I was vegan once. For about six months, I was the worst vegan you can imagine. Mostly that time consisted of me making odd dishes, dumping them in the trash because they were inedible, and then eating a bucket of Soy Delicious ice cream. Like I said, I was the worst vegan. My husband managed to last for a year, but I quickly returned to dairy and my vegetarian ways. The problem was, I gained weight as a vegetarian. I bounced up about 15 pounds during this time.
This was before we had kids. Once we had kids, I managed to keep the child and myself vegetarian for about six months. She ate a lot of baked tofu. But then my parents' constant worrying and a dietician who told me I was eating too many carbs convinced me to go back to meat. I was always hungry as a vegetarian. You're supposed to get sick and stuff after returning to meat, but I relished that first steak like a dog with a bone and never looked back.
Until this year. Eating meat was supposed to help me avoid diabetes by allowing me to eat protein that doesn't come pre-packaged with carbs, and thus not be hungry all the time. And it did, but I still ballooned up to over 100 pounds my ideal weight. And guess what? I became diabetic. Not only was I diabetic, but I also had high blood pressure and high cholesterol -- all of which increased my risk for heart disease (which killed my two grandfathers) and cancer (my mother had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer). All of this prompted me to re-examine my diet and why I can't seem to stop with the sugar and all the refined crap that is soooo carb-loaded. I started to rethink my diet (again), and wonder how I could control the cravings and stop the cycle of weight gain. For six months, thanks to Weight Watchers. I managed to stop the gain and even lose 10 pounds - but over vacation, I regained five. The bottom line is I was consuming too much junk food, too much alcohol, and just not able to stick to my eating plans. Weight Watchers likes to say it isn't a diet, it's a lifestyle change, but the truth was, I hadn't changed my lifestyle. Not really. I'd change it for a week and then slip into my old ways. I'd log my food faithfully for four days, then forget for seven days. What I needed, I realized, was a wholesale, for-real lifestyle change.
So I started to think about switching from a "control the portion of bad things" mindset to a for-real lifestyle change. I knew from the past I did better with absolute rules. After all, I had managed to stay vegan for six months and then vegetarian for three years. So I started to think about a clean approach that would eliminate alcohol, sweets and refined foods. I also remembered a friend, who successfully lost weight as a vegetarian, had told me the key to staying full as a vegetarian wasn't necessarily adding protein, but eating waaaay more vegetables than a normal person. She would roast a pan of vegetables and eat them all, she said. That gave me fodder for rethinking my vegetarian experience. I also knew a lot of people who had lost weight being vegetarian, so that gave me fodder for rethinking my weight gain as a vegetarian. I mean, sure, I had gained 10-15 pounds as a vegetarian. But I'd gained 80-some pounds eating meat. So clearly, meat wasn't the solution. In fact, it might be part of the problem.
Meanwhile, my brother and his wife had become vegan. My brother becoming vegan was like The News of the Decade for my family. He was a big eater, and he loved to grill meat. His wife was a vegetarian, however, but I think she was probably an unhealthy vegetarian, like I had been, because she was having a lot of the weight-related health issues. They saw Forks over Knives and switched their diet. Suddenly, they were dropping weight and looked and felt better. They were a walking advertisement for the lifestyle.
But I'm a bit stubborn and was still wallowing in indecision when I heard an odd fact: Cows make friends for life. Now I'd heard a lot of vegan-propaganda (or facts, if you're vegan) in my life about cows and chickens and pigs, but this punched me in the guts. I'd had a calf in my childhood that I used to talk to and pretend we were friends. It wasn't a calf that would allow me to pet it, because it was part of a herd and there were bulls that would've chased me away, but every afternoon, I'd go out and talk to this calf while it was in the field that bordered our house, and this calf would chew it's cud and look at me just as if it understood. To my 10 year old mind, that made the calf my friend. And we had a great friendship until one day, the calf went away — probably to be sold to raise for beef. Well, the idea that I had betrayed a potentially life-long friend just blew my mind. I found my commitment.
I broke the news to my husband, (now a meat-eater himself), as if I were telling him his best friend had died. I wasn't just asking him to be vegan — I was asking him to really clean up our eating in terms of refined foods, sugars and oils. I wanted a low-fat, low-perservatives, low-sugar, vegan lifestyle. He took the news well, which is good because he is the primary cook in our household and I'm not sure I could do it without him. We agreed to finish the food in the house and move to a whole-foods, plant-based, healthy lifestyle. I stopped drinking alcohol and eating meat that day.
Our plan was to eat up what was in the house. My first day, I made a green smoothie with the left-over yogurt in the house. The next day, I replaced the yogurt with the coconut milk. Just having a green smoothie — lots of spinach, frozen fruit and a little liquid — made me feel better. I don't know if that's all the spinach or if it's psychological, and I don't care. The second day, I bought vegan bean burgers from the freezer section of my grocery, and that became my go-to food until I could figure out the rest. I also brought some whole wheat bread my brother recommended (no sugar, no milk). The third day, I made a rice bowl, which was all vegetarian except I used chicken broth to make the rice. That day, I also updated our meal plans for the week with recipes from Forks Over Knives website. I borrowed FOK recipe books from the library, and bought a FOK magazine I found a local health food store. Everyday, I'm buying a few more new grocery items (fresh fruit, clean freezer foods, whole foods that are naturally sweet such as dates, and vegan staples such as nutritional yeast), cooking something vegan, and adding recipes. Instead of drinking, I read, go for a walk, or -- in the case of last night -- go to bed super early so I'm rested enough to maintain my willpower.
Since I'm diabetic, I also invested in a book on how going vegan can affect diabetes. I was pleased to see the book didn't say I needed to watch the carb count. It provides the science behind a whole-grains, plant-based lifestyle. I know some of these diet books can cherry-pick research, but the truth is, I wasn't doing a great job watching my carbs before this. I want to see if the diet will work without carb counting. I haven't noticed any obvious effects -- no sugar crashes so far that I can tell. If my bloodwork doesn't improve, then I'll add carb counting and revisit. I'm due for my six month checkup, but because I've started this new diet, I plan to wait six weeks. That won't be enough to measure the full results on an A1C, which tests three months, but it should show improvements since that's a month and a half.
Why share all of this? Mostly I thought it'd be interesting to document this change for myself and see if I do, in fact, feel more energetic and better. I'm curious about how this will affect my bloodwork, particularly my A1C (blood sugar). Plus, everybody shares success stories after the fact and then you wonder about what happened to get them from point A to B. So maybe I'll help someone by sharing my journey. I definitely feel positive about this change. I've done a lot of dieting, but down deep, I've always thought this was the best way to eat. I just didn't want to make the sacrifice. For all the reasons I've shared, it feels like I've run out of time to mess around: It's time to get real.
