Can a vegan diet for fitness work?

I keep seeing lots of stories about being vegan and how it affects your training. I watched a fantastic TED Talk explaining how you can benefit from a vegan diet and be a top performing athlete.

The principal is sound, the body has to use energy to digest food, energy that you would ideally use for performance (athlete or regular gym goer), meat requires more energy to be digested, what he explained really well, was that swapping meat for starches was not the answer as they also take a lot of energy to be digested. Plant based foods, take much less, and therefore they can offer a healthy solution to vegetarian or vegan fitness regimes. The less energy used in digestion, the more there is for performance.

I am not vegan, but I can appreciate everyone has choices and being healthy is more important – however you get there. I do, think fitnika101 on instagram is worth following if you are thinking about or have recently become vegan – she shows you how fit and well you can be by eating a good vegan diet. She looks amazing, she talks sense and has dealt with struggles to get her to a point today where she trains hard because she likes it, the results show but she also knows when to relax. She gives regular updates and I think is quite inspirational.