To go along with my newest YouTube video, I wanted to write about some of the things I typically eat in a day-to-day basis, following a vegan lifestyle. All of my days are different, really – some days I feel like just following the normal vegan diet (including vegan junk food), and other days I feel like following a raw vegan diet. The video I posted on YouTube, gives a good idea of what I eat involving both diets.

For a small pre-workout meal, I eat a few figs, some papaya and cut up bananas. I usually wake up and immediately go to the gym, so I need some sort of substance in me before I go – I will never understand people that can just work-out with nothing in their stomach. Literally, the only way I can do that is if I had engorged myself with food the previous night, so that I’m still full when I wake-up; otherwise… NEED. FOOD.

After my work-out I’m usually starving, again, so I just have a small snack to hold myself over until lunch. In this case, I had a cut up banana with some Sunflower Seed Butter. You may want to ask me why I use sunflower seed butter and not almond or peanut butter. I have a simple answer for you, it’s cheap. There ain’t no way I’m spending $12 on a single jar of almond butter.

In my video, I ended up skipping lunch due to errands and puppies that needed tending to, so I had two larabars. In most cases, for lunch, I’ll eat a salad or something similar – maybe some zoodles with crushed tomatoes, something simple.

Later in the day, I whipped up a green smoothie. This included a banana, kale, strawberries, papaya, sunflower seed butter and acai powder. Throw in some ice cubes to make it colder. This smoothie was humongous and kept me full for a while. I try to stay away from smoothies on days where I work, I feel that it doesn’t keep me full as long as I want to be. On the weekends, however, I eat a smoothie for almost every meal and then snack all day.

For dinner, I went to a small restaurant in town with my parents. I was trying to stick to raw vegan that day, but it was my brother’s last “dinner near home” with my family before he went off to boot camp – so I celebrated with a veggie burger and sweet potato fries no regrets!