Tips and Tricks
Level up with ease!
Since my last cholesterol test, I’ve been adhering more strictly to a whole food, all plant diet. We have leveled up. And what that means is, we’re really and truly only eating whole plants and tofu. We’re not eating oil, and we’re striving for multiple servings of green leafies and/or cruciferous veggies per day.
(Health update: I haven’t had the follow up cholesterol test done yet. Still awaiting results of the calcium score to determine how much calcification is in my coronary arteries, if any. Bloodwork soon.)
The main changes we’ve made were areas where we’d been backsliding. We eliminated the weekly batch of chocolate-covered almonds from the health food store, where you just scoop them out into a bag; we quit buying the dairy-free chocolate chips, our use of which had crept up to around a bag-a-week, and people, there are only two of us and one dog eating, here.
The weekend cheats are gone. They usually consisted of a meal of frozen curly fries or tater tots, with a fake meat product, because if you’re gonna cheat, you cheat. And most weekends, I’d starting having a couple of fake sausage links with Sunday breakfast. Which is why my numbers were not coming down as fast as they needed to, and probably why a routine CT for something else showed what might be calcification in my coronary arteries. Yikes.
My favorite thing to scream at the universe while shaking my fist is, “Even with my cheats, my diet is 1000 times healthier than that of almost everyone I know!”
To which the universe usually replies. “I know, right? Just think what those numbers must’ve been when you were eating like them! Imagine what theirs look like!”
I lower my fist.
And then the universe adds, “You’d probably have had a heart attack by now. Hell, you might’ve been dead by now.”
I recall that my mom was, in fact, dead by now. She made it 18 days past her 60th birthday. My 63rd is in sight. Okay. Message received.
So we’re eating far cleaner. Raisins, not chocolate chips, in my favorite cookie recipe, but I’m still having cookies. I made apple crisp last week that was amazing.
Here are some things I’ve found that help me stick to my plan.
Do a Kitchen & Pantry Cleanse
If you spend most of your time at home, like I do, (it’s tough to pry me away from my little piece of heaven) then you have much or all control over what is in your fridge and cupboards. The best way to eat healthily is to have only healthful foods in your home.
So get rid of the garbage. Just don’t buy it. If you get some for guests, bag up the remainders and send them home with said guests, or compost what you don’t use.
Shortcuts are ESSENTIAL
There will be times when we’re too busy or having too much fun to cook. For these times, shortcuts are the key. So be on the hunt for brands that are whole food, all-plant. That means oil free. Oil is not a whole food. It’s the fat from a whole food.
*Discover oil-free, all-plant brands. Real Veggies brand makes burger-patties and of their four flavors, two fit the bill; Purple Root and Black Bean.
*Discover oil-free, pre-cut frozen potatoes. I’ve found Cascadia Farms brand hash browns are good. I know there are French fries out there, but haven’t found them lately and can’t recall the brand. Suggestions welcome.
*Frozen and vegetables save time, and canned fruits & veggies make great snacks. Nothing makes me happier than frozen diced onions, peppers, sliced carrots, chunked sweet potato or squash, or a block of frozen spinach when I need to whip things together in a hurry. I buy frozen peas, black-eyed peas, corn, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and rice, too. I can throw a stew into the crockpot in five minutes using pre-cut frozen vegetables, where it can take me an hour to prepare from raw.
In my cupboard I have cans of asparagus, spinach, green beans, mushrooms, peaches, pears, fruit cocktail, pineapple both crushed and diced, and of course dozens of cans of various beans, lentils, and tomatoes.
I often eat a can of spinach or asparagus just to get my helpings of green leafies in. For a quick snack, there’s not much easier than a can of peaches, pears, or fruit cocktail.
*Always look for low sodium or salt-free in canned veggies, and only buy fruit packed in water or its own juices. No sugar added.
Splurge on Starches and Eat Dessert
*As the late and wonderful Dr. McDougal said, we are starch-based beings, and this is a start-based diet. So the whole grain macaroni, spaghetti, eggless-egg noodles, soba and udon noodles, whole grain rice, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, winter squash—these are the ingredients that fill us up, feed our brains, and bring satisfaction and satiation.
*Have dessert! Don’t give up desserts and treats, alter them. Make them fit your plan. Rely on fruit for sweetness, cut the flour with oatmeal, use peanut butter or a little almond butter instead of oil.
Stay Interested and Motivated
*Experiment with new recipes. More and more of the vegan blogs online are sharing oil-free recipes, so keep an eye out. I get regular emails from the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies, Forks Over Knives and several others, and they always have wonderful recipes to try. I try at least three new recipes a week, never quite as written, always tweaking for my preferences, and when one’s a hit, I add to my regular meal rotation. This is how I keep our food interesting.
*Stay motivated. One of the ways I do that is through the media I consume. I always watch The PlantStrong Podcast with Rip Esselstyn, which has dozens upon dozens of episodes piled up, and every one of them a gem. I frequently re-listen to audiobooks by T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. I follow whole food plant-based bloggers and posters on social. I own most of the documentaries and rewatch them often.
In these ways, I keep my reasons, the cruelty, the environment, and my health, front and center in my mind.
Just last week, listening to a replay of the PlantStrong Podcast, I learned something brand new from the mouth of Doctor Esselstyn himself. Fluoride in toothpaste or water can block all that lovely nitric oxide we get by eating green leafies and cruciferous veggies. I was unaware of this, and immediately ordered some Tom’s of Maine fluoride-free toothpaste.
This happens frequently. I re-watch or re-listen to a piece, and learn a brand new thing that I’d somehow missed the first time.
Frequency & Compassion
*Eat frequently. Smaller meals, more frequently, keep the satiation level high. It’s when we let ourselves get too hungry that we give in to poor choices. that’s when we tend to go for quick, easy meals and those are usually not healthy meals. (See 1, 2, & 3 above.)
*Be kind to yourself. Do this out of love for yourself, your life, and your family. This is self-care, not self-denial. We need not feel we’re missing out on anything.. It’s others who are missing out on quality of life, on feeling great, on high energy, on effortlessly maintaining a healthy weight, and on enjoying your food in a whole newer, deeper, more holistic way. Food is medicine.
We are missing out on multiple prescriptions for numerous “age-related” chronic diseases like hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, auto-immune disorders, cancers, overweight and obesity, even depression.
Share the Journey
*Get your partner involved. Things got way easier for me when my husband listened to the audiobook, Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. That’s when he really got it. The lightbulb went on, and he was all in. (It’s a powerful book.) He actually listened to it a second time through, only a week or two after the first read.
His own cholesterol is normal by medical standards, but high by Dr. Esselstyn’s, and he’s challenged himself to reduce it. He wants that golden number of 150 or less. According to the doc, if you’re 150 or less, and eating a whole food, all plant diet, you’re virtually “heart attack proof.”
My guy has always been supportive and into the lifestyle, but that book dialed him up to a ten, educated him on the finer points, and made things exquisitely easy for me. We’re tag-teaming this thing now, and that’s a huge bonus. If you can get a best friend, partner, or family member involved and enthused, all the better.
Those are my ten tips for making it easier. I have one more things before I end this post.
The Olive Oil Study
I said we’d discuss the Olive Oil study, but I’m not going to be able to give you a better discussion than this one with the author of the study herself. To nutshell it, it’s a small study, but it compared whole food plant-based diets with 4 tablespoons olive oil per day against whole food plant-based diets with less than 1 teaspoon of olive oil per day who still ate the same amount of fat. So the fat content was the same in both diets. Then they crisscrossed the participants, switching them from one diet to the other after a few weeks in between. The lower olive oil diet was clearly healthier. And any beneficial elements that might be provided by the olive oil could also be provided, without all the harmful fat, simply by eating about 8 whole olives.
I hope you enjoy this interview. I found it absolutely enlightening.
See you next week or sooner with that apple crisp recipe and more! I’m also working on stuffed mushrooms with a Thanksgiving-style stuffing, so I hope to have that for you soon, too.
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