Around February of last year, we’d decided that we’d had it with our aging, ballooning, deteriorating selves and resolved to do something about it. What started out as a just wanting to lose some extra weight though has morphed into something bigger, longer lasting, and healthier than a crash diet to drop a few pounds.
Starting after Easter last year, we started hubby juicing again after having had some success with it about four years prior. We knew it worked. We’d both lost some weight and had liked the results. Better skin, felt alert like a werewolf, better bathroom habits, and less tired among many, many other things. We even talked at the time about “Why would we ever want to stop doing this?” “We feel so good!” Blah, blah, blah. Well, vacation happened. We fell off the wagon. It’s a lot of work, and it’s really easy to readopt bad habits. Especially when you visit the only other country in the world that allows for prescription drug advertising and whose population is arguably worse off than ours. New Zealand. En Zed. A country where I could have eggs Benedict for 12 days straight. And I did. What was I thinking?
Over the course of those four years we would yo-yo and put the weight back on.
So, through late Spring and early Summer of last year, we kept up with the juicing for hubby. Immediately, there were noticeable improvements. A loss of puffiness, bloating, a few pounds came off right away. It’s definitely a positive feedback loop. Better skin. Start to sleep better. He stopped snoring.
By about August though, I started to work some solid foods back into his diet because I was sick of just chopping and juicing vegetables. I was content just eating a lot less than I had been used to cooking for the both of us. This was a good thing. We also stopped having much, if any, meat around at this point.
Initially, we set it up that we were doing juice and eating a lot of fruits and veggies with hummus during the week and the weekends were “cheat/treat” times or for what we’ve come to call “weekend food.” Late last year, weekend food included meat and dairy. We were in the habit of weighing ourselves daily and came to see that the weekend binges where meat might be included just weren’t doing good things for us and it would take days to recover it seemed. As we went into Autumn, we started having more and more weekends where our ideas of weekend food had morphed into just having vegan junk food type stuff like fried tofu or other more oily things, maybe out. Going to the Chicago Diner and having a meal, that, while vegan, still seemed like a treat. Increasingly, we wanted nothing to do with the meat or dairy. Further, hubby is lactose intolerant, so it was great for him to finally admit that he just shouldn’t have the stuff period. Accepting that realization has made it a lot easier to just wipe out that whole category of food. Eat it, and you’ll feel like hell. I’ve never been that much a cheese addict and I was having fun experimenting with making my own nut cheeses, so that just about satisfies as much of a craving as I have. I’ve made a few that taste pretty much like Boursin, so that’s been more than enough to satiate me.
As the year was coming to a close and we were continuing to find great success with how we were looking and feeling, as well as continuing to further educate ourselves about the voluminous benefits of a whole food plant based diet, we decided to double down and go full on whole-foods, plant based for 2018.
Yup, we went vegan for 2018. Trying to adopt a whole foods, plant based, and increasingly no oil diet. That’s what this site is about. Sharing the recipes and the message for a better, healthier way to eat and live for you and the planet. This lifestyle is a huge win win for pretty much everyone except meat and dairy farmers, and I think they’ve been fooling us for long enough, so I’m okay with that. I would say this way of eating has been a resounding success, especially compared to the Standard American Diet I was raised on, and that’s not meant as a knock on how I was raised, that’s just what we knew then. What we know now is that too much animal protein can turn on cancer for some people and that a whole food plant based diet can lead to healthier outcomes for people. When we learn something better, then we have to have the will to change for the better. So many of the top diseases that kill most of us are entirely preventable. I don’t mind so much dying, I just don’t want it to be my fault. It’s amazing all the misinformation out there.
Is eating this way expensive? No more so than eating a standard American diet and certainly not if you think of all of the “soft” costs down the road tied to how sick it will make you. Are prescription medications expensive? How about hospital co-pays? It’s really about how you want to spend your money and I’d rather buy some nice cashews and pistachios and not fret the cost.
We eat a lot of beans, veggies and fruit. If you concentrate on eating cheap, in-season fruits, that can go a long way. Like buying the Bosc pears that are .99/lb this week over the Asian pears that are $2.99 every week. Beans are cheap and nutritious. There have been some specialty ingredients that have cost a bit, but they tend to last for a while and you don’t tend to need to buy them much. Meat is expensive and should probably cost consumers even more than it does. We continue to feel great, and we’ve seen reductions in blood pressure, sitting heart rate, and other indicators suggesting the various ways that we’ve improved our health.
Eating whole foods does take time. All I do is break down vegetables it seems. It’s helpful to be able to find the time to prep meal ideas or “bases” like beans and grains that take a while to cook on the weekends. I try to prepare a batch of granola every week to have on hand, as well as a bag or two of lentils, a bag or two of some kind of dried beans and a bag at least of some kind of grain de la semaine. That goes a long way towards making things easier during the week you when you don’t always have as much energy. The idea being also to set yourself up for success.
Finally, I really think this has to be the future. There are too many sick people out there that don’t need to be. Take back control of your health. It’s not magic or surprising that what we put into ourselves is reflected in how we look and feel. Eat better to feel better. Eat plants!