, crazy or cheaty or anything like that. I trained, did legs, and then I did a bowl of cereal, some kashi Go
chocolate crunch, about 100 grams of that. Some creatine, 8 grams of creatine, some blueberries, frozen blueberries, and a cup of soy milk. And this is what it looks like. Oh, and I poured some out. All right, that’s meal one. Also, you can see what Archer eats. He just had some V dog, but now he’s getting some peanut butter cookies, some puppy peanut butter cookies. I’ll show you what those are. Guess you guys have vegan dogs at home, too.
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Sawyer:
A lovely assistant. Oh, yes. We’re doing Morningstar chicken strips and some pasta sauce. Right now, Mia is preparing half a box of Barilla protein pasta each and some sauce on there and some spices and then the Morningstar chicken strips, which we love. Take a look. Yeah, show you what it looks like in a sec. This is very good. Mia made it. I appreciate you.
And she’s watching Great British Bake off, and I’m getting some work done. And, yeah, it’s really tasty. It’s got some hot sauce in it, too, which is, unfortunately for all you weenies, mandatory. Okay, so now I’m going to make myself a protein shake. I’m gonna do soy milk, this plant protein I just got from Walmart and PB2, and that’s pretty much it.
If I was feeling less lazy, might use a blender and add some berries to it, but I’m not, so that’s all I’m doing. All right, so it’s 8pm I still haven’t even finished my protein shake, to be honest. Getting close, though, and I still had quite a few calories and grams of protein to get. So decided I was going to do a bagel and cream cheese for, like, dessert.
And I was also going to do, like, a wrap or a couple of wraps with TVP and some cheese and a hot sauce and lettuce and these pea wraps that actually have decent amount of protein in them, 6 grams each. So I’m going to Come up a little bit short on the protein target, but it’s not a low target, so it’s okay. And I’ll show you what that looks like. These are the spices I’m going to add to the PvP along with some water.
It’s pretty much empty, by the way. This is imitation beef flavored bullion. 10 calories per teaspoon. I’m not going to worry about it. By the way. Usually when you hydrate tvp, you want to add some water to it and then heat it up again. We’re being lazy today, so I’m not going to do any of that. I’m just going to add some water to it and eat it, like cold.
Totally fine to do that. It’s just not as yummy. So here’s what it looks like. Add just enough that it gets all the granules wet and that they’re kind of like floating a little bit, and then it’s going to puff up. So I don’t want to go add too much. I don’t want it to be liquidy once it puffs up. I want it to just puff up and be kind of solid. So while that TVP is soaking, I’m going to make the bagels and cream cheese using Biolife cream cheese and try to get 30 grams on here because I’m kind of low
on calories today. But we’ll see how much that ends up being. You can see Archer really starts to pay attention when I bring out the bagels and cream cheese, because those are his favorite probably. I don’t know. Oh, actually, he’ll cry for pizza, which is. That’s a pretty extreme big action if you ask me. He’s for him. Wow, this might be a lot of cream cheese.
Most of the time when I eat bagels, I just eat them just how they are. Because again, really lazy over here. I don’t like to prepare stuff too often, but I’m low on calories today, so I need to fancy it up a little bit. You know, I figure I’m probably eating maybe, maybe like 5% less of my calories than I think I am, because a lot of that goes to Archer.
There’s nothing that I eat almost that he doesn’t get bites and tastes of. Okay. But that is done. That’s 30 grams of cream cheese on blueberry bagels. That’s crazy. I was just thinking to myself how realistic this stuff has gotten. It’s like basically what I remember cream cheese tasting like, want one vegan? All right. Okay. So finished the bagel.
It’s about 8:30 now. TVP is soaked up most of the water. Probably gonna season it again, but also not very hungry, so might give it a minute. At this point, I’ve been bulking for I don’t know how many months in a row. I have to check my spreadsheet, but it’s been more than a few months. And so I don’t really have that much hunger. A little bit more body fat, and that just means that my body kind of knows that I’m not in danger of dying, especially having gained that fat recently.
So, yeah, my appetite’s not crazy. And if you forget to eat, especially throughout the day and you’re trying to bulk, your life’s gonna be a little bit harder at night, as many of you know. But yeah, I’m probably gonna put together this wrap maybe in another half hour. But hopefully I can finish this protein shake in the meantime and it’ll be done.
Cool. When I first measured out this TVP, it was 20 grams and that was 82 grams now that it’s soaked. So make sure you’re weighing your stuff before you soak it because whenever you read a nutrition label, it is giving you the nutrition for the weight of that food in that state. Right. So if it’s a frozen meal, like whatever, it’s going to be in that state, in that frozen state.
And if you do end up cooking something before you measure it, it’s probably a good idea, kind of have a ballpark in terms of how much you actually made of that food. So if you say you made a box of pasta, but you only did like half the box, it’s probably a better idea to just like. Instead of trying to figure out like, oh, this is probably how much it weighs differently.
Probably a better idea to just eyeball how much you actually used of the box because the weight changes so much, it’s really hard to keep track of. But ideally, you’re weighing things before you cook them, before you, you know, change how they are. It’s gotten a little chilly in here, by the way. We just outside of Atlanta and never been here before, but it’s kind of chilly here in end of November.
Who would have thunk it? Here’s what the wrap looks like. It’s kind of a iceberg lettuce, TVP wildlife cheese, and some Frank’s buffalo sauce in this pita. And like I said, I’m not that hungry. Oh, we’re leaking. Not that hungry. But it’s gotta go down. It’s gotta happen. So it’s now 9 o’clock and I’ve eaten one of the wraps. I still have the protein shake a little bit left and I am very full.
I am not. I mean, it’s not. It’s not tasty, but I’m just. I just don’t feel like eating it. And this is the first day this has really been this bad. I think it’s probably because I recently increased my protein and this is one of the days I’ve gotten closer to that new target. The lesson here is if you are someone who has a higher appetite while they’re cutting or has lower appetite.
Appetite when they’re bulking or something like that, manipulating protein can help you reach your calorie goals. I might have to decrease my protein target. We’ll see. Because I’m not even at it right now. I’m about 20 grams under and I’m still like really full. 20 grams under. Even once I eat all this stuff. That is so, yeah, I think I may have set the bar a little bit too high.
I was kind of trying to see what it would be like to do it in terms of results, but if it’s going to be a struggle with appetite all the time, that’s not going to be worth it. Yeah, I might have to lower it, but I’m not going to do it too reactively. Give it a little bit more time. See if it happens too many more times. And if it does, yeah, I’ll probably have to lower it. All right, guys, so it’s about where it was about 10:30 when I finished my last bite of the meal.
Man, that was kind of tough. That’s the hardest it’s been to eat something all year. Probably didn’t mean for the video to be about struggles with eating food, but there it is. I’ll show you guys the full macro breakdown and feel free to ask any questions or share any comments that you have for me. Thanks for tuning in. Like, comment, subscribe and I’ll see you guys on the next one. Peace.
