FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Mulgrew relieved to ditch Deila’s ‘caveman’ diet and turn vegan
FOR Charlie Mulgrew, the Ronny Deila diet regime at Celtic had a curiously mixed effect. He was losing weight, feeling as lean and svelte as he had in years. And, through it all, he feared it might kill him.
‘It was the caveman diet,’ he recalls, reclining on a chair in Scotland’s Lima hotel. ‘High fat, just meat.
‘To be fair, it stripped everybody’s fat. Everyone’s body fat was down. My body fat was low. I was ripped.
‘But when I went back to training after injury, I had a lack of energy and my cholesterol was through the roof.
‘I got my cholesterol checked by the doctor at the club.
‘It had doubled and I knew I couldn’t keep that going.’
In November 2011, Mulgrew’s father, Charles, died at the age of 64. The Lennoxtown test of his blood fats set the internal alarm bells ringing.
‘My dad had a heart attack and his mum and dad both had heart attacks in their early 70s. I have a history of heart attacks in my family,’ says Mulgrew.
Contrary to the rumours of the time, there was no Celtic rebellion, showdown or surreptitious attempts to sneak oven chips back onto the Lennoxtown lunch menu. Merely an acceptance that, as his 30th birthday approached, it was time to take matters into his own hands. Preserving and prolonging his career as best he could.
‘To be fair to the manager, he said: “If you want to stick to what you are doing, okay”,’ says Mulgrew. ‘He wasn’t sitting over us making sure we ate our meal.
‘If your body fat was fine and you were eating as you had before, that was fine.’
Nevertheless, recent research into the high-fat, low-carb diet promoted by the Deila regime suggests a causal link with heart failure.
Over and above the health concerns, Mulgrew also feared the diet was doing nothing for his chances of playing professional football for as long as he possibly can.
‘When you’re young, you eat a kebab at three in the morning and then you train okay and you think it’s fine, but you realise as you get older that the margins make a difference,’ he says. ‘I recently started to eat a bit more vegan in the last year or so. Less dairy and a lot less meat, hardly any meat.’
In the entertainment industry vegans are ten a penny. Brad Pitt, Beyonce, Casey Affleck and Morrissey swear by it. In the macho bubble of professional football, it still seems a little off-beat. Effete, even.
Asked where the motivation came from to make the change, the Blackburn skipper is blunt.
He says: ‘To be honest, Netflix documentaries... I’m easily led.
‘I have just tried to educate myself on eating and that sort of stuff and I’ve felt brilliant on it.’
Mulgrew’s 14 goals for Blackburn from defence last season played a significant role in propelling the former English champions back to the Championship. In the absence of his close friend Scott Brown, he is now the Scotland captain.
And, at 32, he believes he can defy the lazy outdated convention that a player’s career is almost over as soon as he hits the big Three-O.
‘I don’t tag myself as vegan because I might go up there and have a scoop of ice cream after my lunch,’ admits Mulgrew. ‘But it’s hard, because you need to work out how to cook.
‘We’re brought up thinking meat, carbs and veg is a healthy meal, so you need to base it all on veg really. You need to swap chicken with sweet potato and that sort of stuff, so it’s not easy.’
Gordon Strachan famously played until the age of 40 on a diet of porridge and bananas. And Mulgrew’s former Celtic and Scotland manager has been a major influence on his lifestyle change.
‘Gordon has good views on keeping fit and stepping up your training rather than bringing it down as you get older,’ he says.
‘I’m a big believer in that. I’m fitter now than when I was 19, 20, no doubt about it.
‘There’s a thing in football where if you get over 30, people think you’re getting old. But you can still get fitter and stronger in your 30s.’
That his wife Alana has bought into the plan helps. The only concession to the caveman diet these days is for the benefit of the kids. Mulgrew reveals: ‘I do most of the cooking. But my wife has learned to cook a few things as well.
‘There is still the whole chicken nuggets thing for the weans, we can’t turn them...’
Neither, it seems, are his international team-mates in Scotland’s waterfront Lima hotel entirely convinced that cutting out the red meat is entirely for them.
‘They’re boaking when my lunch comes out,’ laughs Mulgrew.
‘In football, they push you to eat a lot of meat. Sports science and all that, and there is a long way to go to get it in.
‘But I had tendinitis in my Achilles for about a year.
‘It would take me 15 minutes to warm my Achilles up and then it would be fine. But it was getting worse.
‘In that vegan documentary, an American football player said he started a vegan diet and the tendinitis he had in his knee cleared up. As the months went by for me, mine healed completely. I don’t know if it was the vegan diet, but I do remember back to that documentary.’
He still enjoys a beer when the time is right. Neither does he promise never to deviate from the Road To Damascus.
‘If you interview me this time next year, I’ll probably be a caveman again,’ he says.
Yet Scotland’s new captain is leading by example. Eating for success and, at the age of 32, longevity.
‘I am who I am. It’s the same at my club where I am captain — but it doesn’t mean I’ve changed in any way,’ he adds. ‘I just try to be myself and that’s hopefully why the manager chose me.’
“I have tried to educate myself on eating and I feel brilliant”