These Jacked Vegan Powerlifters Are Defying Stereotypes
Goodbye, ‘soy boys.’ Hello, swole vegans.
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These Jacked Vegan Powerlifters Are Defying Stereotypes
Goodbye, ‘soy boys.’ Hello, swole vegans.Joseph Winters, Grist Published July 12, 2024 | Comments (40)
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Over the past two years, Gigi Balsamico has won first place at more than a dozen strongman competitions in the eastern United States: Maidens of Might, Rebel Queen, War of the North, Third Monkey Throwdown. These events typically involve six to eight weight-lifting challenges on which competitors are scored based on criteria like the amount of weight they can handle and how many reps they can do.
Last month, Balsamico came out at the top of her weight class at Delaware’s Baddest. There, she hoisted four 100- to 150-pound sandbags onto her shoulders after completing six reps of a 315-pound dead lift. As the pièce de résistance, she harnessed herself to a Chevy Silverado — which itself was attached to a food truck trailer — and dragged it 40 feet in 40 seconds.
Balsamico is also a vegan of 11 years. It’s an identity she’s vocal about, out of a desire to push back on the notion that you need to eat meat to be strong. When she was a vegan-curious teenager, it gnawed at her that giving up animal products could mean sacrificing sports.
“I thought I was going to shrivel away to nothing,” Balsamico told Grist. Her Italian, sports-loving family had always eaten meat and dairy. “That’s what was always said to me, that you would basically get so skinny and die.”
But Balsamico’s love for animals compelled her to question these concerns. As a child, tending to neglected horses at a family friend’s farm prompted her to wonder why people didn’t see all animals as beautiful, each with its own unique personality. Horses, cows, sheep, dogs: “It was so apparent to me that there was no difference,” she said.
Meanwhile, veganism was at the beginning of a surge in popularity — concerns over the cruel conditions of factory farming, as well as the impacts of animal agriculture on the climate and environment, were helping to bring the marginalized diet closer to the mainstream. Although estimates vary, peer-reviewed research suggests that the chickens, cows, pigs, and other animals humans raise for meat and dairy contribute up to 20 percent of the planet’s overall greenhouse gas emissions.
Balsamico cut out all animal products from her diet at the age of 14, justifying the decision to her parents in a “39-minute PowerPoint” on the health benefits of plant-based eating. The weight lifting came a couple of years later, mostly out of curiosity: “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” she said. And she could — in 2022, she began winning first place for her age and weight class in every strongman competition she entered, racking up a streak of victories that she has yet to break.
“I haven’t had meat in 11 years of my life, and I can pick up 700 pounds on my back,” she told Grist. Balsamico now coaches other aspiring athletes at a gym in Pittsburgh, and is affiliated with an international team of vegan strength competitors called PlantBuilt.
Balsamico and her teammates are just a few of the many plant-based athletes who are using their “swole” bodies and competition results for social change, showing on social media and through word of mouth that you don’t have sacrifice “gains” — slang for muscle mass gained through diet and exercise — in order to eat a diet that protects animals and the environment. One block of tofu at a time, they’re defying expectations about what’s possible without animal protein — and weathering unsolicited criticism from those who insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that “soy boys” are inherently weak.
Eating fewer animal products — especially beef — is one of the most effective actions that people can take for the planet. Researchers have found that eating a plant-based diet is one of the four individual lifestyle choices that have the biggest impact on emissions, along with living car-free, avoiding air travel, and having one fewer child. An Oxford University study examining the reported food intake of more than 55,000 people found that the diets of people who eschewed all animal products generated one-quarter the greenhouse gas emissions of those who ate a lot of meat.
Nutritionists say a vegan diet can be healthy for most people, as long as they take supplements to ensure adequate intake of certain micronutrients that are hard to find in plant foods, like vitamin B-12. James Loomis, medical director of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit that promotes plant-based diets, said non-animal foods are more than adequate sources of protein. Contrary to popular belief, he said, the idea that plants can’t deliver all of the essential amino acids is “complete mythology.”
Veganism is a tougher sell for strength athletes, who have higher protein needs than the average population. Whether plant- or animal-based, dietary protein is the only way to get the amino acid building blocks that can grow and maintain muscle mass. But due to what some nutrition experts call “bro science” — a cocktail of personal experience and information gleaned from social media — strength athletes often believe that the only way to fulfill these requirements is through large servings of eggs, yogurt, chicken, dairy-based protein powder, and other high-protein animal foods.
Carol Johnston, an associate dean and professor at the Arizona State University College of Health Solutions, said it may be easier to absorb protein from these animal foods. Nonathletic “regular Joe” vegans could be at risk of deficiency if they don’t compensate by eating a slightly greater amount of plant protein. But for protein-obsessed strength athletes, she said there’s no reason they can’t swap out whey, yogurt, and steak and build muscle on their plant-based counterparts.
“They just need to consume extra protein” compared to omnivores, Johnston said. Most serious athletes know this, she added. “There are a lot of pro athletes who are vegan and they perform just as well as the nonvegans. That’s because they take a lot of care with their diet, they know how to maneuver through their nutritional needs.”
According to Loomis, “reasonably active” people should be getting about 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight each day. Most people don’t need to worry about hitting this target, he said, as long as they’re eating a diverse diet of unprocessed foods. Athletes need more calories overall, and therefore their protein intake should scale up — to about 0.55 to 0.73 grams per pound for endurance athletes who are less concerned about building huge muscles, and to 0.68 to 1 gram per pound for strength athletes like powerlifters. Beyond a certain limit, the body can’t store excess protein, Loomis told Grist, and some studies suggest that too much can promote the growth of cancer cells. (It may be, however, that this relationship only applies to animal protein.)
Most of the plant-based strength athletes Grist spoke to reported trying to consume between 0.68 and 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. For someone who weighs 200 pounds, that would be 136 to 200 grams of protein per day. For context, a block of extra-firm tofu has about 40 grams of protein, and a typical serving of vegan protein powder has about 20 grams.
Those foods both play a prominent role in the diets of the vegan athletes Grist spoke to. Protein powder, which can be blended into smoothies or stirred into oatmeal, represents a fairly low-effort way to up one’s daily intake. Katie Chetcuti, a vegan fitness coach with more than 45,000 followers on Instagram, said she uses a barley, rice, and lupin bean-based protein powder from the brand Fyta. Other athletes named Orgain, PlantFusion (a sponsor of PlantBuilt), Vedge, and TB12 as their preferred brands. Bradie Crandall, a powerlifter with PlantBuilt who uses the social media handle Vegan Hercules, said he saves money by mixing an admittedly “chalky” blend of unflavored pea and rice protein powders, which he buys in bulk. He blends his powder into post-dinner protein shakes, along with orange juice, mixed fruit, and beets, which he says help improve blood flow.
Beans are another popular staple — especially among a small but passionate circle of vegan strength athletes who subscribe to a whole food, plant-based diet that emphasizes the importance of dietary fiber. (Americans are much more likely to be deficient in fiber than in protein.)
But others center their diets around plant-based products designed to taste like meat. Chetcuti said these can serve as a one-to-one replacement for more conventional proteins: an Impossible burger instead of a beef patty, for instance, or soy-based chicken substitutes instead of chicken breasts.
“Vegan nutrition is really not that different from nutrition for other athletes,” she said — you just take the meat, eggs, and milk, and swap them out for high-protein plant-based lookalikes.
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