1 Year Plantiversary | Tips, Tricks & Resources

It’s been a whole year of plants! I never thought I would be saying that.

I went 100% plant-based last year after our trip to Florida. It was a trip I was panicking about, because I was so nervous to tell others I wouldn’t be eating their food. I have since gotten over that, but the transition to a plant-based diet for me spans a few years. Some people transition overnight, but I was not one of those people.

Since going plant-based a year ago, I have learned so much. I have become much more comfortable cooking and eating out. I understand the science. I continuously feel better and better in my skin (although confidence is a journey of self-exploration dependent on many things other than food).

It’s hard to pinpoint that one moment where things just clicked. I vividly remember saying I don’t think I would ever go vegan, but as time went on, I couldn’t really see myself not making the change. For me, it wasn’t working to sometimes eat dairy and to sometimes not. I had pretty much eliminated meat, with the occasional piece of salmon. I would eat cheese and immediately feel awful, which would then make me feel awful about myself. It was a very poor relationship to have with food— so I eventually decided to give up those things completely.

Don’t get me wrong, I still indulge in the vegan treats and vegan cheeses, which undoubtedly aren’t the healthiest things for me to choose— but what it came down to was knowing these things were exactly that, indulgences. They were not to be a part of my every day meal, and when I enjoyed them, I was sure to enjoy them. It also began to matter to me deeply that I was not actively participating in the dairy industry, so to enjoy a plant-based ice cream felt much more acceptable in terms of my values. On most days, my plate typically consists of whole foods like fruits, veggies, rice, beans, oats, brown rice pasta and lentils.

There are typically three reasons individuals will go plant-based— for their health, the planet, or the animals. I went plant-based for my health.

My health has been a bit like a roller coaster. It was around college, a time when I most certainly was not focused on health, that I started developing serious stomach pains. Prior to this, in high school, I was all about health, in an air-quote kind of way. I thought I ate well, but in hindsight it was not that great. I focused a lot on calories— 100 calorie packs, frozen meals, etc. This is probably a story I can dive into more later, but post-college was the beginning of my forceable exploration with food and its effects on my health.

No one ever really wants to change. Pain is usually the catalyst. You become so fed up with your current situation that change no longer seems so scary or so off limits. Pain was my driver.

It was on our honeymoon when I initially began to question my diet. I ate vegetarian in Sri Lanka, and while there was still dairy, I slowly started to notice my stomach bloating fade and my energy begin to rise. And the following week, when I got my period, it showed with very few cramps. Something I had never experienced before. Looking back, the nature of the food was predominately whole food based— lots of veggies (and anti-inflammatory foods like ginger and turmeric) and very little of anything else. I figured learning more was a good place to start. It was about a year later that I made the transition to completely plant-based.

Finding this way of eating has been a beautiful blessing. Healing, an ongoing process that I am still very much in the middle of, takes time and patience. It requires a hard look at the truth and instilled beliefs. It takes questioning and practice and failure and the resilience to start again. Turning to food to heal has opened my eyes to the human potential. Our bodies are incredibly resilient, so long as we give them space to nurture and grow.

Drinking straight out of coconuts on our honeymoon in Sri Lanka. The beginning of the path forward.

Whole Food Plant-Based (WFPB) Beginner Tips

A Whole Foods plant-based diet is different than a vegan diet. A vegan diet can technically consist of anything that omits animal products, but does not necessarily focus on health-promoting ingredients like fruits and veggies. A WFPB diet focuses on cooking with whole ingredients as often as possible, and trying to reduce the use of highly-processed ingredients as much as possible. For me, this means eating a lot of fruit, potatoes, leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower, brown rice pasta, oats, etc. and limiting my consumption of white flour, baked goods, and processed/boxed foods.

Eat fruit.

There’s a lot of talk about fruit containing a lot of sugar— which it does. But eating the whole fruit, aka not a fruit juice, means you are consuming the fruit with its fiber, which will not yield a giant spike in your blood sugar like fruit juice will. Eat the whole fruit. Fruit also provides the glucose our bodies need. To give you an analogy about different sugars that exist (good vs. bad), I will share this example about water. You have puddle water and glacier water, all of which is water— but we do not question that glacier water is exponentially better than puddle water. Consider artificial sweeteners to be the puddles and fruits to be the glaciers. Not all sugars are the same.

Also, in the summer when my fruit consumption is the highest, my cravings for sugary treats completely disappear. Fruit is what our bodies are naturally designed for, and when we provide our body with the glucose it needs, we no longer crave all of the artificial sweeteners on the market.

Calories do matter.

Learning how much to eat has been probably one of the largest adjustments for me. Originally, it is easy to eat too little. Leafy greens and vegetables are significantly lower in calories than meat and dairy, so when you first remove those from your diet, it’s important to increase the intake of others. When people feel deprived and hungry on diets, it’s usually because they are removing without adding in. On a WFPB diet, it’s important to make sure you are eating enough of the good stuff to ensure you will be satisfied and satiated and to keep the cravings at bay.

From personal experience, it’s also really easy for me to still overeat plant-based foods. When I was researching, it was always suggested to increase serving size— which I agree with— but this didn’t address that fact that overeating did not immediately disappear when I switched to a plant-based diet. I used this ‘eat more’ mentality to justify my wanting to overeat. Our bodies will tell us when we’ve had enough. Using calories as a guide to ensure our bodies get sufficient nutrients and vitamins when on a plant-based diet is important, but once that point is reached, our bodies will let us know. Learning to listen to your body is the lesson underneath this all.

Educate Yourself.

See the resource section below.

Learn to cook.

Start by adjusting your most frequented meals. Instead of beef, use beans. Veganize your favorite, most-cooked meals and see how easy it is to change up your routine. I’ve become quite the foodie and it is surprisingly so easy to have delicious plant-based meals. Don’t knock it till you try it. Use blogs like the Minimalist Baker or some of the resources I’ve included below.

Surround yourself with support.

It can be difficult to go at this alone, but social media can definitely be used in a positive manner in regards to support and inspiration. See if family members will go on this journey with you or if not, make new friends and use your feed to follow like-minded individuals. From my experience, I was lucky enough to have my husband totally on board with a vegan household. He himself is not vegan, but in our house, we eat the same. He also enjoys eating this way, so I do feel like I have a built-in support system when we go to restaurants or family members houses who may not be as supportive about this lifestyle change. But truthfully, Instagram is a hub for me to follow like-minded individuals and to constantly be inspired on this journey.

My Favorite Resources

There are so many resources that I used when I was transitioning to a plant-based diet. I started first with learning why it was good for my health in the first place. There is so much contradictory information, that I wanted to get very clear on what was the truth. Intuitively, it always felt wrong to me when diets suggested limiting fruit or healthy starches like potatoes. But to really feel confident in my decisions, I wanted to know what science was the truth. I explored a lot of work by doctors in the plant-based space like Dr. Michael Gregor, Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. T. Colin Campbell. Below are some of my favorite resources, stockpiled with useful information. The best thing you can do for yourself is become educated.

DOCUMENTARIES

+ The Game Changers
+ Forks over Knives
+ Cowspiracy
+ What the Health

BOOKS

+ Whole
+ Life-Changing Foods
+ Skinny Bitch
+ The China Study
+ How Not to Die
+ Eat to Live
+ 80 10 10

RECIPE E-BOOKS

Ellen Fisher’s E-books, Epic Vegan Food and Epic Kid Food and Ash Foster’s E-book Potatoes are by far my most heavily used. They are super affordable and I can easily say I use these three books more than I have ever used a cookbook or a recipe blog. They are focused on whole plant-based foods, which can be a bit different than vegan cookbooks and blogs. They use no oil and lots of whole foods and are insanely delicious.

PLACES

+ Plant City
+ The Red Lentil
+ The Grange
+ Pizza J’s
+ Garden Grille

There are so many more resources, but this is my experience and what I have found valuable along the way. I hope you find this useful and feel free to share your favorite recipes, resources, etc. in the comments below :)

Asthma + Life Lately

The third week in September is notoriously considered peak week here in Massachusetts, a term I had never heard before this year. It’s the week that asthma and allergies require the most hospitalization. And to my surprise, I became one of those statistics, landing myself in the hospital right during the middle of peak week.

After about 4 weeks of dealing with a chronic cough, post-nasal drip and fatigue, my cough progressed into recurrent asthma attacks resulting in a hospitalization with a heavy (and continued) dose of steroids. I’m finally on the mend, have most of my energy back and am feeling grateful that I have access to medicine yielding this experience an inconvenience rather than a death sentence. 

I haven’t suffered from allergies in about 12 years, but things change. It is most likely why I didn’t suspect allergies to be the culprit until it was a little too late. I pushed a little too far for a little too long. It scared me, to say the least. I usually take pride in my health and this experience definitely brought me to a point of surrender and vulnerability that I haven’t quite experienced before. My lungs felt like they were failing me and until you can’t breathe, it’s hard to understand how much of a blessing sufficient airflow is. I was left feeling grateful, more than anything.

From what I understand, there is a threshold to asthma. Our lungs can only tolerate and filter so much until our body goes into overdrive. During peak week allergies are at a season high, putting those with asthma at an increased risk. I don’t know fully what triggered my attacks yet, but I suspect the main culprit will be ragweed. As to the whole threshold theory, I am curious what other environmental irritants I could potentially be breathing in on a day to day basis. Dust, air quality concerns, fragrances, etc.? Pollen and air pollution are not things I can control, but it has definitely left me thinking of the things I maybe could.

I originally went down the natural home path to avoid unnecessary exposure to chemicals (don’t we get enough as is?) and to lighten the toxic load of my surroundings— but intuitively I feel like it makes sense that chemicals we breathe would cause our lungs to become irritated and inflamed over time, making it more likely that seasonal allergies would be the tipping point. Since the hospital stay, I have done a bit of minimizing (bye-bye dust) and removed the final remaining store-bought cleaners from my cabinets. It leaves me feeling like I am doing what I can in a highly uncontrollable world. Here’s a few final thoughts…

+ Introduce plants to filter air quality 

Plants filter the air, removing toxins that typically get released from wall paint, plastics, furniture, etc.

+ Use non-toxic cleaners

Consider swapping out store-bought cleaners for homemade ones with non-toxic ingredients.

+ Less things = less dust

Simply put.

I am clearly not a pulmonologist or an allergist, but I think removing as many environmental irritants as possible (aka what we breathe in) just makes sense to me. I obviously have more to discover in relation to my breathing, but feel like I am at least on the right path towards discovery now.

Coffee: How and Why I Detoxed

I stopped drinking coffee due to a combination of breaking my coffee pot and having an inner hunch that it was impacting my health negatively. Coffee has been my morning staple for the last few years, where I became deeply dependent on it after college when I entered the phase of life coined ‘adulting’. That morning grogginess (crankiness) didn’t go away without it.

It wasn’t always bad, don’t get me wrong. I loved my warm coffee on a cool fall morning, it was soothing to my soul. But the reality was it became a crutch I depended on to clear the morning fog and give me the energy to get the day started... and finished. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for me to have 3-5 cups of coffee a day, because lets be honest… my first “cup” was my entire coffee pot.

Doing away with coffee has been on the to-do list for a while now, but I honestly just haven’t wanted to rip the band-aid off. As of right now, I don’t know if I will give up coffee forever or if I’ll jump back on the Four Sigmatic bandwagon. Maybe I’ll stick to my one chai tea a day. Who knows. Life changes and that’s okay.

So besides from breaking my coffee pot for the second time (a sign from the universe?), it was learning about the biochemical effects of caffeine that finally pushed me to commit. (Can you tell I was a bio major in college, #ScienceNerd?)

In short, coffee (caffeine) triggers the production of stress hormones. And too many stress hormones for an extended period of time can impact the production of sex hormones, like estrogen and progesterone. Aka, the female body can go a bit bananas if hyped up on excess amounts of caffeine.

I write more about my journey with hormonal health in the post, My Experience with Birth Control and Life-Post Pill, but hormonal health is something that has always been a bit of a challenge for me. So learning that caffeine can lower progesterone, an anti-anxiety hormone responsible for period health and fertility, among other things, was eye-opening. Low progesterone can present itself in a number of ways like anxiety, fluid retention, low mood, unexplained weight gain and challenges conceiving.

For me, coffee is just another piece of the puzzle towards better hormonal and overall health. I am, by no means, saying this will be the magic piece that puts it all together, I’ve just realized that trying life without coffee is worth the effort.

A SYSTEM IN OVER-DRIVE.

We live in a society that is always turned on, but I’m sure this is not news to you. Very rarely can we disconnect from our work or our responsibilities, but instead we shoulder the effects of our ever growing to-do lists and diminishing hours of sleep.

As our body cannot differentiate between actual danger or lifestyle stress, our nervous system usually works overtime producing and then filtering stress hormones to “protect” us.

Adrenaline and cortisol, our stress hormones, are necessary and life-saving. They help us survive in both short-term and long-term stress, but when stress never goes away, their effects are no longer beneficial.

Take for example, adrenaline. It allows us to access fight-or-flight and gives us the energy to escape harmful and dangerous situations. But more often than not, too many commitments, financial stress, or caffeine can be the “impending danger” that increases our adrenaline production and forces our bodies into a state of long-term, chronic stress.

Adrenaline and cortisol are part of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the branch of our nervous system that is under subconscious control and is activated by stress. Coffee, which stimulates the production of adrenaline, can impair the balance between fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest, tipping the scales in favor of always being on ‘high alert’. This means that our body, whether real or not, sees itself in almost constant danger.

A DELICATE DANCE.

Estrogen and progesterone, our two main sex hormones, play a big role in our menstrual cycle, ranging from fertility to the degree in which we suffer from PMS, cramps, headaches, etc. If out of balance, we can experience heavy, clotty or painful periods, anxiety, sore/swollen breasts, to name just a few symptoms.

Progesterone, a hormone responsible for keeping our uterine lining intact, decreases if our bodies believe we are in stress and in a non-optimal state for conceiving. Cortisol, the long-term stress hormone that presents after extended periods of high adrenaline, decreases the production of progesterone.

The take-away message is that stress hormones are a very necessary part of our biology and our survival, but long-term artificial triggers, like caffeine, could contribute to or exacerbate an already existing hormonal imbalance, if not corrected.

DETOX COMMENCE.

During a habit shift, one behavior usually gets replaced with another, more favorable, behavior. In my case, I replaced my morning coffee with tea as a way to avoid caffeine headaches and gradually wean myself off.

To give some perspective, one 8oz. cup of coffee has about 95 mg caffeine. Green tea, as an alternative, has about 30mg of caffeine per cup. I was typically drinking 2-3 cups of coffee a day, so that’s almost 300 mg of caffeine daily. Switching to ~30-60 mg daily consumption from green tea, it is understandable why on day 2, even with 2 cups of green tea, I had a headache. But thankfully, that would be the one and only headache.

The intention of this post is not to tell you to give up coffee. It’s to continue to share my journey with you and see what works and what doesn’t. Stress is hard to avoid and it’s something I personally find challenging to manage. But in terms of perceived stress, or situations that elicit physical stress responses to emotional situations (embracing conflict, having difficult conversations, budgeting finances), saying no to caffeine seems like an easier and less invasive first step to reducing stress.

I’m hoping that reducing caffeine will allow me to respond better in stressful situations, improve my monthly cycle (in terms of PMS symptoms), and impact my energy levels and mood in a positive manner.

WHAT’S CHANGED?

So far, so good. Outside the normal rush of life, I don’t feel any more tired than I did on coffee. I no longer have my mid-afternoon slumps, but those definitely didn’t disappear right away.

It’s been about 6 months since my last cup and I really don’t miss it much. In the beginning, I missed the smell and the comfort of a slow Sunday morning coupled with my morning coffee. But at the moment, I alternate between green tea or chai as substitutes, and those work plenty fine.

I honestly kind of expected this transition to be harder. But the headache only lasted for a day and I experienced no noticeable symptoms otherwise. Mentally it hasn’t been that difficult either. This may be because my morning routine hasn’t changed: my AM beverage still exists, it’s just been replaced with tea.

I’m currently consuming about 10mg of caffeine daily, which is a pretty sizable reduction compared to upwards of ~180 mg that was my norm.

Sleep

This improvement felt almost immediate. I’ve never had any issues falling asleep, but would typically wake at least once or twice throughout the night tossing and turning. Less caffeine yielded restful nights without any waking. Most mornings I wake with my alarm feeling well rested, given I went to bed at a decent hour the night before.

Energy

I get a sense of clarity and energy from drinking tea, but it seems to be longer-lasting and without the inevitable crash that comes with coffee. I am semi-convinced that sipping any beverage would benefit my alertness though, as the act of making and consuming a drink prompts movement.

Throughout the afternoon or evenings I usually just have water. I rarely have mid-afternoon slumps anymore, but if I do, I try to counteract them with a quick walk or step outside.

Hormones

This is the most exciting improvement, in my opinion.

As I mentioned, one of the primary reasons for this detox was coffees potential impact on progesterone levels. By both personal observation and tracking my cycles via temp charting, I had an inkling that my progesterone levels were low. One of the indicators was pre- and post-spotting. A second indicator was swollen and sore breasts during the two weeks leading up to menstruation.

I have had many cycles since going coffee-free, many of which I experienced no spotting or sore or swollen breasts. It’s too early to say whether or not this trend will continue, but this cycle’s improvements were impossible to ignore.

Overall health 

Giving up coffee has forced me to take better care of my body on a basic level. I no longer have the crutch of reaching for heavy doses of caffeine when I stay up too late watching TV or eat too much junk and enter a food coma. By eating my best, sleeping well and reducing stress as much as possible, I find it is easier not to rely on the caffeine.

The plan for now is to just stay in-tune with my body. If I feel driven to give up caffeine completely, I’ll try it. If I am happy with the improvements and feel good with tea, then I’ll stick to it. I find it liberating to try things as I see fit and truthful.

ACTION STEPS: 

• Get the coffee out of the house. If I hadn’t (accidentally) broken my coffee pot, I would always gravitate towards coffee over tea in the morning.

• Switch to a beverage with less caffeine to prevent headaches (which will cause you to reach for the coffee). My choice was green tea.

• Know why you want to reduce your coffee/caffeine consumption in the first place!