I have tried eating a balanced diet of some healthy options and some vegan junk food vegan for 8 years, but switching to a Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB diet) consisting of whole grains, root veggies, legumes, vegetables, fruits (and nuts and seeds sparingly) has had a host of unexpected benefits!
- I can finally eat three square meals a day!
- I was never able to eat three meals per day in the past, and always had to pack snacks or plan for four (or five) smaller meals per day. This was due to intense hunger that made me hangry and unable to complete my work until I ate a sugar and fat laden vegan protein bar, an apple, and a handful (or seven) of nuts. Healthy right? Wrong. Switching to real foods has made it so I can enjoy heaping servings of veggies and starches with minimal-to-no added plant fats to satiation. This keeps me full for 4-5 hours after each meal for the first time in my life! The fiber and water content of the vegetables truly holds me over until my next meal. Healthy habits when I’m preparing my next meal while hungry include drinking lemon water and snacking on raw veggies.
- I feel satiated for longer between meals.
- I felt so betrayed when I would pay dieticians and nutritionists to help me lose weight, and they would say, “Just eat when you are hungry. Eat intuitively.” Ugh. After hearing this for the upteenth time, I finally laughed in one of their faces. (I swear I’m generally a very polite person) This woman was skinny, always had been skinny, and clearly thought that it was my fault for stuffing myself beyond satiety. I replied, “I have to laugh when I hear people say that. I have two modes- hungry and overstuffed. There is rarely a time I won’t eat something when I won’t eat something. If I ate when I felt hungry, I’d be eating times per day.” Needless to say, we discontinued our relationship due to her inability to help me. What I’ve found is that switching to whole foods has taught me what it’s like to feel full after meals, stay satiated for several hours, and listen to my hunger gently starting to return after four hours. This hunger I feel now is not the ravenous hunger I felt when I was on a blood sugar and insulin rollercoaster of overeating sweet, salty, fatty vegan junk food. The fiber, nutrients, and water-content of vegetables and starches has been my food cure, and makes me feel like a “normal” eater after dysfunctional eating since I was a pre-teen!
- I no longer feel the urge to binge eat after work.
- I worked for 10 years as a teacher, and started my career in low-income schools (Title I) in urban environments. Interestingly, it wasn’t until I started working in more suburban environments that I really started hating my job. I switched careers to find work life balance and worked in medical education in a hospital system. (Enter pandemic) Work has always consisted of long hours, a great deal of physical/emotional/social distress, and ending the day feeling completely exhausted, drained, and defeated. Over many years, I developed the unsavory addiction of walking through the door after work before my husband was home, switching on Real Housewives, and grabbing any snack or leftovers (or sometimes just a jar of peanut butter). I would always tell myself I’d stop at a few bites, but watching women on TV yell at each other and the constant hand to mouth movement was soothing to me in some weird way. When the pounds started to accumulate, I told myself that this dirty little habit, which resulted in 1000+ calorie intake on some occasions, had to end. Funny thing was, I couldn’t stop. I tried switching only to healthy snacks. That’s didn’t fix it. I changed the TV program. That didn’t fix it. The junk food vegan snacks and lunches I was serving myself was not providing the satiation and nourishment I needed. When I started eating Whole Food Plant Based, I slowly started to lose the ravenous feeling I felt when I got home from work. I started to feel the way I imagine people should naturally feel.
- My energy levels are stabilized throughout the day.
- Good Lord. Stay out of my way if my blood sugar was crashing in the late morning after breakfast or early afternoon after lunch. I used to eat a full breakfast at 7:30a, a full lunch at 10:30, another full lunch at 1:30-2:30p and then my scheduled Bravo binge at 6:00. Oh, and don’t forget about dinner at 7:00! My attempts to lose weight consisted of limiting the caloric intake of all of those meals, because it was so difficult for me to work while starved. Years and years of my life went by feeling starved yet obsessed with food and feverishly anticipating my next meal. Now I eat three meals, feeling stable energy in between eat meal. I have the energy to complete all of my goals for the day.
- I sleep soundly throughout the night.
- This is going to make some of your jealous, but I sleep like a freakin’ baby throughout the night. Sure, keeping tortured animals off your plate helps keep your conscious clean. But that high fat, high sugar junk food (and the booze I washed it down with at night) was causing me to wake up at 3:00am and struggle to fall back asleep. Worse than that, my brain would autoplay all the anxieties of yesterday, today, and tomorrow in an endless loop. This terrible routine is caused by a dip in blood sugar, and a resulting surge in cortisol in the 2-4am time frame. It is absolutely treatable by reducing processed foods and booze at dinner. Please reach out to me at weightogovegan@outlook.com or via IG DMs if you need help with this, because I suffered for years and am finally free of this awful burden!
- I am losing weight!
- I am now losing about one pound of weight per week by eating according to Dr. John McDougall’s book The Starch Solution. In that book, he details a plan for “Maximum Weight Loss” which is based on the concept of filling half of your plate with non-starchy vegetables and the other half with starches such as whole grains, root vegetables, and/or legumes. Losing weight is truly REVOLUTIONARY to me, because I struggled so greatly in the past to do this despite extremely conscientious efforts. I reverted to disordered eating, every kind of diet, and fasting to try to lose weight, but nothing worked. When I learned that I had lipedema, which results in the accumulation of diet- and exercise- resistant fat, I all but gave up on the hope of ever achieving my goal. But I am finally am losing and feeling great about myself. I started this blog and my IG channel to inspire others to eat this way, the way humans were intended to eat! Please reach out if you need support!
Plant Based Kelly 