At this time last year, Michael Porter Jr. was preparing to begin his college basketball career at Missouri as one of the nation's top recruits and a consensus future NBA lottery pick. Alas, a back injury in the opener derailed his promising freshman season and robbed him of all but the final two games of the Tigers' 2017-18 campaign.

Disappointed that he didn't have the chance to prove himself during his first turn on the national stage, Porter used the experience to prepare for his inevitable professional career. A lifelong vegetarian, he began experimenting further with his diet while recovering from surgery, and while he may have slipped a few spots on some draft boards, Porter won’t have to wait long until his name is called on June 21. We recently caught up with him to discuss growing up in a vegetarian household; his transition to raw veganism; and the heartbreaking split with Chipotle necessitated by this choice.

GQ: How's the recovery going? How are you feeling?

Michael Porter Jr.: I’ve never felt better. I was in a lot of pain for a while—I had a back injury during my sophomore year, and even before I had my surgery, I was in pain all throughout high school. I always felt like I was playing at between 75 and 80 percent, and never really got back to the point where I should have been.

I came out to Chicago to do all my pre-draft workouts, and that was another one of the reasons I decided to go pro: Now I have the best trainers and chiropractors available, and the one goal is to make me feel 100 percent. I ended up being the top-ranked player in my high school class, but I always was thinking in the back of my head, like, If I didn’t have this pain, I could really be doing some crazy stuff.

Was it tough to grow up as a vegetarian athlete?

Being vegetarian was easy for me. The hard part was going on the road. The team was always stopping at steakhouses and places where I couldn’t really eat anything. Meat seemed nasty to me because I never had it growing up. But I would end up eating a whole plate of fries, mashed potatoes, or macaroni and cheese instead. At home, my mom would make things that—we would never really know how she made it, but it tasted good, and it was vegetarian.

Now, I’ve changed my diet from vegetarian to mostly vegan. I’ll eat dairy from time to time, or if it's in dressing. But my nutritionist, Dr. Douglas Graham, is going to be living with me soon, and from that time on, I’ll be a raw vegan. He has ways that you wouldn’t even imagine of making raw foods. He uses a dehydrator to make tons of stuff. I’ll have some guacamole, and he’ll make these dehydrated chips that taste like chips but still contain all of their nutritional value. He’ll make spaghetti, but it’s zucchini noodles. He’ll make some crazy tomato sauce that tastes like real spaghetti.

It’ll be a big change. I’ve been experimenting for awhile, using myself as a guinea pig—going the whole day eating mostly raw foods, and then eating pizza at the end of the night to see how I feel compared to when I didn’t eat pizza. Once you start eating like that and go back to putting something like that in your body, you feel such a drastic change.

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