The Skinny on Vegan
What do you eat? Any and all plants. Again, stay as close to whole and grown as possible. (That means when given a choice between an orange and orange juice, you choose the orange.) Eat whole grains, nuts, nut butters, seeds, beans, potatoes, fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens. As for seasonings, your pallet will rejoice when you begin to cleanse your diet and utilize a multitude of whole herbs, spices, and garlic to complement the pure flavors of your food.
Switching to a Plant-Based Diet is Helping Me Win the Weight War By: Ashlyn Murphy
Food & Drink
Ah the fat day. It can manifest itself in so many ways. While in college, I once went fourteen days without washing my hair so as to avoid seeing or feeling myself longer than the single minute it took to soap down my body. Absolutely gross, I know! Thank God for hats and braids. (I fully concede that I still employ the hat-and-braid strategy to this day, though I’ve never come close to breaking my impressively grungy two-week Because the constant dieting, overrecord.) exercising, binging coupled with restricting, and general self-loathing More generally, the fat day is unpre- did nothing but make my agonizing dictable, depressing, and derailing. problem worse. You can feel thin and svelte in one moment and obese the next. It Surely dismissing a lifetime of “noralters your moods, undermines mal” and “acceptable” eating habits your workday, and disrupts even is a bit more difficult than changing the simplest of mental and physical toothpaste brands, but the sobering processes. In the event that your reality is that most who engage in life is a perpetual fat day, it can the accepted eating habits suffer feel as if every visit to the scale or from chronic diseases, depressed mirror leaves you feeling hurt and immune systems, low libidos, erecbetrayed. tile dysfunction, persistent allergies, bowel irregularity, general unhappiI am one woman for whom the fat ness, and an obsession with weight. day became a fat existence. At six And that is the short list. feet tall, my weight peaked at 179 pounds, and, even if that number Our American diet, marked by seems insignificant to many, it was heavy consumption of meat, diary, wholly unacceptable to me. I perand processed foods, makes us ceived myself a hulking grizzly of a fat, promotes disease, and kills us gal. To make matters worse, I loved prematurely. There is a huge body to eat and feel full but was unable to of empirical evidence showing the reconcile that lifestyle with an ade- causal relationship between this quately thin physique. In 2007, I was diet and the most common killers of saved by my first love, an incredibly Americans: cardiovascular disease, svelte man and avid disciple of the type II diabetes, and cancer. lifestyle I now call skinny veganism. Since then I have been a devoted Questions? convert and disciple in my own right, promoting a lifestyle founded Surprised? Shocked? Simply sick upon whole plant foods and eating of despising your body? I know as close to grown – as often – as you have questions. Here are the possible. Why skinny veganism? most common:
48 Center City Magazine | June/July 2012
How do your survive without meat & dairy? It’s easy, and this from a girl who could make an entire meal of these foods. When exploring the skinny vegan lifestyle, you should fully eliminate animal products and most processed foods for at least two weeks to cleanse your body and pallet. How did I overcome the temptation to return to my old eating habits? I ate copious amounts of whole foods: huge bowls of oatmeal with fruit and raisins, fruit and vegetable smoothies, plant-based burritos, vegetable and bean sautés, soups, stews, chili, grain salads, and vegan brownies (not a whole food but certainly a personal favorite). I was always satisfied and never missed the foods of my former life. Where do you get your protein? Everywhere. Think of an elephant or ape, huge land mammals that live on nothing but plants. Do they have a problem growing, building, and sustaining muscle? The key is variety, which provides all the essential amino acids required by your body to sustain itself.
You eat so many carbs! Don’t they make you fat? The fat-, sugar-, and salt-laden “bad” carbohydrates you find in processed foods like cookies, crackers, chips, white rice, and white pasta will make you fat. They have an overabundance of calories and not enough fiber or nutrition to satisfy you, and when you are not satisfied, you will overeat. I freely admit that a low-carb diet results in weight loss, as your body burns fat instead of muscle and sheds water because it is carbohydrate-starved. But what is the price? Constipation, bad breath, overtaxing of the kidneys, an increased chance of cancer, heart disease and type II diabetes, and the return of all weight lost when you begin to eat carbs again. How can you be thin and eat copious amounts of food? Not all foods and calories are created equal, and it is no coincidence that those who stick close to whole and grown are consistently thinner than their more carnivorous counterparts. The body is not satiated until its needs for essential nutrients are met. When we consume a nutritionally deficient diet, we overeat in the vain effort of satisfying our body’s requirements. In contrast, if we consume a diet rich in whole foods – all of which are full of the nutrients our bodies desperately want – we achieve a lasting fullness, sooner. Even more, whole foods contain lots of fiber, and the positive effects of this are twofold: you get full fast and therefore eat less, and you quickly eliminate waste. Do not underestimate the importance of regularity in maintaining sanity and a constant weight. Finally, those who