Vegan Bodybuilding Contest Prep: Marcella’s 8 Week Update

I first posted on my progress here and Derek posted a brief update here. I began this journey, 8 months after the birth of my son, at 29.1% body fat and significantly weaker than I had been pre-pregnancy with serious post-pregnancy spine and pelvis problems due to scoliosis. I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to be able to lift heavy again or get back to where I’d been…

Six months have passed. I’m now at 16% body fat and stronger than ever! Am I going to be competition ready in 7 weeks? I still have a minimum of 4% body fat to lose in the remaining 7 weeks, as well as some loose skin on my stomach (again – thanks pregnancy!) so I’ll just have to continue to do the absolute best I can and see where that takes me. I’m already damn proud of myself!

Finding the time to train has been hard. Getting through Derek’s insane high-volume workouts has been hard – sometimes I’ve had to rely on fantasies of knocking him out upon my return home just to get through them. You know what hasn’t been hard, really? The diet. Up until about a month ago we’ve continued to eat a whole foods, plant-based diet that was high in carbohydrates from sweet potatoes, quinoa, beans and other wholesome things. You can see a sample day of our diet in the article linked above.

Not only have I lost 11% fat and gained seven pounds of muscle doing this over the first 5 months of our contest prep, Derek has also gained muscle and been the leanest he has ever been at this stage.

We have done this with minimal supplementation, far far less protein powder than is common, because we want to demonstrate what is possible with nutrition from whole plant sources. Because I know you’re wondering: Derek now takes a maximum of 3 scoops and I take a maximum of 2 scoops of PlantFusion protein daily and we started out with less. PlantFusion is our raw multi-source protein of choice, and the company has been incredibly supportive of all the vegan athletes competing as part of PlantBuilt – please support them if you’re looking for a new source of vegan protein powders but remember that the vast majority of your protein should come from whole foods!

In the past month, we’ve restricted whole grains and sweet potatoes and fruit – for example, I was having a BIG sweet potato with lunch every day as per this recipe and am now having an itty bitty potato. My calories have also dropped in stages from 2500 to 1800 per day. At six weeks out, I will begin carb cycling and cut calories further and I expect that to be hard to do. However, if you compare our vegan contest prep menu I mentioned above to these you’ll see just how fortunate we are!

It has been interesting to see this process, of building muscle and losing fat within a set period of time, unfold. And that’s the key – it is a process, that begins counterintuitively with eating a lot of calories to stimulate your metabolism and then continues with gradual adjustments to caloric intake and macronutrient profiles over a period of time – it’s surprisingly logical and scientific and that may be why it appeals to me! Most interesting has been the contrast between the success I’ve achieved thus far, with Derek coaching me along using these methods, versus what happened to me pre-pregnancy when I had been eating far fewer calories and doing far more cardio than I do now…for months…without making any progress whatsoever. I could not get past about 20% body fat. After mocking Derek mercilessly for his seemingly arcane contest preparation strategies I am now a believer.

Derek will be posting a progress update in the next couple of days, detailing our training. We’re also sharing all of our complete meal plans, fat loss strategies, and nutrition guidelines to download as well as our library of exercise and cooking dem0s and more at our online personal training studio! You can preview all of the videos here as well as view some that are completely free and, as always, the diet planner we’ve used to get here is free to download.