ABOUT MICHAEL
From an early age, I was enthusiastic about all kinds of sports and tried a lot of things (more or less successfully): football, swimming and alpine skiing, to name a few. My absolute favorite food as a child was “Schnitzel” with french fries.
In the course of my childhood, I ended up playing handball, which became my absolute passion for a few years. As a teenager, however, I gave up sports and started to eat mostly junk food. You’d rarely find vegetables or other healthy foods on my plate. I ate a lot of convenience food, meat and sweets. The result was weight fluctuations, overweight and a great listlessness.
In the end, however, the excess weight was the trigger for me to get involved in sports again and (in my naive opinion) to attract more girls with my fitter and leaner body. I started weightlifting and fitness when I was 17, which also changed my diet. I ate chicken and rice almost everyday, because I was convinced that it was the only way to build up muscles effectively. I got rid of my excess weight on the whole, but I still felt tired and flabby.
I met and fell in love with Marie when I was 19.
After two years we moved to Vienna to live and study there. At that moment, for the first time in our lives, we were in charge of our own food and groceries. Meals and their preparation became an important part of our lives, cooking together every day was the highlight after a hard day at UNI. As nutrition became more and more important to us, we studied different types of nutrition more intensely, through books, articles and documentaries. This opened our eyes, and mine in particular, to the fact that my chicken and rice "muscle building food" was pretty much the worst thing for my body, the environment and the animals. I was, and I still am disgusted by the way slaughterhouses and breeding stations are run and the way they exploit and treat animals there. From that point onwards, a little over two years ago(2019), we changed our diet completely to a vegan one. I did have some concerns, but they disappeared in no time and I felt fitter and more alive than ever before.
Documentaries like "The Game Changers" underlined my own feeling that my athletic performance also benefited from the new diet. For some time now, triathlon is my sporting passion, where I have already been able to celebrate some success stories. The vegan diet supports my performance, I don't get tired during training sessions, my regeneration time has been extremely shortened and my digestion now works perfectly, which is an important success factor for endurance athletes.
I can still remember our first vegan dish, broccoli with potatoes. Sounds boring, am I right?
Well, it was. Over time, however, we massively expanded our culinary horizons and every dish became more creative and tasty. I, a past vegetable denier, turned into a real veggie lover. For this reason, it was obvious that we wanted to share this passion with our friends and family and so the idea for an Instagram food account was born, which should document our culinary vegan journey on the one hand and serve as a source of inspiration for other people on the other. But we couldn't imagine where our journey would lead us, almost two years later we have reached a considerable number of followers and we have even started our own blog, which you’re currently reading.
What are your goals and dreams for the future?
I would be happy and it would be a big dream of mine if our little success story as The Vegan Allrounder grew steadily and we could make a living out off it at some point and make our passion for vegan nutrition and a conscious life to a profession.
In the meantime, I could also imagine working in an environmentally friendly or even vegan company after my bachelor's degree at the University of Vienna in business studies with the focus on production and logistics, which I hope to complete in the near future, and thus making the world a better place.
My biggest dream, however, is to live in nature near the sea one day.
What is your favorite dish?
That's a difficult question, I love all food, whether it’s sweet or savory, everything gets into my stomach in no time. But if I had to choose, my favorite dish would probably be homemade sourdough bread with guacamole…or cookies…or suhsi… see what I mean? Impossible to pick just one.
What does a perfect day look like for you?
A perfect day for me starts with sunshine, I'm an absolute good-weather person. Followed by a bike ride in the fresh air. In a nutshell, that's how a perfect day would start for me, what comes after that is just the cherry on top, but I certainly wouldn't say no to a vegan ice cream sundae or some biscuits.
Hi, we’re Marie and Michael, two foodies living and studying in Vienna!
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