Top 10 Reasons to Eat More Plants: #5 Our Food Choices Aren't So Personal

I know we are supposed to say that our food choices are personal.  I have very often said this myself, especially in the first few years of eating plant-based. Anytime I sensed discomfort from others or felt it building up in myself when I discussed our family's lifestyle, I'd often follow with, "But what we eat is SO personal!" just to make us all feel more at ease. So here's the thing... When I think about how deeply I must have felt, as pre-plant-based-me, to believe that thousands of animals needed to die over the course of my lifetime in order for me to live - or how deeply I now feel to leave animals off my plate while living in an omnivore's world - definitely, to an extent food choices are very personal and attached to a deeply held belief. But for this post, I want to take a moment to share why I've come to think this "food choices are personal" business is only true to an extent and how important it is that we stop seeing our food choices as entirely personal. Because that's not the whole story.

“The primary reason diseases tend to run in families may be that diets tend to run in families.”

— Dr. Michael Greger, Nutritionfacts.org

Imagine your daily life for a second and think how often food is a part of your social fabric. You're a parent, a son or daughter, a grandparent, a friend, a boss, a colleague, a business owner, a volunteer, a member of a community organization, a coworker. You have patients or clients. You prepare meals for others. You dine with others. You plan your office parties or snacks. You give thank you gifts of food. You're a host. You have people who love you, who depend on you, who you may someday depend on for your own care and who your quality of life (and how long you are on this earth) truly matters. The choices we make include others, even when they seem personal. They may influence or impact others. We are so interconnected. We have the ability to make choices that improve or weaken the quality of our own lives but I think this also includes the lives of those around us. And so I'm just not sure how we can keep saying it's personal. 

I can imagine pre-plant-based-me reading through my website, and sort of skipping through parts, numbing out how this really relates to me. I'd likely feel like, yes, all of these things matter, but I have to eat animal foods to live - it's about protein, and there's a food chain, and our families and communities have taught us this since we were born basically. It's what we've always done. 

What I wish I'd known earlier...

Here's what I wish pre-plant-based me would have known. My husband has a chronic condition that I now suspect may have been avoided had we always been eating plant-based. It's a really hard pill to swallow to think that my way of life (and serious cheese habit) could have been a factor in nudging him towards a less healthy lifestyle and a chronic condition. But I think that's likely true. And I know for a fact it was light years easier for him when I went fully plant-based too. Caring more about what I eat improves my overall health and wellness and sets a new stage for my whole family. Our eating habits are now based around longevity, not based around an unfounded notion that we may all fade into the earth if we don't eat enough animal protein. Pre-plant-based me didn't have all the information and hadn't realized how intensely my lifestyle was also impacting my husband's (or could be limiting my own) - which is one of the very deeply-felt reasons why I now live plant-based.

I can remember a few things pretty distinctly about the moment when I realized that plant-based eating was now going to be a way of life for me. 1) The shocking realization that I might not have ever explored plant-based eating without someone caring enough to plant a seed and without chronic disease leading us there, 2) One of my biggest worries was socially how eating vegan would all play out, and 3) A need to completely understand plant-based living, especially in consideration of my kids - but how would I know who to trust/where to find resources?? 

Someone had to plant the seed. I had to be ready to hear it. And I had to find resources that matched up with what I was experiencing and offered me the right kind of information to give me the confidence to know I was making the best decision for my whole family. 

Making healthy choices together...

What we eat does matter. Food matters. Our health matters - and not just to us but to our loved ones. If  you aren't familiar with the work of Blue Zones, you should check it out. Here's the Blue Zones' mission, "Inspired by the world’s longest-lived cultures, we help people live longer, better lives by improving their environment." Dan Buettner and his team talk extensively about the benefit of plant-based eating and about how they've found our environments can either nudge us into healthier, happier lifestyles, or be a road block to health and longevity. Let's do more than nudge each other. Let's make it damn easy. As Santa Barbarans, we pride ourselves on living in a healthy community. Still, I think we can do better. Yes, let's build better hospitals and better clinics and specialty centers. But let's do more about prevention so that we can try to avoid getting there in the first place. We can't do it alone. We need each other to do better together. 

“The most meaningful piece of advice is to tell patients to make friends with people who eat a plant-based diet. Healthy behaviors are contagious.”

— Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones

We need to bring more plant-foods in to our homes. We need restaurants to make delicious mushroom dishes instead of the newest take on pork belly. We need kids menus with actual healthy veggie options so our kids learn young, even when they're out, to care about what they eat (and they're way more likely to try new foods out to eat, at school, or at a friend's house - at least that's our experience). We need community events to focus on healthy options to make plant-based eating more normal and to support the common mission of enhancing our communities' lives. We need our go to resources for food and nutrition to help us learn about the risks of eating animal foods, not just the perceived benefits. Because it's likely that 15 of the top diseases and conditions that lead to death and disability in the U.S. can be prevented, arrested, or reversed by diet. That's powerful. We need to help each other feel more comfortable making healthy choices by making them together. 

Getting started...

I share a number of resources within this site to help you learn more from those that I've come to count on and trust. I've never just trusted one voice, and wouldn't expect you to. You've got to do the reading and the research and determine who you trust and look at their background and the background of the research they rely on and make sure it's unbiased. Marketing dollars are driving a lot of the information we're getting. But the unbiased research and information is out there. 

Please consider this site and this post a love letter to you and your loved ones and my community. Perhaps this is your seed planted. :) Check out the Blue Zones and the resources I share to learn more about the science and practice of plant-based nutrition to discuss with your families, friends, and health care team (in my first post Start Anywhere, throughout  THE VINE, and in the TOOLKIT to start). And start to notice how your food choices may make you feel and impact your health and those around you. Start to imagine how can you help nudge others towards healthier and healthier choices. Because they matter and you matter.

If you feel the pull of your environment making it more difficult for you to make healthier decisions, you can do something about it. Think longevity, rather than taste to taste, meal to meal. It may be uncomfortable at first. But it can be exciting too! My husband did the research and took a chance, and our whole family is healthier because of it. Be the one to start make the healthier choices. Don't assume your kids can't grow to love beans + tofu. They're easier and cheaper (or just as cheap) as chicken + hot dogs and you can season them just as you would any meat - and they are deeeelish! Choose a veggie dish eating out with friends (or at least don't razz someone else for choosing it). Stock up your office snack zone with fruits and vegetables and plant-based treats. Do you run a restaurant or snack bar with a kids menu? Add more veggie options and maybe reconsider the chicken nuggets, burgers, hot dogs, cheese quesadillas, dairy based mac n cheese, and please please rethink how the french fries are prepared. (Bake 'em or air fry them please! Phew, I've been needing to get that off my chest. Even plant-based kids need healthier options.) When you're out, make a habit of asking about ways to eat more plant-based at your favorite places. Try a plant-based cookbook or meal plan or rotate in a new fruit or veggie every week while rotating out an animal food. Read the research. Start anywhere.

It matters how we live. Chronic disease doesn't have to be inevitable. If I've learned anything from all of my years spent researching and learning about the plant-based life, I've learned that. Make healthier choices for you because you matter to yourself. And to your kids. And to your parents, and your friends. We want each other to have long healthy lives. And we all worry about being a burden to others as we get older. Let's make it damn easy to live healthier, longer lives, not shorter more challenging ones. Our food choices aren't so personal, after all.

Top 10 Reasons to Eat More Plants: #4 Maintaining a Healthy Weight Doesn't Have to be an Uphill Battle

There's no question that exercise is super duper important to our long-term health. I don't think I need to dig up any facts here to support that claim, it's something we all commonly know. But, I think many of us (or at least pre-plant-based-me:)) have come to think about exercise as necessary for maintaining a healthy weight. I remember as a kid looking at this beautiful picture of my grandmother and her sisters. All were so beautiful. And at this moment in time, all carried their weight in their hips. I knew someday I was destined to be a beautiful pear-shaped goddess just like them. I always thought genetics was a pretty big factor in our body-type/weight. And to a greater extent exercise. Sure, perhaps genetics play some role and of course physical fitness is important, but what I've experienced is that the biggest influence on how I feel and how much weight I carry is in the food I eat. It's (almost) all about the food. I now firmly believe that I can let exercise be for fitness, strength building, fun, meditation, flexibility - or whatever reason that most connects me to an exercise routine at a given time - by keeping the foods I eat whole food, plant-based. It doesn't have to be an uphill battle to maintain a healthy weight.

My Experience

Going vegan helped me loose some weight naturally. But, me oh my, shifting into a whole food, plant-based lifestyle (vegan minus the oil and highly processed foods) was a game changer. I have found that my weight is super dependent on what I eat. And it's not a "carb" thing. My two biggest roadblocks to maintaining my feel-best weight are 1) animal based foods (contributing to, as I call it, my "extra cheese layer") and 2) processed oils. In the past ten years, I have been soooooo many sizes, going in and out of three pregnancies and three different eating styles. Right now I am a bit of a pear coming out of my third pregnancy. And I'm loving it (for the most part;)) for the time being as it's an extension of a special journey that I've been on this past year - but also I know by sticking to my plants I can work my way back to my feel-good weight more easily. So here's been my experience.

Before and during my first pregnancy, I was a classic cheese-a-holic omnivore. I started at the highest weight of, maybe, my life. And to top that, I gained by far the most weight during that pregnancy (40+ lbs).... Oy. I shifted to veganism, literally on the day my first child was born, transitioning from vegetarian to vegan eating over the following few months, and then went from vegan to whole food, plant-based over about the next year. I reached my lowest weight since high school leading into my second pregnancy, and I felt awesome.

During my second pregnancy, oil began to make a regular appearance about half way through and I    definitely noticed a change in my weight gain later in my pregnancy as compared to the earlier days. And following that pregnancy, I shifted back to a primarily whole food plant-based diet, which brought me down to my feel good weight much, much quicker than before. Mind you, my weight gain came from using just a bit of oil on cooked vegetables at night and maybe in my salad dressing at lunch. When I shifted back to whole food plant-based, the pounds tumbled off waaaay more easily. And this was without a really crazy exercise routine. I walked. I tried to squeeze in yoga. As a mom with a new baby and working full-time, I was not super consistent. What I found is that my weight was mostly connected to what I ate. 

In my most recent pregnancy I gained just under what I gained in my second (about 30 lbs total), eating whole-plant based throughout. But just following the birth I found myself in birthday season where I indulged in some yummy (but surely oil/shortening-laden) cakes, vegan pizzas, and more processed vegan foods and I suddenly came to notice, once again, that these foods are super fun, but don't serve me in maintaining my ideal feel-good weight. I am confident as I make sure to stick to a 95-100% oil-free diet moving forward, I'll be back to my old feel-best self in no time. 

Whole foods! :)

No other eating style did for me what a whole food plant-based diet does. Taking out animal meat made a huge difference. Taking out cheese, dairy, and eggs made a huge difference. And taking out oil made a huge difference.

I don't want to confuse finding my best feel-good weight through what I eat with deprivation. I'm not limiting my portions. I eat until I'm full and high fiber foods help my body stay in better tune with my full queues. And I totally enjoy eating whole food plant-based. I especially love it because it makes me feel the best. Limiting foods like animal products and oils doesn't mean I'm depriving myself, it means I know what foods make me feel good and I focus on those foods as the foundation for a healthy lifestyle.

Experiencing a wide range of sizes, feels, and eating patterns in a relatively short amount of time made me realize how DIFFICUUUULT we make it in America to maintain a healthy weight. On the one hand, we learn that in order to be trim you have to exercise a lot, focus your diet on protein (particularly from animals...and definitely dairy, but be careful, it has to be just the right amount! Not too much. Not too little. But what the heck does that mean??). And yes, eat your veggies. But not white veggies. And don't forget to blame it on gluten. And sugar. Aaaand too much fruit and carbs in general will make us larger in life than we may like. And the family-style restaurants we gather at with our loved ones all have servings of heavy oily - animaly foods in triple the amount we really need (of any food) in one sitting. I remember pre-plant-based-me always feeling so confused about what to eat and constantly feeling guilty that I wasn't exercising hard enough to balance out my calories. So what's the deal? Why do we have to feel so guilty about our habits while the traditional guidance we're getting is so dang confusing and unclear? And doesn't serve us well? It's crazy-making. 

So What I'm Saying Is...

I don't think it has be so hard. We can make exercise about fun, health, stress relief, meditation, activity, longevity, or whatever moves you to move and by literally just focusing our plates on plant foods, as close to their natural forms as possible, we can take the guilt, stress, and mystery out of eating. 

When I was first learning about plant-based nutrition, I remember hearing that diet was 80% the driving factor in weight loss/management and 20% is fitness/exercise. I believe that. Once I shifted my plates to nutrient rich foods and away from calorie rich foods, everything changed. My main food philosophy is to eat 97-100% whole food, plant-based at home (all plant-foods, limited-to-no refined foods and oil) and when I eat out/take out, I try to maintain the same, but oftentimes some oil sneaks in. Sometimes a Crushcakes cupcake with my kids or Mesa Verde pizza with my husband is just soooo good. So I try to worry about oil a bit less when eating out, it's just the way of most restaurants at this point. But I'll almost always try for an oil-free option or at least limit oil where I can - and because oil-free options can be a bit more challenging (although not impossible!:)), I try to eat most of my meals at home so oil-rich foods don't override my diet. 

What I  eat is completely relative to how I feel - the more whole food plant-based nutrient dense foods I eat, the better I feel. The more animal foods and oils (calorically dense foods) I eat, the more weight I gain and the crummier I feel. Here's a visual from Forks Over Knives that paints a pretty good picture of filling up on calories from animal and processed sources vs plants.

Image Credit: Forks Over Knives

So where do you start if you're thinking of plant-based eating to find your feel-good weight? As you'll find on Plant Based SB, I'll share what I've experienced and a lot of what I've learned but also some resources that I've found to be super helpful and credible in their approach to nutrition because we all need trusted resources to add to our toolkits and to help build our foundation of knowledge. I share some great resources in BASICS and throughout THE VINE on plant-based eating, but to help make it super simple to start, here's what the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) says about what to eat for a healthy weight loss, to get you started (and check out the full article in the link):

• GRAINS - Eight servings a day, 80 calories = one serving.  At least six servings should be from whole grains. (i.e. brown rice, whole grain pasta, quinoa, oatmeal, whole wheat bread, etc.)
• VEGETABLES - At least four servings a day, 35-50 calories = one serving. At least one serving raw, at least one serving dark leafy greens. (i.e. leafy greens of all kinds, cruciferous veggies like broccoli, squash, root veggies like carrots, potatoes, and sweet potatoes)
• LEGUMES - Three servings a day, 100 calories = one serving. (i.e. beans of all varieties, lentils, soy products)
• FRUIT - Three servings a day, 80 calories = one serving. (i.e. berries, stone fruit, apples, citrus, etc. Focus on whole fruit rather than juices.)
• SWEETS - No more than one serving a day, 100 calories = one serving and limit to one gram of fat. (i.e. fruit, smoothie, sweetened cereal, baked fruit, etc.)

The Physician's Committee also recently came out with a podcast all about weight loss/management and plant-based eating. Yes! They cover everything. I super love PCRM. Find the podcast by clicking here - PCRM's Exam Room Podcast - Weight Loss on a Vegan Diet: How Going Vegan Causes the Pounds to Melt Away.

Enjoy what you eat. And eat so you feel satisfied, but make it nutrient dense foods, not calorically saturated foods. For healthy living and feel-good-weight, it's (almost) all about the food. :)