Today, I would like to talk about cooking. How I cook has changed dramatically over the last five years or so. This is because I started eating a lot of meat and potatoes and ended up now eating primarily whole food vegan. This means starting with steak, eggs, and butter, then switching to beans, greens, and water. I can certainly say that I feel much healthier.
Trying to cook whole food vegan has a lot of challenges. Whole food vegan means no processed food and no animal products. So no meat, dairy or eggs, but also no oil, white rice, or ketchup. The key word here is trying, so I do not follow this strictly, but about 90% of the time, this is how I eat.
Adopting this diet can seem very challenging, but I have some tricks that I used to get me here that I would like to share. Eating less meat and processed foods is good for your health, your wallet, and the planet, so even if you only do a few of these things they can make your life quite a bit better.
The first trick is to swap out easily replaceable foods. The best example of this is vegenaise. It tastes the exact same (as far as I can tell) and has no eggs. Other examples are brown rice for white rice, dill pickles for bread and butter pickles, tomatoes for ketchup. This is the easiest change you can make. You can often find me at the store looking reading labels to try to find the variety that doesn't have high fructose corn syrup or, what I like to call, the normal one. Don't remove foods, replace them.
Trick two is to not get rid of foods in your diet, but add in the healthy ones. The idea here is to fill yourself up on healthy food so that you don't have room for junk. This might seems odd if you are trying to lose weight, but a whole food vegan diet with no calorie restriction is effective for weight loss or maintaining a healthy weight. This is because these foods are typically less energy dense. So instead of starving yourself to be whole food vegan, try treating yourself.
Third trick is to surround yourself with people doing the same thing. I've always known that I should eat less meat and processed foods, but, until I met @terril, I didn't really follow through on this. She was vegetarian at the time and together we became whole food vegan. I'm more whole food, she's more vegan. Doing it together makes it easier.
The last trick is not really a trick, but a warning. You need to have patience. A lot of this gets easier the longer you do it. You'll find the right foods and learn how to cook them too. The craziest thing is that your taste buds slowly adjust to the new tastes. Not all, but some of the foods you ate before won't taste as great and some of the weird new or kinda bland vegan food starts tasting better. Patience is key.
Anyways, this was great to write and I hope you enjoyed it. Being healthy is difficult sometimes, I hope this makes it a bit easier.
Cheers,
Curtis
Written on eSteem