High-performance herbivore

Subject: High-performance herbivore Sat Nov 05, 2011 4:01 am

Quote :: http://www.thestar.com/living/article/1080043--high-performance-herbivore?bn=1
Mike Zigomanis grins jaggedly. “If I don’t eat something, I might pass out.”

He’s not joking. It’s Tuesday around 2:45 p.m., and he hasn’t eaten since Sunday.

Sitting inside Live, an organic food bar on Dupont Ave., Zigomanis is ready to break his 48-hour fast. He cleanses his system about three times a month. He readily glances at the drink list, which sounds like a roll-call of superheroes: Blue Fusion, Green Electricity, Will Power.

Zigomanis has been deluged with interview requests lately, although nobody wants to discuss his job as a centre with the Toronto Marlies, the Leafs’ AHL farm team. They don’t want to talk about his faceoff skills, his two-way contract, his rank on the depth charts or his prospects of getting called up this season.

What they want to talk about is food.

There are many vegans on this planet but not many who are professional hockey players. So after giving up seafood and dairy recently, four years after he stopped eating pork and red meat, Zigomanis has become an accidental poster boy, an inspiration and curiosity, a high-performance herbivore on skates.

He loves to talk about food.

“I told my sister, ‘It’s going to be impossible to be a professional athlete and be vegan,’” Zigomanis recalls, rubbing his scruffy beard. “And she’s like, ‘Well, here, I have this book for you. I’ll start printing off pages.’”

The book was The Thrive Diet, by Brendan Brazier, a vegan ironman and triathlete who also created Vega, a line of whole-food nutritional products. Zigomanis credits the book and supplements for turning him into a vegan hockey player, the only one in the Toronto organization.

On Sunday nights, Zigomanis is usually in the kitchen of his Scarborough home. The 30-year-old tosses organic produce into a blender. He reads cookbooks as if they were sacred texts. He prepares meals and smoothies for the week ahead with the logistical precision of a wedding caterer.

Zigomanis recites ingredients the way other hockey players recite stats.

He orders something called an Immune Smoothie and I reluctantly follow his lead. When our pink shakes arrive — mine tastes like an $8 glass of Strawberry Quik, but what do I know — he reads out the ingredients.

“I’ve got almond milk in mine. O.J., strawberry, banana, Vitamin C, Echinacea . . . ”

He pauses and furrows his brow, tapping his finger on the menu.

“ . . . Yeah, I don’t even know what that is,” he says, slowly enunciating the last two items: cordyceps and reishi.

“Anyway, this tastes so much better than the ones I make. I’m still doing just straight fruits in the morning — pineapple, raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, apple, pear, plum, orange, grapefruit, mango. Then I put coconut water in it. Then I do crushed chia seeds. Then I do a little protein powder.”

Recipes:

Zigmanis’s pre-workout shake

Zigomanis’s post-workout shake

At upwards of 10 hours per week, cooking has become a second job for Zigomanis. What’s in his cupboards? He launches into another list of esoteric victuals.

“You’re going to get all ancient grain pastas, grains, black rice, brown rice, quinoa — ”

“is that what it’s called?”I interrupt. “Ancient grains?”

“Yeah, ancient grains. Your millet, your kamute, your spelt, your quinoa. So kamute, that’s like Egyptian times. And the Romans stole it from the Egyptians. It’s back when they never had white pasta, right? It was just ancient grains.”

All of this sounds perfectly reasonable within the nurturing confines of Live. Soothing jazz is playing. Hushed patrons are nibbling on beet burgers and barbecued burdock root.

But one wonders what the skating carnivores now make of Zigomanis.

Are opposing players taunting him in the faceoff circles? Cracking jokes about sprouts and tofu? This statement alone, which he utters after ordering a black bean burrito with an infusion of cashew cream, might have triggered a bench-clearing brawl in the olden days: “Sometimes I’ll have a bowl of ancient grains cereal in the morning with nuts and agave nectar.”

“I kept it a secret for as long as I could,” he shrugs. “But now it’s out there.”

There is an upside and downside to coming out as a vegan hockey player.

Upside: Zigomanis, who recently completed a business degree online from the University of Phoenix, is now as hot as his food is cold. He started his own company and plans to develop a therapeutic product for suffering backs. Publishers are coming forth with book ideas. He’s in demand on the speaking circuit.

This raises another question: Is veganism distracting him from hockey?

“No, not at all,” says Zigomanis. “I’m making it more of a hobby than anything. I mean, if someone is looking for a hobby, why not make it your own health?”

But as he talks, this hobby seems to go beyond health.

Zigomanis is now giving away his clothing. He doesn’t want to wear anything made from leather or wool, anything that contains animal products. His other hobbies — music (he plays piano and guitar) and yoga (he does Moksha four times a week) — are also rumbling along in high gear.

And this brings us to the downside.

As a general rule, people don’t say: “Hey, wanna go out for an Immune Smoothie tonight?” The life of a vegan hockey player can be lonely.

“It’s tough to stay social,” says Zigomanis, who often dines by himself when teammates decamp to a steakhouse or seafood joint. “You look at the big social things — coffee, alcohol, cigarettes. So to stay social in our society, this is a big paradigm shift.”

Does he date vegans exclusively?

“No, not necessarily,” he says. “But obviously it’s a lot easier.”

Does he feel disconnected from his teammates?

“A little bit,” he says. “I get heckled in the (locker) room. But that happens whenever there is change. It’s no different from outside the room.”

Outside the room is where his universe is expanding. He’s making new friends, including an attractive vegetarian filmmaker named Deborah. They met at the Toronto premiere of Vegucated, a vegan documentary. Deborah arrives during our lunch to shoot some footage for a film she’s planning about hockey players.

How serious is Zigomanis about his vegan lifestyle? After appearing recently on CTV’s Wylde on Health, Zigomanis wants the host, alternative health expert Bryce Wylde, to be his personal physician — “I’m going to call him this afternoon.”

As it turns out, Zigomanis never loses consciousness during lunch. But this latest two-day cleanse was more turbulent than usual.

“I woke up at like 3 in the morning,” he says, as Deborah shakes her head with sympathy. “Sometimes I get headaches from it, just mild. Those are normal. But it’s very rare. Usually, I just sleep right through it. It’s just your body telling you you’re missing something.”

Just a wild guess: Food?

When his black bean burrito arrives, Zigomanis devours it like a contestant on Survivor who has just returned to civilization. Still not satiated, he orders a massive Rainbow Kale salad, which he wolfs down while identifying the ingredients. (He also agrees to finish one of my tempeh cakes after I decide to get my botanicals in the form of gin.)

“What do I miss?” he asks, looking at my glass of hard liquor, something he’s also stopped consuming. “I used to crave Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream, like every night. And now since I quit dairy, I don’t at all. I have no cravings.”

The life of a vegan hockey player, I tell him, sounds wonderful and horrible.

“But I feel better than I’ve ever felt,” he says, laughing. “This has been a process going on four years. And I know I’m a lot healthier than I’ve ever been.”