So you’re thinking about dipping your toe into the fantastic world that a Whole Foods Plant Based or Vegan diet can offer you.
Whether you’re doing it for your health, the environment or animal cruelty is entirely up to you but know that regardless of your reason or purpose you are embracing all three.
It is estimated by the CSIRO that it takes:
50,000L of water to make 1kg of Beef
only 2,523L of water to make 1kg of Tofu
800L of water to make 1L of Cows milk
only 200L of water to make 1L of Soy milk
Going purely Whole Foods Plant Based can seem very daunting. When I made the change, I didn’t put allot of thought into it or plan it out (which is unusual for me). I made the decision and I was going to work out what I was going to eat for the rest of my life in the morning, see going WFPB/Vegan #1 Both Feet In [Link].
One easy way is to change one thing and do that one thing well.
Consistency is the key to success; this is a mantra I live by in all my endeavours.
There are three distinct ways to do it the easy way:
Option 1 – Meatless Mondays, Wellness Wednesdays, Farm Free Fridays or any other day that may work for you
Option 2 – Change one meal such as breakfast or lunch
Option 3 – Eliminate something significant such as meat or dairy
When you do this, do it well. Look back at the end of the week and think about what you’ve managed to cut out and the good it did you and the environment.
Don’t falter because this is the beginning where you incorporate more change and not go backward.
If you choose breakfast, make it every breakfast. Don’t default to bacon and eggs on the weekend. You might start with Monday to Friday WFPB and then bring in weekends but once you start one routine don’t go backward.
The important thing here is that you are creating a new habit. If you flip flop in and out of being WFPB then you are not achieving a whole lot and you are actually making it harder for yourself to make the change. See the more detailed explanation below.
A quick note before you start
#1 Try and remove temptations, if you’re going dairy free, ditch the milk out of your fridge.
#2 This isn’t a calorie controlled diet. Eat what you need to. You can generally eat more on a plant based diet as depending which option you choose it is less calorie dense.
#3 Don’t skimp on food or quantity because if you are calorie deficient, if you feel hungry, then you are less likely to succeed, you are more likely to reach for something bad.
#4 There are lots of vegan meat substitutes available now in supermarkets. Use these if it makes the transition easier. We can get you off the processed food later. If you’ve got a killer chill con carne recipe that you love, use plant based mince instead of beef mince. You will probably be surprised. The texture and mouthfeel are very convincing.
When I started, I ate a couple of pieces of peant butter or avocado on toast, crumpets or bagels for breakfast. These were easy, tasty, portable and filling and by the way I lost weight. I was pretty pleased with myself too. I thought wow, who knew you could eat tasty food and lose weight. Portable and easy was key to me because of my work, I could eat these in the office. At work I had a jar of peanut butter in my desk draws, some crumpets and bagels in the freezer and I tossed an avocado in my bag as I left home in the morning. I simply chucked something in the toaster and spread something on it mid morning. EASY, no thought required!
OPTION 1 – choose a day
Popular these days are Meatless Mondays. Make Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner free of dairy, meat, fish and eggs, no animal products. Do it for a day, you can do a day, anyone can do a day. Plan it on the weekend, make sure you have what you need and then do it.
Use it as a chance to try something new. For some people, eating some vegetables is a new experience. Some of these will easily become some regular go-tos as you move forward, some you will try and then pass on. I love artichoke hearts, the type you buy preserved in cans or jars. I recently tried fresh artichokes again and I have to say, they just don’t work for me. Maybe I’m just rubbish at cooking them but they are a hard pass when I see them at the grocery store, allot of work, not allot of gain and whole load of compost afterward.
OPTION 2 – choose a meal
Do breakfast, it’s probably the easiest one. Some really simple ones are:
- Cereal with plant-based milk
- Peanut butter, jam or vegemite on toast
- Avocado on toast, smashed avo, the choice of the in crowd
- Apple pie overnight breakfast oats
- Brushcetta – the cheats version
But when you do breakfast you do all the breakfasts, eating cereal 5 days a week if you used to eat bacon and eggs 7 days a week is a good start but if you ate cereal nearly every day anyway you know you can do a bit more.
If you can do plant based breakfasts every day for a whole month without any breaks, take a bow. You have achieved something significant. You will have formed or be well on your way to forming a strong neural pathway to your future breakfast choices whatever your situation.
What’s next?
It’s time to do lunch, yay!
It’s time to pick your next challenge, lunches are probably the next easiest to choose. If you haven’t incorporated any dinners into your repertoire it’s now time to be incorporating one or maybe two of these a week as well.
OPTION 3 – Eliminate something significant
This might be you eliminate dairy. No milk, no cheese. This can be a transition for some, especially if you are a latte type person and always have milk in your coffee.
I’m not going to lie to you, a soy milk latte tastes different to a cow’s milk latte. Luckily, I don’t have milk in my coffee so that wasn’t a problem for me.
If you’re removing dairy as your thing, try the range of plant milks available. There is a huge number now that are readily to hand such as soy, almond, rice and oat milk. There is also coconut, hemp, pea and peanut milk but you might have to don your Sherlock Holmes gear to find some of these. You local hole in the wall barrista is probably not sporting hemp milk below the counter but they prbably have some almond milks stashed away behind the soy milk.
They all have their own taste so you will need to work our which one works for you. Soy is distinctive there are people that just don’t like it. Oat can have a nutty flavour to it, rice milk is less distincstive and reasonably neutral.
What have you achieved?
Whether you opted for option 1, 2 or 3, there’s a very good chance you are feeling better or you feel better after your plant based meals vs meals involving animal products.
There’s a chance you can tell the difference between when you eat a plant based meal and when you eat a meal incorporating dairy, meat and eggs. It is likely the sluggish feeling after a meal with animal products will be quite pronounced.
One of the great things of going WFPB is embracing the new experiences and feeling positive about the change.
However you choose to do it, you have to make it work for you.
If it’s a chore, if you make it hard work, if you’re not on the bus because you don’t want to be, you will find reasons to fail, reasons not to make it work for you.
Think ahead where you can about social situations. If you made the big dollar move and went WFPB for dinners, that’s great but when you go out with friends are you going to feel socially awkward, are they going to bombard you with a thousand questions?
You might need to be prepared for this. If you know where you’re going, research the menu, contact the venue and check what they have available that’s WFPB so you won’t be surprised. The choices are pretty good these days unlike the unfortunate vegans of yesteryear. Remember vodka and chips (hot version, fries if your American) are a saviour to vegans everywhere 😉
THE EXTENDED VERSION
To create new habits, psychologists refer to the three R’s, Reminder, Routine and Reward.
Reminder – Why are YOU doing this? Why did you start the journey and what do you want from it?
Routine – Do it regularly, consistently and with purpose. Be it one meal daily or one day weekly, stick to it.
Reward – If you achieve your goal then you can reward yourself, just not with a great big egg and bacon roll. Maybe get a massage, have a vegan brownie or something that gives you pleasure that doesn’t involve eating animals.
Our brains create neural pathways based on our habits and behaviours (good and bad) the brain doesn’t really know the difference but the pleasure receptors know what they like and as a result we gravitate toward things that we like.
Neural pathways are like tiny electrical wires in the brain that are used in preference when something happens. Fight or flight, smoking and drinking, temperature control when sleeping. When something happens, we automatically do something as a result. Colours we like, make us feel happy, a loud bang might make us jump, if we get hot when we sleep, we kick the covers off. A classic for me was when I drank alcohol in social situations, I would crave a cigarette, you know it’s bad but you also enjoy it, similar to deep fried anything, including Mars Bars.
Neural pathways control good and bad habits. They aren’t set in stone and they can be changed, they are changed through sheer will and determination or more so by using the three R’s and creating new habits.
The Three R’s work because we naturally gravitate toward things we like and enjoy, things that give us pleasure and we move away from things that hurt us or don’t give us pleasure (like work, ha ha).
A 2009 research paper by the University of London indicates that on average it takes about 66 days of repetition to form a new habit. This is not an absolute, you might take as little as 3 weeks or as much as a year. Depending on your age, some habits are really hard to break or forget.
I still have associations related to situations involving eating and drinking but my new habits overrule these. It doesn’t mean I don’t think about having a cigarette when I’m having a drink or that time I had a huge bacon and egg roll when I was working away but now they are memories that come to the surface, are acknowledged and then you move on because that’s not me now, they don’t get air time because I just don’t do that anymore. Funnily enough, that gives me pleasure, that is in itself a reward to me. To know that I kicked those habits, makes me feel good and further reinforces my decisions.