The Herbivore Family
To start at the beginning
I’ve been vegan for about eight years, and my husband has been vegan since we met, so I think four or five years. But what I realized when I met him was that so many people actually want to go vegan, or even just eat more plant-based food, but they don’t do it because they don’t know how. Because going vegan can be a huge shift, and it was a huge shift for me, especially in how I was used and raised to eat, and what kinds of food I ate. So this is for anyone who’s interested in eating more plant-based diet or wants to shift completely to veganism. To start at the beginning, the first question we need to ask ourselves is of course “where do we start?”.
where do we start?
Personally, when I went vegan I had no idea where to start. I just knew I wanted to be vegan. So I started with the simplest meal in my diet that was the closest to vegan already, and for me that was breakfast. All I had to do to make my breakfast vegan was to swap the dairy milk or the dairy yogurt for a non-dairy milk or yogurt, and I still had it with my oatmeal or muesli and it was just as delicious. So step one is really simple, just make the meal that’s closest to vegan already vegan by swapping or substituting ingredients.
swap ingredients and never eliminate
Once we started eating a more plant-based diet and learned how to shift our favorite meals or change what meals are our favorite into a more plant-based predominant diet, we come to one of the most important points, and that is to swap ingredients and never eliminate. People tend to remove ingredients from their regular meal to make them vegan, but not accounting for those missed calories by adding more of something else or swapping the ingredient for something else. A regular sandwich will probably have butter, it’ll have cheese and it’ll also have meat. Now that’s the majority of calories and food and substance in that sandwich that’s going to make you feel satiated. Now if you buy the same sandwich but you just remove the three high calorie foods from there, you’re basically just left with vegetables. Then you’ll be hungry and then you’ll say “I can’t be full enough on a vegan diet, so I can’t be vegan”. However, we can’t just remove foods and expect the food that we’re left with which is often just a little bit of iceberg lettuce and tomato maybe cucumber, to satiate us in the same way that these incredibly fatty and high in calorie foods do. We really need to swap them for alternatives. Now depending on what kind of food you’re eating and what you like and what you’re used to, there are many different ways you can swap them. If you mainly eat out swapping is very very simple most of the time because you can swap it for vegan chicken or vegan salami and vegan cheese, and that does add up to the calories. However, if you’re more on a healthy route you can swap the meat for things like lentils, tofu, tempeh or beans. Whichever way you get there it’s really really important that you swap and substitute the ingredients and you don’t just remove them, because that’s just going to be miserable.
the “why” becomes really really important
So once you’ve progressed further and you start to become a little bit more confident with eating a vegan or a plant-based diet, the “why” becomes really really important. For me the why becomes important especially as an ethical vegan, in social situations. So when my granddad started asking me if I was eating hay for about the fifth or the 10th or the 11th time since I went vegan, remembering the why was really important. Because by remembering the why I A, did need to get in an argument, B, could just drop it and not care too much about it, and I, C, could calmly tell him that I was just eating regular food. And another tip with this I think is to keep yourself informed, because a lot of people will have opinions on what you’re eating for some reason, so it feels really good sometimes to be able to have the science and the support and the information I need and that I know now exists. I’ll link some really good resources in the description box below, but that makes me feel really confident and secure in my choices and that really calms me down when other people bring it up.
eat more
Number four is my favorite tip, and the most important important important thing when you go vegan, more important than anything else, and that is to eat more. Please, please please eat more food. When I first met my husband he did go vegan, and I was very nervous. In fact, I wasn’t happy at all. I was of course happy for the animals, but I was so nervous that he’d gone vegan and didn’t know enough about it and was gonna fail, then he was gonna blame it on me and then he was never gonna try it again. And that is the circle that happens quite often. So the first day of his veganism he came home and I asked him what he’d eaten today, and when he replied he’d just eaten an apple… I was not pleased. Because I knew this was just gonna go downhill really fast. So the answer here is you need to eat more, and you don’t need to eat a little bit more, you need to eat a lot more. We need a lot more food to feel as full as if you’d eat say a cheese board, you don’t eat a lot at all to feel really really stuffed. So on your journey towards eating more plant-based please remember that when you eat your plant-based meals or when you’re swapping completely to a vegan diet just eat more food.
Variety
The next step I think is important on your plant-based journey is variety. Variety the way our bodies want us to eat, our microbiome wants us to eat, and if we don’t eat a variety of different plant foods it’s very easy to get deficient or to eat too much of something. And I find this surprising how common this is, but one of the apparently biggest excuses people use for not being vegan anymore, is spinach. I’m gonna put this as simple as possible to not have too many confusions. Spinach is a healthy food, you should eat it, but eating too much spinach is not good because it can cause kidney stones. Our bodies were not made for us to only eat one leafy green and eat it in abundance. Our bodies are made to eat spinach, kale, rocket, collard greens, all kinds of different vegetables and fruits so that we could get all the nutrients we needed. There’s a great book called Fiber Fuelled that you can read if you want more information on this.
focus on real foods
When I talk about variety and health I talk about food. So things like spirulina powder, and charcoal powder, any collagen powder, health powder, anything in the powder form. So I say don’t add any of that into your diet, focus on real foods and I’ll get to supplements in my next point. So there is scientific consensus on B12, which you’ve probably heard. Personally I take one B12 supplement a week, that’s all that you need. I choose the cheapest one because it saves me the most money.
perfectionism and the different levels of veganism
The more vegan you eat the more confident you’ll feel and the more healthy you hopefully feel as well, and on this journey there will be a big question about perfectionism and the different levels of veganism and that’s what I want to discuss next. I’ve seen three to four different levels of veganism throughout the past years. The strict vegan is what I would like to call myself. I don’t buy animal products in clothing or homeware or anything like that, and if I can’t figure out if something is vegan or not I will not eat it. I will simply not eat, I’ll bring my own food or I’ll just eat fruit and then eat when I get home. And that does work great for me, but I know that that can be difficult in social situations and I’ve definitely experienced it. That’s why actually the most vegans I’ve met are actually the next category, number two are people that call themselves vegan but in my opinion I wouldn’t call myself vegan if I ate that way, I would just call myself plant-based or mostly vegan. For example, I lived in Japan and in Japan most of the bread contains milk. The people around me in Japan who were vegan, or called themselves vegan, they would eat this bread because it was too difficult socially for them, or awkward to check or inconvenient or they were hungry, or whatever the reason may be, they would still eat the bread if offered. Number three is that I see a lot of people from the older generations do, and that is to try to eat a more plant-based diet, which I also think is great. These are people who don’t necessarily call themselves plant-based or vegan, but they try to swap their meals for vegan or plant-based as often as they can. One thing I want to remember with this one though is that we tend to overestimate our ability to eat healthy or do something that we set out to do as human beings, so I think it’s great to try to eat more plant-based food but I would suggest that if you want to to do it I would try to hold yourself accountable. And I think clearing up these different categories of what people tend to include when they say vegan or plant-based, I think can be really helpful and create more communication and less arguments. Because I think all these three are great, they’re all fantastic, they all save lives, they’re all… There’s just so much good about them, and I think the easier and more accessible we can make veganism the better it is for everyone.
this journey is not about me, it’s about the animals
I’ve been vegan for about eight years now. I didn’t like have a day that I wrote down or anything, so I just know the approximate time, but I feel so much more confident now than I did eight years ago. So over the years I’ve practiced and I really experienced the benefits. And finally I’ve learned that this journey is not about me, it’s about the animals, and that’s what makes it so easy and so fun and enjoyable for me. Thank you so much for watching this entire video, it was a long one. If you have any questions or want any tips on veganism or how to eat more vegan and plant-based food I would love to reply to that in the comments below. I will also put all my favourite, favourite resources and links in the description box below.
my husband’s three tips for going vegan
And finally I wanted to share my husband’s three second tips to go and vegan. My husband’s three tips for going vegan is: number one, get a buddy or partner to help you and hold your accountable. That was of course me. Number two is dates. He eats dates whenever he craves sugar which, especially in the beginning. was so important because otherwise he would have gone out and bought biscuits. Number three is to watch the documentaries because that will really convince you that this is the right way to go. Number four is to heal your relationship to food by eating in abundance and eating until you’re fully satiated.
