Legendary Rock Climber Alex Honnold's Vegetarian Diet

the simple answer for why i'm like a well-known professional climber is the fact that the type of climbing that i like to do which is soloing things like climbing without a rope is like beautiful and easily understood it's the type of thing that people see and they're like that is rad even if they don't know anything about climbing [Music] i spend the majority of my time in my van traveling on the road you know like camping in different climbing areas yummy climbing is pretty much all i do yeah all the time people use dirtbag just to mean somebody who's like i don't know dirty like living on the road climbing all the time like semi homeless but climbing a lot we're headed to that cave up there very exciting i'm gonna say they're with you i'm gonna say they're with you i'm gonna be like they're here shooting documentary on the best handicapped climb in the world james is a homeless friend of mine like i've known him for a decade we've climbed together forever like in various places around the world he's just like another climber that's on the road james has like a fused ankle on a fuse back and a bunch of random things like that he took like 100 foot ground fall like a decade ago and so he got like put back together yeah pretty hardcore people who were always like you've had a second chance at life like what are you gonna do with it i was always like well i'm gonna do exactly what i was doing before maybe slightly better okay not work okay climb as much as possible and that's about it if you don't have talent you gotta have tenacity we've been climbing to maple like two on one off for the last like nine ten days or something maple is a place that you would never solo because climb without because there's like yeah you would never climb on a road because there's like a very high probability of the rocks pulling out of the wall i'm about to warm up we just start over on the side on kind of easier routes to just stretch out and get warm and then we'll move on to like the real projects in the middle of the cave i'm preparing to go to angola in 10 days the angola expedition is more about exploration developing new climbing sort of seeing new places on the west coast of africa i'm also supporting a project through the haunted foundation which is like a nonprofit that i run and through the haunted foundation we're supporting a solar lighting project [Music] [Applause] [Music] cool nice that was pretty good that's pretty legit nice this is one of many of my first snacks like so i climbed something and now i'm resting and we're waiting for james to climb something so it's like makes sense to snack so you never get like hungry hungry good james come on get it come on come on hold it hold it come on james come on yeah you definitely don't want to eat like super heavy like a bacon egg sausage fest right now and then try to climb you'd be all like oh though it's kind of true that you wouldn't want that stuff in general you know because it's just gross i've been vegetarian for two and a half years or so okay climbing james okay climb up dude i just feel like people should be more mindful of the impact that their diet has actually i mean for that matter i've never drank alcohol either because i've never liked it i often like to say that i'm um i'm basically mormon except for wait i forget what i like to say god damn it but yeah basically i'm mormon except for the god thing you know um in terms of clean living and like you know being wholesome but i just think all the religious stuff has [Music] okay so take me up james yep got you dude i have no idea what i'll be eating in angola i might actually take you know 15 pounds of like bars and powders and like random nutritional type snacks just in an effort to like maintain a high level of fitness while i'm there so when i get back i can still climb well i started climbing when i was 10 years old or so climbing in a gym in sacramento as a kid i always loved climbing on things like trees and buildings and you know i did gymnastics for like a year just recreationally and my parents just knew that i loved climbing on things i climbed on the roof i was never like a bad climber but i was never a great climber either because there were a lot of other climbers who were much much stronger than me who started as kids and were like instantly freakishly strong like they just have like a natural gift and that was never me i just loved climbing and i've been climbing all the time ever since so i've like naturally gotten better at it but but i've never been like gifted you know that's all right [Music] oh yeah dinner time i'm looking through my pantry to see oh perfect i have some mac and cheese i'm gonna make mac and cheese all right she's just so easy i'm a very lazy cook i wish these were cookies it's not really like pc to talk about diet and weight and all that stuff with climbing but obviously the heavier you are the harder it is to pull yourself up something and there's like a healthy middle ground where you have a healthy weight you have energy you feel you know you feel good and like it's good for your long-term health but then i mean you want to stay as on the skinniest side of that as possible really this is probably like a thousand calories maybe aren't you supposed to be on a 2000 calorie diet no like we're both on like 3 000 calorie diets for sure but we're also not working out in an extraordinary way either i mean we're still not doing any more like physical output than like a peasant does in normal day life yeah so this is a big thing with like the vegetarian diet people are like oh my god how do you get your protein how do you stay fit or whatever and you're like dude the majority of the world operates on a vegetarian diet because they're poor and it's like they basically are like relatively healthy lean folks and so that's you know like we're doing the same these little things are outrageous i was thinking about that like elite gymnasts like olympic gymnasts are surely dieting at like a crazy level and it's probably taking years off their life but you know if they're willing to win an olympic gold and like shave a few years off the end i'm like that's certainly their call all right no not yeah sleep well this year yeah good night honey in the morning right now we're in my van on my friend's driveway or i like to say we're in my living room or my kitchen depending how you look at it um i just poured the remnants of my muesli flax meal raspberries are like my favorite food and then what's left of the almond milk which hopefully i haven't gone off probably hasn't no i've never really had refrigeration though honestly it doesn't really matter and it just goes to show that people are way too worried about refrigerating things people often ask about living in the van and it's not that i want to live in a car i mean if i could live in like a really nice house and climb all the time i would but in order to be out at these mountains you know to climb in different national parks all year round to be able to travel be mobile you know like you have to live in a van and so the van is like a really nice middle ground where it's like well it's not a nice house but it's pretty nice and i get to do the thing that i love to do all the time this is emptying my pee bottle or as i prefer to consider fertilizing the tree though i try to vary all the different spots in the yard that i fertilize because i don't want to like kill his lawn in one place oh living in the van's not that bad with with the ladies i mean you know it's not great but uh but you know for the right kind of lady they like the adventure i just need adventurous ladies that's the kind you want anyway is your breakfast just that apple yeah it's really nice here yeah it's like 20 minutes out of town and you're like on top of 11 000 foot peaks and stuff this morning i'm going to go with my friend james up uh the south ridge is superior which is like a peak above town it's like a really accessible like scrambling slash hike jog thing up a mountain i threw in an extra gel for james i have my phone in here we have a little bit of water and we're like ready to go okay ray yeah let's go [Music] and we're off like i heard a turtle is this actually like the pace we start at what oh yeah something like this yeah okay casual the the south ridge superior is sort of like a classic alpine scramble it's just um like blocky rocks you know a little bit of dirt here and there trees a tiny bit of climbing like little steps that you have to climb over but like you know extremely steep like 3000 feet of vertical gain in like a mile or something maybe a mile and a half max i guess any day you're not climbing is the rest day the big thing that we're resting is like our skin and like tendons in your arms and like all these little things that like you don't really use for anything else so even if you go out and get like worked like running around in the mountains you're still like well at least my hands feel better [Music] [Music] sorry my weight actually has never fluctuated that much there are a lot of other climbers who have like gone heavier and lighter and like really starve themselves and drop a bunch of weight and i've like never really dropped weight specifically for a climbing project but that's partially because the climbing that i do is so diverse because i go from like running up mountains to like sport climbing to bouldering to like all these different sub disciplines of of climbing and so to be able to do all of them at roughly the same time you kind of need to have just like a middle ground healthy body weight are you excited about this oh yeah this looks disgusting dude i've got a boner for that grassroots it's not i mean it's okay yeah all right it's food that's good maybe it's more appropriate to call it fuel it's like pouring coal into the fire it's not exactly like it's not delightful but yeah but you're safe for the coal it tastes like coal i'm probably gonna just take off and run in a minute okay let's see what i can do down [Music] yeah so we are leaving the house on our way to maple via a grocery store and a random office to pick up some nutrition stuff i've gotten like more and more anal about looking at nutrition facts and like ingredients and just like you know choosing things that don't have too much extra stuff added i'm starting to get angry i want like three muffins and some cookies lots of cookies and then a fair amount of judgment from alex dude it's heinous he talks so much i got james's old woman parking though james is a great example of the saying ignorance is bliss you know because he's so happy no idea yeah look look at the gap in his parking armor apple avocado banana these little packets of almond butter i really like i got muffin and then there's a cookie i already ate half because i'm hungry because the first thing you need in the morning is a cookie and if you don't you're alex honold and you're crazy so pretty much my whole childhood and into my early 20s maybe i had like a pretty bad diet a ton of cheerios i mean in my family it's funny because my family has all these stories like oh as a kid you wouldn't eat this you wouldn't eat that you were so picky you wouldn't do this or that you know like now that i've like traveled in africa and like all these random places and eating like all kinds of crazy food i come back to my family and i'm like you guys made fun of me for being a weirdo you don't like the texture of hummus so you're not gonna have any you know you're like really like what the heck so this is where the reading nutrition facts is like really annoying because i'm not going to stand here for five minutes looking at each of these because like the justin's is mildly annoying because it has palm oil this stuff is like you know when i'm buying nut butter i want it to just have the nut it's like annoying when it also has like palm oil sugar salt whatever well you're like why add a bunch of stuff like you just want you said yeah you just won the nut dude you know so we're headed to go gnarly which is like a nutrition supplement type company and uh i don't know they sort of just offered me some product and so i figured i'd check it out [Music] where are we i feel like we're at like citibank corporate offices right well is there a little more room in our room so yeah a matter of fact leave this did this is uh is there a little poster like a year ago so that's my poster on the wall that's pretty classic our whole goal with with that was to make it really easy on the stomach so we use a grass-fed way no hormones no antibiotics no artificial ingredients yeah and then we also use digestive enzymes this isn't just pure powder some powder and water that's all it is go for it all right you know you're gonna make it taste are they cheers cheers not too bad right it does go down easy you know there's certainly a time and a place for like powders and and like protein powder supplements i mean like i don't know i think there's some value to it and so i'm totally curious to to try it more and dabble a little bit i don't know we'll see actually i mean one of these tubs would be a perfect thing to take the angola honestly because that's like ideal where it's hard to get proper nutrition but you can probably get water at least and so you can just like mix up like wholesome little things to make sure you don't waste away um actually i do think that some of the climbing angola is on conglomerate which is the same type of rock that i'm finding on in maple so some of it might be kind of similar this is the second half of breakfast or second breakfast i mean how much of a hobbit you feel like [Applause] so this is some muesli some hemp hearts raspberries cinnamon and quinoa milk it's a bit of an experiment but it seems pretty wholesome well don't think that i'm full of myself these are honest words i speak i just think you better find a quiet corner of a couch that's sitting thinking what you're gonna come up with through all your years of pondering won't ever add up to me oh there are tons of climbers who are much stronger than me and can climb harder routes and can climb maybe a little faster or whatever i mean they're all these different sub disciplines and there are tons of people who are way better than me at like most parts of climbing but like i'm pretty good all around and i've just done a bunch of things that for whatever reason you know garnered mainstream attention i donate probably a third of my income to the haunted foundation which then goes to like environmental nonprofit stuff which honestly is a big part of why i set up the honol foundation was because it made me feel better about embracing the whole like fame side of climbing you know but if i can do two days of work that earns enough money that i can donate it through the foundation and like positively affect thousands of people and you're like that's pretty rad like i'd like to think that when i die the world will not be a worse place because of me [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Munchies

Views: 5,721,795

Keywords: diet, fuel, sports, Alex Honnold, Utah, Angola, Maple Canyon, Mount Superior, without ropes, free solo, munchies, el capitan, ted talk, rock climber, vegetarian, yosemite, food, climbing, africa, james lucas, healthy, free solo movie, jre, joe rogan, interview, calories, vegetarian athletes diet, vegetarian athlete meal plan, top vegetarian athletes, rock climbers flow, documentary, oscar, best, brad gobright

Id: ncDFDz9k35o

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/kukusz]

I'm basically Mormon except for the whole god thing, you know, in terms of clean living, you know, being wholesome. But I just think all the religious stuff is retarded.

Awesome

[u/Egg_Veal]

18 minute video, 1 minute of climbing. Fair warning. Interesting overall, though.

[u/unbiasedhammock]

The comments on that video are horrendous.

[u/rickster907]

Nice seeing Alex on the rock, always a good sign.

[u/travelinzac]

cookies

edit: I'm actually pretty fond of the honey stinger bars they didn't like so much on the summit of Superior