Show Notes

Ever thought you could enjoy a hearty, vegan Thanksgiving feast without breaking your fitness goals? Brace yourself as we, alongside our special guest, Protein Deficient Vegan, unravel the secrets to maintaining a vegan lifestyle while keeping a keen eye on your fitness throughout the Thanksgiving season. From smart strategies like calorie-saving before the holiday, loading up on proteins, to taking charge of your food by bringing your own dishes, we’ve covered all bases. Plus, we’ve got a treasure trove of mouthwatering yet healthy Thanksgiving recipes just for you!

We’ve handpicked some of our most loved vegan dishes perfect for your Thanksgiving table – think high protein spinach and artichoke dip, green bean casserole, scalloped potatoes, pumpkin chili, and butternut squash chickpea curry.

But hold on, it doesn’t end there! Thanksgiving pies are a tradition we all love, and we’re spinning it with a healthy twist.

High Protein Vegan Pumpkin Pie

We’re also serving up more vegan-friendly Thanksgiving recipes on our website!

Best High Protein Vegan Thanksgiving Recipes

So buckle up and join us on this culinary journey to make your Thanksgiving both healthy and satisfying!
Navigating Thanksgiving as a Vegan

Full podcast transcript

VeGAINS: Hi, welcome to the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition podcast, Episode two. I am VeGAINS and I’m here with Protein Deficient Vegan. You want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hi.

VeGAINS: Thank you. So we’ve got a couple of blog posts out this week about the Thanksgiving holiday coming up. We wanted to talk about kind of the physical barriers to the Thanksgiving holiday today. And then next week we’re going to put out the pod guest talking kind of about mental barriers and dealing with different struggles of being vegan around a holiday that you might encounter.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And having fitness goals.

VeGAINS: And having fitness goals. So one of the issues with a holiday like Thanksgiving, if you’re a vegan with fitness goals, is that it doesn’t take much of kind of overindulging, maybe on some dishes at Thanksgiving, to really set your progress back on your calorie goals by a week or two in just a matter of days.

VeGAINS: So whether you’re in a caloric surplus or a caloric deficit, you still have goals to hit. You might have macro goals to hit. You probably definitely have some kind of protein goal to hit if you’re trying to be fit. So we want to make sure that we have some kind of strategy and plan to get through the holiday pretty much unscathed. I mean, everything’s okay in moderation.

VeGAINS: We’re not saying that you have to withhold from eating the things you like or anything like that. You just don’t want to get a week later and look back and be like, wow, I really wish I would have handled that differently. So a couple of things you can do.

VeGAINS: One is you can save some calories going into the holiday. So if your goals normally have you at 2000 calories a day, maybe for the couple of days leading up to Thanksgiving, you drop that down to 1800 a day. That gives you an extra 200 a day of cushion to use on Thanksgiving. So if you do that for four days, you’ve got 800 calories worth of cushion.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What if I just don’t eat for seven days? Then I have 14,000 calories.

VeGAINS: Yeah, the math checks out. That is technically correct. The best kind of correct.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So much casserole.

VeGAINS: It’s a lot of casserole. Unfortunately, if you did that, I don’t think you’d make it to Thanksgiving and you’d probably be spending your holidays in an emergency room or something along those lines, which doesn’t sound great.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Challenge accepted.

VeGAINS: Yeah. So you can keep us updated on that. Everybody else, I would not recommend it. So that’ll give you a little extra room for your calories. If you handle it a little less intensely than our friend here wants to handle it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I go hard.

VeGAINS: Something else you can do is on the day of your Thanksgiving gathering, or whatever it is you’re doing for that holiday, you can make sure to kind of pre-game with some extra protein. Right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Edamame.

VeGAINS: Edamame.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Take edamame in your purse.

VeGAINS: Edamame is good. Protein shakes are good. Whatever you want to do, you can use that to kind of boost your protein goal, your protein intake for the day to kind of get closer to your goal. Or maybe you just want to eat a little before you go. If you know that if you go hungry, you’re going to go kind of crazy and you don’t want to go kind of crazy. Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And they might not even have food you can eat.

VeGAINS: Yeah. That’s actually a real concern with a lot of family gatherings is if you don’t eat before you go, you’re going to get really hungry because everybody’s going to kind of forget you were a vegan and nobody’s going to make anything you can eat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes. You’re going to have raw carrot sticks and nothing to dip them in because, whoops, forgot about dairy.

VeGAINS: You can dip them in water. Does that count?

Protein Deficient Vegan: No, that doesn’t count.

VeGAINS: Okay.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Here’s some olives. Enjoy.

VeGAINS: And even if your family members are great and nice like ours and make vegan food for you, then you might not know what ingredients get put into those foods. Right. Like you don’t know who just doesn’t measure their oil? Everybody. Right? Anybody who’s not doing fitness calorie counting type stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You need all the butter, all the butter, all the oil, all vegan cheese.

Protein Deficient Vegan: If they know what that is.

VeGAINS: Yeah, it’s not really anything that you can just put into myfitnesspal and really know where you’re at for the day. So giving yourself that little bit of cushion can help with all these unexpected things that happen. And then you’re going to take all these delicious dishes and you’ll probably end up taking home some leftovers. So you’re going to have a couple of residual days of eating some things that you don’t really know how to track.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Especially if they make something specifically for you because you’re vegan, you will be guilt tripped into taking that, all of it, because they don’t want to eat it.

VeGAINS: Hopefully you at least get guilt tripped into taking something that tastes good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I mean, if I brought it, right.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Speaking of bringing your own dishes, that’s kind of our go to and what we really recommend, you know exactly what’s in it. You know it’s something that you like to eat and you can share vegan food with your family and show them that it’s good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Conversion!

VeGAINS: Conversion is always a good goal if you can do that, but it gives you something just a certainty for the day. So if nothing else, you can eat the meal you brought. So we actually have a separate blog post where we have a collection of recipes we recommend making for a Thanksgiving gathering that are kind of tailored towards a holiday gathering type situation like that. A lot of sides, a couple of desserts. So I think we can just kind of go down the list here and hit on each one of these and talk about what it is a little bit. So we’ve got a high protein spinach and artichoke dip. Dip is always a good choice for kind of a gathering like this. Everybody can kind of wander by and graze on it, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: This one is so good. I’m convinced you could take this to like a work potluck and not tell anyone it was vegan and they would have no idea.

VeGAINS: And it’s 33% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s still creamy like a normal artichoke dip. It gets its protein from extra firm silken tofu and nutritional yeast.

VeGAINS: Awesome.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Also, artichokes and spinach have a pretty high protein content for a vegetable.

VeGAINS: Oh, yeah. Next up on the list, we’ve got a high protein green Bean casserole.

Protein Deficient Vegan: This tastes almost identical to the original green bean casserole that you’ve probably had since you were a kid.

VeGAINS: But this one is 39% protein. Yes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Also extra firm silken tofu, because we have a problem.

VeGAINS: So we kind of got a theme going here. You don’t really have to choose between delicious sides and the protein main. We just made it protein sidesgiving, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes, it is sidesgiving this year because usually the mains suck anyway.

VeGAINS: That’s true.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So me personally, I would rather just eat a bunch of artichoke dip and green bean casserole.

VeGAINS: I would too. I mean, even before I was vegan, that was pretty much all I did. I never really was a big fan of turkey like that. Next up, we have two versions of high protein scalloped potatoes. One is with sweet potatoes and one was with normal white potatoes. They’re both pretty high protein, 25% protein, 25% protein for both.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And they’re both delicious.

VeGAINS: Yeah, they’re really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And even better, like, heat it up the day after because we’ve been eating these for leftovers for lunch for like three days.

VeGAINS: Yeah. And because they’re high protein. That’s okay.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Eat as many as you want.

VeGAINS: That’s right. Next we have our high protein pumpkin chili. So chili is always a good standby. Another good one for gatherings. And this one has a little bit of pumpkin flair for the fall. Yeah, all the fall vibes. That one is 39% protein. So that’s pretty significant. Obviously, chili is pretty high protein in general with all the beans and stuff. But we also have tofu in there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And this is a good one to take to, like, a potluck or a family gathering because you can just bring it in a crock pot. It just sits there and stays warm. And chili seems to be one of those easier things to get non vegans to eat. It doesn’t have, like, fake cheese, which is what they always turn their noses up at.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Next we have a high protein butternut squash chickpea curry.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So the high protein part is it is coming from the chickpeas, but it’s mostly coming from the fact that we use TVP for it to sit on. Instead of, like, usually you would use rice with a curry. We just use TVP.

VeGAINS: Then we kind of get into the dessert category a little bit. First we’ve got a TV protein pumpkin Craisin muffin. It’s made with TVP.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Holy shit. I feel like we discovered gold here. This thing is freaking incredible.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: How many did you eat in one day?

VeGAINS: Normally, since it’s a muffin, I would say too many, but they’re high protein muffins, so I’m allowed to eat as many as I want because I have.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Well I have to cook them all.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a you problem.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What’s the question on Tuesday?

VeGAINS: Yeah, so these are hard to walk away from. For sure. Very good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And they have, like, chocolate. Yeah, and I’ll eat anything with chocolate.

VeGAINS: Same. Then last on the list here, we’ve got a high protein vegan pumpkin pie that is really unique and really good. It’s got silken tofu in the filling and then TVP for the pie crust, which I don’t think is something we have seen anybody do before.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30% protein. You could literally eat nothing but that fucking pie and you’d be golden. Yeah, and it’s so good. It’s so good. It’s good. Like warm or cold even.

VeGAINS: Yeah. So if your vibe for Thanksgiving is just avoiding friends and family sitting at home and eating an entire pie, 30% protein, you could do this.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Actually, my ideal Thanksgiving.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You don’t have to worry about politics or anything. You just eat pie.

VeGAINS: That’s true. Yeah. That does sound like a pretty good thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I know. I think we should do that, actually. Sorry, we can’t come. We were eating pie.

VeGAINS: Yeah. All right. Thanks for listening. We will have the episode out next week about the mental struggles and other things you might have to deal with during this holiday season if you’re trying to maintain your fitness goals as a vegan. Keep an eye on the website. We have more Thanksgiving recipes in the tank that will be getting dropped over the next couple of days, and we’ll probably cover those a little bit on next week’s podcast as well. You want to say bye?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Goodbye.

VeGAINS: All right. Bye, everybody.

Vegan that likes to pick up heavy things and put them down again.
USAW Level 1 Coach
NASM CPT

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