Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life

could this be? Was I simply eating too much, more than I could burn? Succumbing to this conventional way of thinking, I tried what most people do to lose fat: I cut back on the amount of food I ate. After a few weeks of consuming less, the situation was even worse: I gained fat faster, plus fatigue was now a real concern.
     
    As it turned out, the cause of this fat accumulation was also the cause of the previous year’s compromised sleeps: stress. In this case, physical stress—more than my body could deal with. Had I trained the optimal amount, an amount that my body could recover from, I would have remained lean. As I later learned, the amount of training I was doing stressed my body to the brink. The result was that my cortisol levels were chronically elevated for two months—long enough to gain noticeable body fat.
     
    My adrenal glands were exhausted and my hormonal health sharply declined. Unaware of this, I had reduced my nutrient intake at a time when stress on my body was already extremely high, and so exacerbated the problem. Nutritional stress was now again also an issue. Had I eaten nutrient-rich whole foods instead of less food, I would have helped my body recover from the demands of training. In essence, I would have remained leaner by eating more.
     
    Stress, including not being adequately nourished, results in the accumulation of body fat.
     
     
    My diet at the time consisted primarily of complex carbohydrates, with a modest amount of protein and almost zero fat. A diet rich in essential fatty acids, like those found in whole flaxseed and hemp foods, would have provided the extra fuel my body needed to function more efficiently, thereby reducing stress.
     
    As I found, even physical stress in the form of overexercising can cause fat to accumulate, so it’s no wonder that stress from other sources is a catalyst for obesity. The body perceives not eating enough nutrient-rich foods as stressful. So, yes, there are situations when eating more will reduce your body-fat percentage. The quality of your diet, however, is paramount. The Thrive Diet is based on nutrient-rich whole foods. Their nutritional stress-reduction properties will help you spend more time in the delta phase of sleep and help you achieve an ideal body weight. Eating only nutrient-rich foods will lead to permanent lower body fat.
     
    If your goal is to lose body fat, ask yourself why it is that you have more body fat than you want. Are you overweight because you consume more calories than your body’s activity level can utilize? If so, then a reduction in total calories consumed will help. However, if you are one of the many people who have tried a wide array of diets with only marginal success, it’s time to get to the root of the problem. The guidelines in this book will help you minimize nutritional stress to optimize health. After that is accomplished, your body fat will decrease. That is, with the Thrive Diet, it is not necessary to specifically target body fat.
     

the toll of stress
     
    Initially manifesting as fatigue and weight gain, stress, if untreated, can lead to much more serious conditions. Now accepted as one of the leading causes of illness, stress has been shown to precipitate many diseases. The ability to weaken the immune system is one feat stress is renowned for, and compromised immune function leaves the body susceptible to sickness.
     
    Have you ever noticed that when you work to meet a deadline—as the pressure mounts and stress rises—sickness is least likely to strike? Then, once you’ve met the deadline, you get sick. Or perhaps a day or two after a long, taxing race, illness sets in. The body is capable of rising to the occasion in a stressful environment; indeed, the more stress, the better the performance—short term. But when the project is finished and the stress is alleviated, the body lets itself get sick. We are equipped with a mechanism that is quite effective at warding off infection until we rest. It assumes that our immune system will be better able to deal with sickness when we are resting and relaxed than if we are in the midst of a pressing time, and it’s right. From this, you might conclude that high stress all the time is the solution. Not so. The severity by which the immune system is suppressed is directly linked to the duration and intensity of the stress. Meaning, the longer the body is stressed, the greater is the potential for a big problem.
     
    The body can tolerate