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VEGAN BADASS PATRIK
BABOUMIAM: “I COMPETE TO CHANGE THE WORLD”
“I have won the German
Log-lifting Championship every year since it was held for the first time in
2009. I have set three world records…after turning vegan in 2011.”
Name: Patrik Baboumian
Occupation: Speaker, Author, Sport Psychologist, Media Consultant
City/State/Country: Berlin, Germany
Age: 35
Height: 5’6″
Type of Competing: Strongman
Weight: 282lbs
Website/Social Media:
www.veganbadass.com
www.facebook.com/patrik.baboumian.fanpage
Q: Who was your hero as
a child?
The Incredible HULK. I was
deeply fascinated by his unattainable strength. As he represented a more
childlike mental state led by an incorruptible “just” anger. And being
practically unstoppable, he was the perfect character to identify with for a
child growing up in the early 1980s in Iran (a place of war and uncertainty).
Q: Do you meditate?
I have recently started using meditation as a means to calm down and find a
deeper mental focus.
Q: What are your hobbies
outside of fitness?
I produce electronic music in
my home recording studio.
Q: What inspired you to
start lifting weights as a young man?
I was a fan of pro wrestling
when I was in my mid-teens, and as I was dreaming of a future wrestling career,
I started lifting weights to develop strength. Soon, strength training became
my number-one priority, and the wrestling thing was forgotten. I started
competing at powerlifting when I was 16.
As I made great progress, I
stuck to strength-sports for many years, trying out different sports like
powerlifting, bodybuilding, and arm-wrestling. I was quite
successful on some level. For instance, I won the junior overall championship
title at the 1999 International German Bodybuilding Championship of the IFBB.
Q: What uncommon
activity do you schedule into your daily routine?
I do long late-night walks
every night with my companion dog, Basco, to relax, calm down, and develop new
ideas for the coming day. I live on the countryside near Berlin, and the nights
are really quiet here. I love to be in nature when everyone else sleeps. I enjoy
the quiet, tranquil atmosphere without the noise of human life that is
omnipresent at daytimes.
Q: What are some of your
strength competition feats?
- Won the
lightweight German title twice in 2007 and 2009
- Runner-up
heavyweight champion in 2010
- German champion in
2011, acquiring the title of “Germany’s Strongest Man”
- National
Heavyweight Top 5 in 2007 and 2009 (as a lightweight)
- National
Heavyweight Top 3 from 2010-2014
- Set a lightweight
world record in the log-lift* in 2009, lifting 165kg
- Placed 4th at Log-lifting
Worlds in Vilnius 2011, lifting 185kg.
- Won the German
Log-lifting Championship every year since it was held for the first time
in 2009
- Set three world
records at the front-hold (20kg/1m26sec), the keg-lift (150kg), and the
yoke-walk (555kg for 10m) after turning vegan in 2011.
*My personal best at the
log-lift is 200kg in training.
Q: Why did you initially
become
vegetarian
in 2005? In what ways has your health improved?
For many people I know,
external pressures (media, friends, etc.) have played a crucial role in their
decision for a vegetarian
diet or vegan
lifestyle.
For me, that wasn’t the case.
One day out of nowhere, I started to reflect on my personal worldview and
actions.
I realized that my meat
consumption wasn’t compatible with the compassion I felt for the animals.
It was at this conclusion I
decided to stop eating
meat. The
decision-making was done in a rather level-headed way. There were no
emotional, external factors that influenced me.
What I realized after thinking
about it was that all my life, starting in childhood, I always had felt very
compassionate for animals. This was expressed in my need to help
animals that were in danger or distress.
For example, I tried to nurse
an injured bird back to health, and let it stay over winter at my home. Another
time, I spent a whole day with a former girlfriend to save tadpoles from a
puddle that was drying out.
We provided refuge for a little
abandoned hedgehog (Harald) one autumn to let him hibernate in our house, and
set him free the next spring. One day, I realized that when I see a bird suffer
in front of my eyes, I have the urge to help it. And that this is inconsistent
with me going into a supermarket the same day and buying chicken breasts.
It makes absolutely no sense
that I feel compassion for the bird in the first case and that I don’t care at
all about the product that I consume in the latter case. I understood
relatively fast that in the one case, I saw the suffering directly before my
eyes, and in the other case, it just wasn’t visible.
I also repressed the fact that
my own consumer behavior lead to animal suffering, just like the greatest part
of our society does every day. But I didn’t want to carry on with that. I
realized that I could not reconcile this with my own conscience, and I had to
make a decision. The decision could lead in two directions.
One possibility could have been
to decide not to be compassionate anymore, and to say: “It’s important to me to
be able to eat meat and not care about the animals.” The other possibility was
to follow my compassion and change something about my life. I had to stop
letting my habits as a consumer be responsible for the death of animals.
“To be honest I was very
anxious how switching to a plant-based
diet would
affect my performances before I went vegan. The interesting thing was that none of
my fears became true.”
I had expected that everything
would be very hard for me to get used to. But that wasn’t the case. It was much
easier than I had anticipated. Above all things, this desire for dairy products
was swept away within one or two weeks. In retrospect, this is hardly
surprising because when you’re addicted to something and you’re abstinent for a
while, the craving goes away after some time.
Within two weeks, I had no urge
to drink milk anymore. I had no yearning to consume anything that contained
milk or dairy products. The second thing was my performance. I had assumed that
it would suffer, but nothing of that sort happened. My sporting prowess
was totally stable, the only thing that changed was that my overall sense of
well-being noticeably improved.
I suffered
from constant heartburn
while consuming dairy products, and was chronically, overly acidified due to
the gigantic amounts of animal-based protein that I consumed.
It’s important to know that
animal protein contains especially high amounts of sulfur-containing amino
acids.
This leads to an
over-acidification of the body. This becomes evident when one gets heartburn, and the fiendish thing about that
situation is that at first it helps to drink milk.
The stomach has something to do
in this moment, and the acid gets balanced. Though that was my reasoning, I
didn’t realize that the heartburn was caused by dairy products in the first
place.
I only understood that when I
started to omit dairy products that the heartburn disappeared after two or
three days. I asked myself what had happened. Before I switched to a vegan
diet, I had feared that I would die of heartburn without milk.
“I had assumed that dairy
goods were a remedy for
heartburn,
whereas in reality, they are the cause for it.”
So for the record – and let us
savor this one: Nothing of all the things I had feared had become true. What
actually happened was the opposite of everything I had expected.
“My athletic performance
stayed stable and even improved in the long run. Today, I am significantly
stronger than I used to be. And my well-being improved dramatically.”
My acid-base balance is
regulated, the heartburn improved – these were naturally only
two aspects. If you have a balanced acid alkaline metabolism, there are a whole
lot of other bodily effects that are very positive. For example, you
recover faster after athletic training. A balanced acid-base metabolism is
important for the body to be able to absorb nutrients.
“If your body is too
acidic, it can’t digest protein at optimal levels, and for a strength
athlete who is concerned about a sufficient
protein supply,
this is a nightmare.”
As a strength athlete, you are
anxious to consume huge amounts of protein. Your goal is to develop a
considerable quantity of muscle, and this demands a substantial amount of building
material, which after all, is protein.
When your body is hyper acidic
and consequently can’t absorb protein, this is actually one of the worst
things that can happen to you as a strength athlete. By changing to a vegan diet and omitting
animal protein,
this has shifted to a gigantic part in a positive direction.
Q: Sample meal
plan
for bulking up?
Please remember that this
schedule was planned according to my needs. You will, of course, find all
the listed meals, smoothies, and shakes in my book, “VRebellion,” that can be
ordered online.
- 9:00 –
Breakfast: Baboumian Shake
- 11:00 – Between
meals: Snack assortment of nuts
- 2:00 – Lunch: Bean
soup with rice
- 2:30 – One liter
of soy cocoa as dessert
- 3:00 – Between
meals: Smoothie
- 5:00 –
Pre-workout: Protein shake with 50 grams soy isolate and a vegan calcium
preparation with D2 (D3 isn’t vegan)
- 5:00 – Workout: I
drink water or a homemade Isotonic drink
- 7:00 –
Post-workout: Smoothie with creatine, 50 grams multicomponent protein,
vitamin C, zinc, and magnesium
- 8:00 – Dinner:
Tofu with rice and sweet and sour sauce
- 10:00 – Snack:
Peanuts
- Before going to
bed: Protein shake with linseed oil
Q: Favorite pre-workout
meal?
I do not eat before a workout
to keep my blood-sugar-level stable. Instead, I just drink a water-based
protein shake with plant-based
proteins.
Q: Philosophy on supplements, and which ones you take?
“I have stopped using a lot
of supplements as I went vegan, and I feel that I have overrated a lot
of supplements in the past.”
I still use some supplements
that I feel help optimize my results, such as:
- Creatine
- Beta-alanine
- Nutritional yeast
- B12
- Fenugreek
- Ceylon cinnamon
(for anti-oxidants)
- Glutamine
Q: If you have to pick
only three exercises, what would they be?
I think that these three
multi-joint exercises are the most effective movements when it comes to
building mass and strength. They are also quite functional movements.
Q: How has your training
regimen
changed over the years?
Not so much [laughs]. I have
always loved to train heavy and build strength. I love functional movements. I
have always trained according to Mike Mentzer’s heavy duty principles. As I
began training more with strongman disciplines and less with gym-based
routines, I still stuck to the fundamental principles I always believed in.
Today, 22 years after touching
a dumbbell for the first time, I’m still able to improve. So I assume I will go
on training this way for some more time.
Q: What unique tips can
you share that have led to your success in strength training?
My main advantage over most of
the athletes that I have been able to best in all these years have been more on
the mental side.
“As I am quite small for a
strongman competing in the heavyweight division, my only chance to overcome the
physical disadvantage has been to simply be mentally stronger.”
One thing is that I literally
never give up.
For example, I have won the title
of Germany’s strongest man only three weeks after a muscle-tear in my left
calf, barely being able to walk until three days before the competition just by
training around the injury and doing everything in my power to recover as
quickly as possible.
Another thing is that I know
exactly why I do what I do. As a vegan
athlete
fighting the common
stereotypes of vegans
being skinny, weak guys, I consider myself more of a warrior with purpose than
an athlete.
“I do not compete to win, I
compete to change the world.”
Q: What are the three
biggest trends you see in fitness right now?
have the feeling that the
industry realizes that there is a big movement towards a more health-based
approach to fitness and strength-training. I see a
revolution according to the “stardom” within the industry, away from the
pro-bodybuilders and toward the more everyday guy type personalities fuelled by
social media. And I see a big trend towards outdoor training, bodyweight
training, and more functional training approaches away from the gym and toward
the street or nature.
Q: Tell us about your
new book.
I wrote “VRebellion” to answer
frequently asked questions about vegan nutrition and how my diet enables me to
gain weight, power, and muscles. I also wanted to provide a little insight into
the unique particularities of my vegan diet, because I simply think that there
are certain things I do differently.
Maybe I can give one or two
useful hints to people interested in the vegan
lifestyle
regarding how they can understand what it involves in practical terms that
would save them time and trouble.
Q: What advice do you
have for someone who wants to try vegetarian bodybuilding or powerlifting, and struggles with the
same fears and hesitations you had at first?
I believe that there is a
simple error in reasoning that plays a big role in a lot of the fears and
misconceptions people have regarding what a vegan
lifestyle truly
is: as soon as somebody mentions that he or she is living on a diet that
is based purely on plant-based products, people immediately assume greens and
vegetables.
The first picture that comes to
mind when one hears the word “vegan” is a diet consisting mainly of vegetables
and salad. We know that vegetables and salad consist mainly of water, so
presumably one has to eat gigantic amounts of vegetables and salad in order to
gain any weight. That’s why many people probably ask themselves how one can
get so muscular while on a vegan diet.
How is this even possible?
Well, you simply have to think
about the fact that a vegan diet does not consist of salad and
vegetables alone, but also food like nuts or legumes with high calorie content.
Even if we consider the food that many meat-eaters rely on as a source of
energy, we find that much of it is of plant origin as well.
Whether it is potatoes or
oatmeal, rice or noodles made from durum wheat semolina, there are plenty of
wonderful sources of energy for the body that are not meat.
Peanuts, for example, are a
wonderful source of protein. They contain a higher amount of protein than a steak, and have a higher energy
density than most animal products.
The peanut contains lots of
vegetable fats, as well. It’s wonderfully suited to supply us with calories and
with protein. I could go on and on about all kinds
of other legumes like beans, lentils, or peas. We would find that it is quite easy
to supply one’s protein needs.
For more ideas about the benefits of
vegan diet for athletes,
watch this video - Vegan Diets for Athletes! | Better
Endurance and a Healthier Heart
Author
Bio:
Chris
Willitts (creator of V3), is the founder and owner of Vegetarian Bodybuilding.
V3 Vegetarian Bodybuilding System is a
mixture of science and author’s advice, providing users with
optimal diet and exercise. This system is designed for vegans and vegetarians
only.
A
lot of research has been put in this program. Furthermore, a lot of
professional bodybuilders and athletes tried and tested the program, praising
its progressiveness and efficiency.
The
program is about taking control of your own body and health according to your
potential and needs. And worry not; you’ll get plenty of proteins with this
system. It will boost you with energy, and you’ll feel just a strong as any
carnivore would (perhaps even stronger, depending on how much you invest in
your exercise). It avoids vitamins deficiency and provides you with a lot of
proteins, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
Instead
of saying things like “I think a plant-based diet is good for athletes and
bodybuilders,” the V3 Vegetarian Bodybuilding System claims “I know a
plant-based diet is good for athletes and bodybuilders, and I have results to
prove it.”
To
find out more, visit the website at V3 Bodybuilding – Benefits of Vegan Diet for Athletes
