Whole Food Plant Based Lifestyle
Why I’m adopting a whole food plant based lifestyle.
Health and nutrition have been very important to me for about the last 30 years. I have not led the healthiest lifestyle, that ‘s for sure! Coming into my teenage years in the middle of the Vietnam War debacle definitely had a say in how many of us, at that time, paved a road for ourselves. Some of us came out okay, some, not so. I’d like to think that I was one that came out OK. I do a lot of research on food, nutrition and eating well, and I have finally found the solution! I took the certificate course from the Center for Nutrition Studies at Cornell University and that showed me the path to good health!
For the last 20 years, my biggest health concern has been losing weight, and not once has my primary care doctor mentioned that to me. He’s never once addressed the weight issue, and even though I have slightly high blood pressure, he’d just as soon write me a prescription, rather than try to divert the cause.
Enough on that, the reason I’m writing this is that I have changed to a Whole Food Plant Based lifestyle. I’ve always been vegetarian, anyway, and about 10 years ago I was “vegan” for about 2 years. I put that in quotes, because, now that I have researched a healthy vegetarian lifestyle, I realized that I was on a “junk food vegan diet”. Yeah, that’s a real thing. There’s healthy veganism and there’s junk food veganism. Just to differentiate, junk food veganism is eating a lot of prepared, processed veggie based foods such as frozen veggie burgers, and other veggie “meats”, veggie cold cuts, and other frozen or prepared foods like pizza and TV dinner type entrees.
Basically, the food industry has succeeded in recreating all forms of meats and dairy products to sell their products to the unsuspecting “vegan’ who thinks they are being healthy. Then, it’s all about reading those labels, Very Carefully. The new “meats” that are being produced by the boat load, like Impossible Burger, Incogmeato and Beyond Meat are very highly processed and contain ingredients that came out of a lab. They are high in sodium and fat and have more calories than a beef burger! I’ll pass. I tried to try them once and the smell of the raw “meat” turned me off. I threw it out, couldn’t even cook it. Yuck! What a waste of money, it’s also very expensive. You can make your own for a fraction of the cost and it’s healthy.
As such, a Whole Food Plant Based diet consists of just that.
Whole foods. If they didn’t come directly from the ground, they
are not whole foods. Whole grains and recipes made from them are included in this list as well as nuts and seeds. If you don’t like to cook, this type of lifestyle probably will turn most people off. But if you’re willing to spend a little extra time in the kitchen, honing your knife skills, pre-planning what you’re going to eat, this diet will make you feel awesome, and even help you lose weight. I don’t want to call it a diet, though, it’s a lifestyle and something you can stay on for life. There’s no fad here!
I’ve been maintaining this style of cooking and eating for a little over six months now, and I must say, I feel pretty good. Granted, I haven’t gone 100% yet, I’m at about 95%, but I think that is pretty good. I’ve lost a bit over 10 pounds, and definitely some inches around my middle, (without even trying!) and that is something I have not been able to do on the Standard American Diet (SAD). I thought I was eating healthy, but I still included some processed foods and meats daily. Overall, I the biggest change was the “no oil”. I don’t use oil anymore at all and I think that’s the trick to the weight loss.
What I am going to do here, is to include my favorite recipes, my “go to’s”, and also include some tips and tricks that I have come up with to make this lifestyle successful. I believe the real secret to this whole food diet is not using any type of oil or processed fat. All your fats come from whole vegetables and/or nut and seeds.
When I first started to learn about this, I read The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell. Then I watched the movie “Forks Over Knives”. It was life changing for me. It really drove home the messages in The China Study.
This book is amazing, the science behind this diet is incredible and if we could just get half of our population to follow this diet, we all would be so much healthier, as well as our planet too!
Going back to my childhood, I was pretty much brought up on a whole food type of diet. Our mom’s all cooked and baked when we were kids. It’s amazing to look back and see how the foods have changed since the 1960s. My Mom always cooked her own food, we hardly ever had processed foods when we were kids. I’ll never forget one time that I went to eat dinner at a friend’s house, and we had spaghetti with jarred Ragu sauce. It tasted so different to me than the homemade sauce that my Mom made, but I liked it! This must be what we’re talking about when they say that the processed foods contain addictive substances to make you want more and more.
If you’ve read up to here, I must have caught your attention. I will be including recipes and my almost famous “No recipe recipe’s” as well as tips that I have found to make this lifestyle doable and user-friendly. I love to cook, and I love my herbs and spices, so hopefully you will try some of my recipes and love them as much as I do. Most of my recipes I got the ideas from cookbooks and other bloggers, but the ones I’m including will be original, I promise!