Why Plant-based?

Why is my diet plant-based? There is a short version and a long version.

Here is the short version: I am plant-based because the longest lived people on earth eat diets that are 95-99% plant-based. I read about these people in The Blue Zones Solution, by Dan Buettner, and it started me on the journey to a whole-food plant-based diet.

At the time I had just taken a course to be a nursing assistant, which gave me shocking insight into the reality of dying from a chronic disease like diabetes or heart disease. While I never worked as a nursing assistant, the horror created by that experience motivated me to start living a healthier life, and it made a lot of sense to copy the healthiest populations on earth.

As I’ve learned more about the health benefits of a whole-food plant-based diet, and as I’ve experienced the benefits for myself first hand, I have become passionate about sharing this information with others. Not everyone is ready to make the change, but I know that eating this way is the future for our species and the planet. I feel very lucky that my time for transitioning to plant-based has passed. On that note, this is my favorite quote about the journey to a plant-based lifestyle:

“Becoming vegan is not so much a decision made with our intellect as it is a natural consequence of inner ripening.” - Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet

I love this idea, because it captures the process of nurturing self-love and compassion.

Now, if you are interested in the long version of my change from a meat to a plant-based lifestyle, I’m happy to tell that story as well.

Like millions of others I grew up in meat-eating America. I grew up eating scrambled eggs, hot dogs, burgers, sausages, roasts, ribs, cheese, omelets and drinking milk. At the time I didn’t realize how often I was eating animals. It was normal and routine.

Still, I was vaguely unsatisfied with my food. I didn’t like hamburgers but I ate them because it was strange not too. I didn’t like milk either, but I was worried that my bones would be thin and weak without it. So I forced myself to drink it every day at lunch, if not also for breakfast and dinner. I listened to the teenagers and adults around me discuss diets, weight, break-outs and exercise, and everyone apparently knew the obvious - the way we were eating was bad for us. What no one knew was what to do about it.

The ‘Got milk?’ posters in the lunch rooms of all my public schools told me to drink milk, but I also heard from my friends that salt, fat and sugar are bad, and milk has a lot of fat and sugar in it. This was confusing, but ultimately my fears about being calcium deficient convinced me to keep drinking it. When I was training for cross-country and track I was concerned about iron and protein, so I ate the chicken and beef prepared for me, even though I knew they had a lot of fat and salt in them. Despite my efforts, my health was not good. On the outside I looked fine, but on the inside I was sluggish, tired, and often sick. This was so normal to me that I wasn’t even aware of it, it was just how life was.

Then I went to college and I stopped training every day. My calorie needs had been quite high as an athlete and now that I was only a casual gym goer I wasn’t hungry nearly as much. I was also extremely stressed about doing well in school and building a strong foundation for myself in the future. If I could go back in time I would hug that young person, because I really felt the weight of the world on my shoulders.

Predictably, I started gaining weight. I didn’t gain the freshman 15, but I did slowly lose muscle tone and add layers of fat around my mid-section. Excess fat on the stomach is a sign of serious ill-health, but I didn’t know this at the time. The years flew by and, as if it had happened overnight, by my junior year I was nearly 15 pounds overweight.

It suddenly really, really bothered me, because I had made a promise to myself long ago that I would never live so unhealthily as to gain that much extra weight. And yet it had happened to me without my awareness.

This led me back to exercise. I started running seriously again. I logged hundreds of miles. I ran two half marathons and one full marathon. I ran on weekdays and on the weekends, I ran on treadmills, I climbed stair-steppers, I lifted weights, I did yoga, I ran on cement trails, I ran on gravel trails, and I didn’t lose any weight.

I worked out obsessively for two years and I thought it was my fault that I wasn’t losing any weight. I believed that if I just worked out harder I’d be healthy and fit, but after I ran the marathon I had to admit to myself that I was clearly doing something wrong.

I read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and started prioritizing 8 hours of sleep a night (seriously, get 8 hours a night), and I started thinking about my food.

For the first time I was reading about diets, calories, nutrients and macros. I had always been skeptical of diets and this led me to the conclusion that all calories are the same, and the only way to lose weight is to restrict calories. The problem for me was that I was unwilling to go hungry. In fact the few times that I tried fasting or restricting my calories I hated it with unbridled passion. I couldn’t stand being hungry. It made me angry, irritable, light-headed and terribly exhausted.

I knew that this was not a good solution, and particularly after taking the previously mentioned nursing assistant course, I decided to focus on health instead of weight-loss. This led me to read the book The Blue Zones Solution by Dan Buettner, which shows that the diets of the longest living populations on earth (the ‘blue zones’) are almost entirely plant-based. I was absolutely fascinated, and as I happened to read it the first summer that I was in charge of preparing my own food, I started eating more beans, greens, and grains. I also discovered the magic of oatmeal for breakfast. However, I was still skeptical about completely switching to a plant-based diet. Where would I get my protein, iron and calcium?

Then I watched the documentary Cowspiracy. I considered myself a serious environmentalist and I was shocked by the statistics that I saw in that movie. For me this was the breaking point and led me to completely stop eating animals, eggs, and dairy.

But I was concerned, would my plant-based diet for the environment lead me to have ill-health? That led me to read The China Study by Colin Campbell and How Not to Die by Micheal Greger, and I was absolutely stunned to find out that animal products are not only unhealthy for the environment, they are unhealthy for humans as well! I won’t go into detail here, because this is about my story and not about the nitty gritty of nutrition science, but if you are interested I can highly recommend both of those books.

Finally, I will talk a little bit about how I evolved since changing my diet. The longer I ate plant-based food the more unappetizing animal products became, and the more sympathetic animals became to me. I realized that if I wasn’t comfortable slaughtering an animal myself, then I wouldn’t want to ask anyone else to do it for me. Furthermore, after reading Living the Farm Sanctuary Life by Gene Baur, I saw the unique personalities of farm animals and had a new appreciation for them as dignified individual creatures who lead lives separately and mysterious to us.

I also read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle. Both of these books helped me to appreciate the human toll of animal eating, which begins with the humans in slaughter-houses and factory farms who are exploited and abused. These jobs are simply inhumane for any human being to perform.

Today, like many vegans, I don’t buy leather or wool goods and I search out cruelty free and fair trade products. I lost all of my extra weight on a vegan diet without restricting my calorie intake and without even consistently working out, and I feel the best I’ve ever felt. My energy levels are higher, my mood is better, and I rarely get sick. I know that a vegan diet is the future and I am so thankful that my time for making the switch has passed. I ate animals for 22 years of my life and now I don’t anymore. It’s possible to do.

I’m not entirely comfortable with the term veganism, largely because of the intense stigma attached to it and it’s perception of being exclusive and judgmental. I strongly believe that exclusion and judgment of others will not create the loving, peaceful and abundant future we desire, but neither will eating animals. I also believe that shame and guilt are not effective tools for positive change, only love and kindness are.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading, and I will leave it here with another quote.

“The future generations of both humans and animals are depending on us to do what we can to nurture the seeds of nonviolence, intelligence, and compassion in our shared cultural garden so that they can inherit an earth that is healthy and a way of living that is based on freedom and caring. We can each be a field of freedom, and by the force of our example and intention we make it easier for those around us to do the same. The field will grow, spreading through our culture as a benevolent revolution.” - Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet

Sending you love, support, and encouragement.

xo