How To Build Muscle as a Raw Vegan with Chris Kendall of The Raw Advantage
How To Build Muscle as a Raw Vegan
A deep dive into the real keys to raw vegan muscle building, caloric sufficiency, training, supplementation, and why most people get it wrong.
A lot of people out there still think you simply cannot build muscle as a raw vegan. They picture someone wiry and pale, running on juice and willpower. I’ve heard it from doctors, personal trainers, and even qualified nutritionists over my 22+ years on this path. One of my first teachers in holistic nutrition school looked me dead in the eye and said I’d be dead in two years eating this way. Here I am, still standing, and still getting asked how to build muscle as a raw vegan, which honestly I love.
I recently had a great conversation with Dillon Olias on his YouTube channel where we went deep on exactly this topic. Dillon asked all the right questions, from caloric needs and fasting to supplementation, food combining, smoothies, and the mindset side of things. I’m going to pull the best of that conversation together here so it’s all in one place for you.
My Background and Why This Question Matters
I’m Chris Kendall, founder of The Raw Advantage and a Registered Holistic Nutritionist. I’ve been fully raw vegan since meeting Dr. Doug Graham at an event in Vancouver back in 2004. I was already high raw at the time, but Doug simplified everything and I went 100% the next day. I went on to write a book with him, speak alongside him at festivals worldwide, and consider him a close friend and mentor.
At my heaviest as a raw vegan I was 198 pounds at 6’2, and that came after I was hit by a truck on my motorcycle and went through an intensive rehab program. I went from around 155 pounds post-accident to nearly 200 within roughly a year of focused training. Not slowly. Significantly. All on fruit, greens, and vegetables. No protein powders, no supplements beyond what I’ll mention later, no magic.
So yes, you can absolutely build muscle as a raw vegan. The question is how, and more importantly, why most people who try it don’t get there.
The Number One Reason Raw Vegans Fail to Build Muscle
Undereating calories. Full stop. This is the most common failure pattern I see after 16+ years of coaching, and it’s predictable every single time.
Here’s the thing about fruit and vegetables. They are incredibly high in volume and nutrition per calorie, but low in calories per volume. So the three signals our body uses to feel satisfied, which are volume, nutrition, and calories, two of those three are met really easily on a raw food diet. Volume? Easy. Nutrition? Excellent. Calories? That’s where people fall short.
Someone can eat a big beautiful salad, have a smoothie, feel completely full, and still be 600 calories short of what their body needs. After a week or two of that, the deficit compounds. That’s when cravings hit. That’s when people second-guess the diet. That’s when they fall off. It’s not a failure of the lifestyle, it’s a failure of not understanding caloric density.
A quick calculation I give people: take your ideal weight in pounds, multiply by 10. That’s your basal metabolic rate, the calories you’d need just lying in bed. Add 500 for basic activity. Then stack on whatever your actual training demands on top of that. For me right now at around 175 pounds that puts my base around 1,750 calories, and with the skateboarding and movement I do daily I’m consistently at 2,500 to 3,000 calories. On hard training days I’ve eaten well over 6,500 and it felt completely appropriate because I created the demand.
Exercise Creates the Demand, and Changes Everything
This connects directly to how to build muscle as a raw vegan in a practical sense. Exercise isn’t just beneficial, it’s the variable that makes everything else work better.
When you’re training hard, big fruit meals go down easily. Insulin function improves. Muscle receptivity to simple sugars increases. Your body starts directing those calories exactly where you want them. Having a 2-liter banana smoothie before a session, or coming home from the gym and loading up on mangoes, that’s not excessive. That’s appropriate. The demand is there.
My go-to muscle building approach during rehab was eating every meal until I genuinely couldn’t fit in another bite, and then a couple bites more. Always erring on the side of more rather than less. Training six days a week, specifically and progressively targeting muscle growth. The results spoke for themselves.
What About Fasting and Building Muscle as a Raw Vegan?
Dr. Doug Graham is clear on this and I agree from personal experience: it’s physiologically very difficult to build muscle in a meaningful caloric deficit, and essentially impossible while fasting. The body simply doesn’t have the raw materials to synthesize new tissue.
What fasting can do is reduce body fat, which can make existing muscle more visible. Dropping from 185 to 175 pounds didn’t make me look dramatically smaller. The definition was still there, just leaner. But that’s different from building.
My view on fasting for someone on a clean raw food diet: unless you have a specific reason, it’s not necessary. The diet is already light and clean. The body handles natural detoxification well when you’re eating this way. Adding intentional fasting on top of an already calorically low diet just compounds the deficit and makes muscle building harder, not easier. If you do fast, rest while you fast. Don’t train through it and expect to build.
B12, Vitamin D, and Supplementation on a Raw Vegan Diet
I came into raw food through natural hygiene and was fiercely anti-supplement for the first six years. I even had a kind of pride about it, like supplementing would somehow be a failure of the lifestyle. Then I got blood work done at year six.
Everything looked exceptional. My doctor said they were the best results he’d seen in his career. Cholesterol, protein markers, all of it. Except B12 and vitamin D, which were a little low. Over the next few years I monitored them and my B12 kept declining. By around year ten I was symptomatic. Minor things were stressing me out that wouldn’t normally bother me. Back pain was increasing. I was clinically deficient.
I’ve now been to well over 15 raw food festivals and run 12+ retreats. I’ve met a handful of long-term raw vegans who pushed through those deficiency signals without supplementing and ended up with permanent nerve damage, tingling in extremities, coordination issues, memory problems. That’s not theoretical. I saw it firsthand.
My take now: B12 supplementation is not a failing of the diet. It’s a reality of modern living. We used to get it inadvertently through trace soil contact on unwashed food, from natural water sources, from the environment. That’s not our reality anymore. Sublingual B12 is inexpensive, has no known side effects, and removes a risk that simply isn’t worth taking. Check out one of my full posts on this topic here: Vitamin B12 Deficiency – Is it a Joke?
For vitamin D I prefer a UVB lamp during darker months in Sweden over supplementing. Short sessions a few times a week are enough to produce D3 naturally in the skin. If a lamp isn’t accessible, supplementing is a reasonable backup. I also recommend this post on vitamin D sources for vegans for more on that.
Smoothies, Food Combining, and Getting the Most From Your Meals
Smoothies are one of the most practical tools for anyone figuring out how to build muscle as a raw vegan, because they let you get a significant calorie load in without forcing large volumes of whole fruit in one sitting.
A 2-liter banana smoothie is around 1,800 calories for me. That’s a complete lunch. I also love date smoothies, blending a pound of dates with around a liter of water. That’s 1,650 to 1,700 calories in a smaller volume, and I can still add bananas on top if I need more. Dates pressed into celery sticks are a great snack for travel, the fiber slows digestion and helps buffer the sugar load, and having an apple or some celery at the end of a date meal does a nice job of cleaning your teeth too.
On food combining, I spent years treating it like a strict rule book. If I saw someone break a combining principle I’d practically get a stomach ache on their behalf. Now I see it as a tool, a continuum for optimizing digestion rather than a law with penalties. That said, some patterns are real. I do notice mixing acid fruits with sweet fruits gives me more gas and burps. Banana orange smoothies aren’t my best digestion experience. Banana blueberry on the other hand is totally smooth.
The other variable that matters as much as what you eat is the state you’re in when you eat. Eat from a calm, balanced place at the sweet spot between enjoying your food and being genuinely hungry. Hunger on a raw food diet is a pleasant, relaxed feeling, often with some salivation. The anxious, irritable, hangry feeling that most people associate with hunger is actually a detox cycle. Sip water, let it pass, then eat when you feel settled. Your digestion will be noticeably better.
For anyone interested in vacuum blending, it’s worth looking into. It removes oxygen from the blender container before blending, preventing the antioxidants in the food from being oxidized during the process. Studies have shown up to 60% less antioxidant loss compared to standard blending. The smoothie tastes more intense, stays fresher longer, and digests cleaner. I have a video on hacking a standard Vitamix into a vacuum blender for a reasonable cost if you want to explore that.
Organic vs Conventional, Cold Climates, and the Mindset Side
Most of what I’ve eaten over 22+ years has been conventional produce, at least by calorie. It has still led to extraordinary health outcomes, fast recovery, stable energy, and consistently strong blood work. I prefer organic when the price difference is reasonable, but I don’t stress it. My priority is quality that actually tastes good, because flavor tracks with nutrient density and sugar content more than the organic label alone does.
In colder climates, the first couple of winters on a raw food diet can feel a little harder. Partly it’s caloric, slightly undereating makes you colder. Partly it’s hydration, a higher water content in the body requires more energy to heat. Over time the body adapts. Dress appropriately, keep your space warm, stay active, eat enough. I find in Sweden that it genuinely isn’t difficult. Warming date drinks, date blended with hot water or caffeine free chai tea, are a nice comfort on cold days without compromising anything.
The mindset piece is honestly where a lot of people quietly go off track. I used to see this as a binary, perfect raw foodist or total failure, and it created so much unnecessary stress. That stress itself affects digestion, energy, and how you experience your food.
A more useful frame: this is a marathon, not a race. It’s a 5 to 7 year integration process, not a 30-day cleanse with a result at the end. Where you are right now isn’t where you’ll always be. Your microbiome changes. Your digestion improves. What feels heavy or hard today can feel easy in six months. The goal is to keep moving in a direction that makes sense, not to perform perfection for anyone including yourself.
Eating a raw food diet doesn’t make anyone more worthy or spiritually elevated. It simplifies your digestive load, increases your nutrition per calorie, and over time supports your higher potential across a lot of areas of life. That’s already a lot. It doesn’t need to also be a rigid identity.
Key Takeaways for How To Build Muscle as a Raw Vegan
If you’re looking for the clearest possible summary of how to build muscle as a raw vegan from everything above, here it is.
Eat enough. More than you think you need. Err on the side of abundance, especially when training. Create the demand through exercise and the calories will go down easily and be used well. Keep fruit as your caloric foundation, include greens and vegetables daily, and keep fat low. Supplement B12. Get your vitamin D sorted, whether through sun, a lamp, or a supplement. Don’t fast while trying to build. Eat from a calm balanced state. And give yourself time, because this is a long game and it rewards patience.
I hope this helps bring some clarity and confidence to wherever you are in your journey right now. If you want to go deeper on any of these topics, my B12 post is a good next read, and feel free to explore everything else on the site from there.
Another great resource is my post on The Four Pillars of Truth: How I Separate Useful Information from Misinformation.
About Dillon Olias
Big thanks to Dillon for having me on and asking such genuinely great questions to help people learn how to build muscle as a raw vegan. Dillon is a 19-year-old from the UK, 95% raw vegan, and documenting his journey on YouTube and Instagram. Check him out below.
Youtube: youtube.com/@DillonOlias Instagram: instagram.com/dillonolias Email: [email protected]
Thanks so much to Dillon for the great conversation. I hope this full breakdown of how to build muscle as a raw vegan gives you the clarity and confidence to go after your goals with zero second-guessing.
As Always
Wishing You Much
PeaceLovenSeasonalFruit ck
