9 minute read
Robert Cheeke: Co-author of The Plant Based Athlete
T.COLIN CAMPBELL, PhD
Congratulations on publishing The Plant Based Athlete! How has life been treating you since it’s release?
Thank you so much! This has been a lifetime in the making for me, as someone who has wanted to be an author since I was 8 years old, so it has been a dream come true. I am in my 26th year as a plant-based athlete, and this has been the biggest project I have ever completed. The PlantBased Athlete became a New York Times Bestseller, a #1 International Bestseller, a Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller, and a #1 Amazon Bestseller in 4 categories (Nutrition, Exercise and Fitness, Vegan Diets, and Sports Psychology). It has been a whirlwind past couple of months, but I am embracing it as I fulfilled my lifelong dream of becoming a bestselling author.
The book is co-written by Matt Frazier, founder of No Meat Athlete. How did that partnership come about?
I have known Matt Frazier, the founder of No Meat Athlete, for more than ten years. Matt manages perhaps the largest plantbased athlete community in the world, and he was my first choice as a co-author. I presented this idea of The Plant-Based Athlete to him, with the goal of telling the compelling stories of the world’s greatest plantbased athletes, and he enthusiastically agreed to collaborate on this book with me. The collaboration between Vegan Bodybuilding & Fitness and No Meat Athlete has been a long time coming, pairing two of the largest plant-based athlete communities in the world together, which resulted in publishing one of the bestselling books in the world, and it has been an honor to partner with my long-time friend on this meaningful project.
It looks from the back cover that you have quite a few high-profile endorsements...
Yeah, our book features amazing plant-based athletes, including Scott Jurek, Fiona Oakes, James Wilks, Orla Walsh, Rich Roll, and names you’d expect to see included in a book like this such as Rip Esselstyn, Dotsie Bausch, and Brendan Brazier, and the experts who endorsed our book are just as impressive. We’re fortunate to have the support of iconic members of the plant-based, health, and nutrition communities, including Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Brenda Davis, RD, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr., Chloe Coscarelli, John Robbins, Dr. Will Bulsiewicz, and a bunch of others. It is such a rewarding feeling to have their sincere support of The Plant-Based Athlete.
Dr. Michael Greger, MD wrote the Foreword, is that right?
We are very fortunate and grateful to have the foreword for The PlantBased Athlete written by Dr. Michael Greger from NutritionFacts.org, who has been a role model and inspiration to both me and Matt for years. Having experts like Greger, Campbell, Esselstyn, Robbins, Davis, and so many others, including the wide range of elite athletes, makes The PlantBased Athlete a well-rounded resource that nearly 100 athletes and experts contributed to.
How long did the book take to write, and what was your process?
Believe it or not, I first wrote the proposal for The PlantBased Athlete in 2013, when it was nearly accepted by a publisher back then, but it did not end up landing a publishing deal, and it sat on the back burner while I wrote and published other books, including Shred It! and Plant-Based Muscle. Then, in 2018, I revisited the idea of releasing this book, wrote a new proposal, got a new agent, landed Matt as a co-author, and then I went to work writing the book in 2019. The book took about a year to write, with many, many months (nearly another year) rewriting and editing until it was finally completed. We submitted the manuscript exactly a full year before it was published. The whole process took a little more than two years.
As well as information, facts, motivation, anecdotes and meal plans, there are also lots of recipes - where did you source these from? Are they recipes you use personally?
One of the most exciting aspects about The PlantBased Athlete, from my perspective, is that the recipes were contributed by the elite plant-based athletes featured in the book. Therefore, the recipes are not just mine, and not just Matt’s, but readers get to see the exact recipes that worldclass plant-based athletes actually use. Matt and I also use the recipes from the book, and in fact, during our book launch, I was enjoying some of the recipes from the back of the book to fuel our very busy book launch. In addition to the recipes contributed by the athletes, there is also a Day In The Life section where many of the world’s greatest plantbased athletes share an insiders look into their entire day, from their breakfast, to their pre-and post-workout meals, their workouts, lunch, dinner, dessert, and even their routines and techniques to effectively recover from workouts. There are about 25 day in the life routines shared in the book, and more than 60 recipes.
How did you get started on a plant based journey?
I became a plant-based athlete in 1995, as a 15-yearold 5-sport athlete when I got involved in animal rights. I became vegan for the animals, and as someone who grew up on a farm, and lived on a farm for more than 20 years, reducing animal suffering became a passion of mine, and I turned into a vegan athlete, advocate, and activist. I am still driven by animal rights today, more than a quarter century after becoming vegan. Over the course of my plant-based athlete career, I went from being a champion vegan runner to a champion vegan bodybuilder, gaining 100 pounds in the process. My plant-based diet and vegan athlete lifestyle saw me grow from weighing 120 pounds at age 15 to weighing 220 pounds at age 41, and at times, I feel like I’m just getting started.
Advice for getting people started?
For those who are just embarking on a plant-based athlete lifestyle, I would recommend reading our book, The Plant-Based Athlete, because it is the number one resource for plant-based athletes, and represents my 25-plus years experience and my co-author’s 10-plus years experience as plantbased athletes, complete with nutrition information, meal plans, recipes, day in the life routines, grocery shopping lists, athlete stories, and more. You can also visit our websites, www.veganbodybuilding.com and www.nomeatathlete.com for decades worth of articles about building muscle, burning fat, and improving endurance on a plant-based diet.
When it comes to training, are there any specific foods that you consume? And why?
Meal timing around workouts can be important, and I recommend eating complex carbohydrates before a workout, such as foods like oats, rice, beans, vegetables, or fruits (my favorite), and a balanced nutrition approach of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats following a workout. Basically, you want to have adequate fuel before a workout, and carbohydrate is our body’s preferred fuel source, and you want to replenish glycogen (carbohydrates), electrolytes (carbohydrates), amino acids to repair muscle (protein), and calorie dense foods with essential nutrients like Omega-3 (fats, as well as protein and carbohydrates for other calorie dense options) after a workout. I recommend eating slower releasing (longer lasting energy) carbohydrates like oats, potatoes, yams, rice and beans an hour or two before a workout, but fruit (quick energy to be used up right away), such as bananas, stone fruit (peaches, apricots, etc.), and berries immediately before a workout.
C’mon then – we all want to know – how do you get those gains!
I have found success as a plant-based athlete because of three primary reasons:
1. I learned to believe in myself at a young age, and whether it was becoming a champion athlete or a bestselling author, I’ve always believed in myself. If you don’t believe that you can accomplish something, nobody else is going to believe in you either. It starts with you, and the actions you take to support your goals.
2. I always found ways to connect the dots ahead of time. I learned that actions taken today will impact tomorrow, but will also impact a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, and five, ten, or twenty years from now. I’ve always been focused on consistency and maximizing the 1,440 minutes we have each day, working toward meaningful goals. Connecting the dots in advance allowed me to visualize my future, even when I was a skinny vegan farm kid dreaming of being bigger and stronger someday. I believed it into existence, and then worked incredibly hard, with transparency and accountability, turning my goals and dreams into my reality.
3. I learned the importance of nutrient density and calorie density, and that enabled me to have control over my outcomes, determining whether I would gain weight, lose weight, or stay the same, and that served me well as a runner, as a bodybuilder, and as an athlete in general.
More than anything, I was able to discover what I was passionate about (saving animals and building muscle) and I worked at it day in and day out, and the results tend to speak for themselves after a lifetime of commitment to those endeavors.
What’s next for Mr Cheeke in the Plant based world?
After the success of The Plant-Based Athlete, I would love to embark on a professional writing career, writing books for the rest of my life. There will likely be at least one follow-up book to The Plant-Based Athlete, and then I have many other topics I want to write about, from children’s books to personal development books. I’ve written four books about the vegan fitness lifestyle, and I think I’m ready to tackle some new topics, and I look forward to seeing what’s next. For now, The Plant-Based Athlete is still very new, having been released on June 15, 2021, and I am looking forward to landing as many international translation deals as possible. We’ve already landed deals for translation in German, Chinese (Taiwan), and Italian, and we hope to get our book translated into many more languages soon.
Buy the book here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Plant-Based-Athlete-Game-Changing-Approach-Performance/dp/0063042010
