Why You Want To Avoid Animal Products & How To Shift Toward Plant-Based Whole Foods

5.22.2020

That harpy howl of mine that is likely driving you crazy, is the same voice and factual process I used on myself, and the same bellow that battered Ian to finally shift forward to this never-been-better space.

It was then sequestered to my throat in a growing ball of bile through a year of seeing loved ones grow progressively sicker (with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, GI issues, mental health issues, etc) while they mocked/disdained our plant-based path and ignored us as we showed how animal products diets caused all of the above while spurring on endless suffering to other species & environmental devastation; and eventually it rumbled out of me in a furious roar.

There is a cultural assumption that us plant-based folks should demure and keep silent about our path, but folks eating animal products everyday our ruining the earth, causing suffering to millions of species, and cause disease in ourselves & our kin, so why should vegans politely sit quietly if we know there is a kinder/healthier/sustainable way?

Sensitive human feelings are a speck compared to the species and ecosystems destroyed by animal agriculture; and once you shift to a plant-based whole-foods diet and start feeling stronger, healthier, happier, you’ll understand precisely why I’m so fiery about humanity’s myopic focus and lack of forward movement.

Continue on for:

why I changed from a Standard American Hobbit to a Plant-Based Whole-Food Hobbit.
why you need to avoid animal products for the sake of your health (your kin’s) and the environment
how these quarantine times have cemented my decision to no longer participate in meals with family/friends eating foods that are harming other species, themselves, and the earth (though once this pandemic has passed, y’all are always welcome to feast at our plant-based table)
how to start moving forward
resources to help you out
examples of plant-based whole-food family feasting/thriving through a day

Live Kindly, Feast Kindly, Grow Forward.

Q’s Morning Chalkboard: he asked me to draw the Mind Flayer from Stranger Things

Q came downstairs before I could get his chalkboard done, and it was because he’d been woken early by a nightmare. He requested I do a drawing of the Mind Flayer from Stranger Things (something he’s seen through much unpacking and parental-editing —like any and all fight scenes removed— but he loves the designs of the creatures), and you’d think maybe he had a bad dream about this spooky figure, but when I finally got it out of him, this was his description of the nightmare: “Mama, you were going downstairs to fix me a snack, and I had asked for peanuts, but I changed my mind and wanted an apple instead, but you couldn’t hear me and gave me peanuts instead!” He woke up crying.

Good gravy am I happy that is what a “nightmare” is for Q. (One of my favorite heart-squeezing things about Q, is that the worst cry-out I ever heard in his sleep was a sob/wail of “But that was MY donut!”)

Speaking of dreams, though, both Q and I are deep, detailed, vivid dreamers; and I’m not sure if he’ll grow into this as well, but I am a lucid dreamer. What does that mean? It means I know when I’m in a dream and how to control it and direct it.

This comes in handy when I have a lot of things on my mind that I want to sort through, and it was through this realm that I was kicked off the carnivorous path.

When I first shifted my diet, and people asked me why, I tried explaining that I had been propelled through dreams, and they always looked at me like I was crazy, so I was unable to fully explain.

At the time, I was deep into the data connecting vast environmental harms to animal agriculture, keto was on the rise (my husband, family members, friends, the rest of this dang globe), and my mind became racked with the incongruity of that situation: humans were consuming MORE animals in a time when we needed to be eating LESS.

After years of happily gobbling down animal products, I started having dreams where I was trying to explain to animals why I needed to eat them, and every single reason I could come up with was dispelled as pure myth and ignorance.

It went a bit like this:

But, humans need animal products to thrive… there are nutrients within your muscle/breastmilk/embryo that I need to eat or I’ll waste away.

Categorically untrue. Look at how many plant-based doctors are now in their 70s (and 80s!), have had years of plant-based thriving, and are perpetually sounding the alarm that animal products actually feed us DISEASE and it is plant-based whole-foods that make us thrive.

What it all boiled down to was a dream where a pig said,

“Admit it. You just keep eating bacon because of the taste. Despite all of the environmental harm, the harm to your body, the painful life you subjected me to, the terrifying slaughter: none of it was needed. It was purely for TASTE.”

I woke up weeping and never touched a piece of pig again…and this was after years of being known as “Bacon” by an Oswego diner because that was all I’d eat for breakfast: double order of bacon.

Q’s Plant-Based Whole-Food (Sugar-Free) breakfast: cacao oatmeal, cashew cream, and peanut butter.

It was absurd that I’d have all the data in front of me and it would take a dream to kick me forward; but aren’t we all stuck in the same standstill?

I’d started as a vegetarian, had finally cut out cheese (due to that harpy wail of all its health harms), and eventually cutout eggs —not for environmental reasons, because ours were well-loved ones from our neighbor— but because they (like all animal products) create TMAO within your system and this perpetuates cardiovascular decay.

I couldn’t get that voice out of my head and every time I thought about consuming an animal product, I was reminded of all that I had learned, and it wailed loud enough to keep me on track.

As the year progressed (and then turned into two and a half years), I grew healthier and stronger, and I became more and more internally frustrated with loved ones for not changing course. Couldn’t they see that there was health and kindness on the other side? If they knew what I knew, how could they continue to eat animal products?

I realized I needed to start illuminating folks, because many aren’t tapped into the environmental and nutritional realm, and frustration is misguided at ignorance.

I started with quiet, Midwesternly lead-by-example, and not a single soul changed course.

I offered Ian an ultimatum which was a bitter pill for all involved, yet he’d tell you now he feels better than ever and has never regretted walking away from animal products one bit. He needed that push.

In January I started howling, and I’ve since convinced 11 souls to a healthier/kinder path. (<—As of September 2021 it’s now over 200. <3 )

Once more, let’s list the reasons why it is imperative that we stop consuming animal products:

They are the biggest contributor to our environmental impact, and they are perpetuating runaway climate change that will affect every ecosystem and species on this planet…as well as us and our kin if we want to be myopic.
They destroy a healthy microbiome and your microbiome controls your whole health.
They increase your risk of cardiovascular disease (#1 cause of death)
Increase your risk of diabetes
Consumption Increases (even directly causes!) cancer [Ham, bacon, lunch meat, hot dogs are listed as Class 1 carcinogens by the World Health Organization, folks! And they’ve been listed as such since 2015! Why are we still feeding this to ourselves and our kin?!]
They are tied to autoimmune disorders
They are tied to antibiotic resistance within your body (because you are consuming a soul filled with them) and this is leading us toward incurable infections
Consuming animals perpetuates the possibility of zoonotic diseases (<—COVID-19)
Raising animals to slaughter them —when you don’t need their flesh to survive/thrive— is cruel

If after all of the above you still reach for that muscle/breastmilk/embryo, you have to come to the realization —like I once did— that you are doing so purely for selfish taste.

And now that you know all the reasons why our choices are harming the earth, ourselves, our kin, and the species we share this planet with, you’ll hopefully understand why I will no longer want to sit at a table and watch you continue to do so. I’m invariably sitting next to my son, and the conversations we have afterward shred my gut to hollows.

“Do they know that it hurts the animals?” Yep

“Do they know that it is bad for their bodies?” Yep

“But do they know that it is hurting the earth?” Yep

“Then why are they still doing it?”

Plant-Based Leftover Lunch + one of our favorite hot saucesj- black rice noodles, peanut sauce,sauteed mushrooms, peas, apple, quick-pickled cabbage, quick-picked radish. Q - quinoa, sauteed mushrooms, peas, hummus, quick-pickled cabbage, and apple … — Plant-Based Leftover Lunch + one of our favorite hot sauces
j- black rice noodles, peanut sauce,sauteed mushrooms, peas, apple, quick-pickled cabbage, quick-picked radish.
Q - quinoa, sauteed mushrooms, peas, hummus, quick-pickled cabbage, and apple (he picked that mix up himself and said it was delicious)

So how do you move forward?

Here are some resources:

“Plant-Based Primer: The Beginner’s Guide to a Plant-Based Diet”
“Whole-Foods, Plant-Based Diet: A Detailed Beginner's Guide”
“The Step-by-Step Guide to Finally Making a Plant-Based Diet Last”
“How to Smoothly Transition to a Plant-Based Diet”
“Healing Autoimmune Disorders with Dr. Brooke Goldner”
How to Prevent and Reverse Diabetes through a Plant-Based Whole-Foods Diet
How Not To Die, by Dr. Michael Greger
Undo It, by Dr Dean Ornish
Your Body In Balance, Dr Neal Barnard
Watch the Forks Over Knives documentary
Watch the Game Changers documentary
Watch the What the Health? documentary
Or go back to any of my resource posts. There are feasts of great podcasts.

I started intuitively, and with small steps: by swapping out animal-product ingredients with healthier alternatives in meals I already loved to eat. It is untenable if you just leap right into the fire, you need to actually enjoy what you’re eating and know that it’ll be something you can come back to.

For example:

instead of putting milk in our coffee, we started adding deliciously-creamy oatmilk
if I was going to make tacos I used plant-based meat or beans
I still made curry, I just made it with more vegetables and maybe a member of the legume family
I made stir fry with extra vegetables, topped it with peanut sauce, or ate it with a protein-dense grain like quinoa
instead of eggs I started making us oatmeal
did mushroom gravy, instead of muscle/organ gravy
instead of ice cream I started making smoothies or nice cream

The list goes on and could do in any vector. I did a lot of googling. :-) I’ve mostly kept our entire menu the same, it just orbits around a different protein and is full of way more beneficial fiber. If I need to find a substitution, I simply look online.

I show what we’re eating each day, because a friend asked for that illumination, and I hope it inspires you to go set up your own healthy rotation. You want as much diversity in your diet as possible, so just make sure to eat a lot of different plants each week. As soon as I can find the time to add more recipes, I will. My particular amplification passion-point is where science meets food-love, illuminating what I’m learning, how we’re applying that information, and why it is imperative that we all do.

In the meantime, there are soooo many sites out there that have a way better handle at how to write up recipes. For fun food ideas, these are sites/sources that are bounds better than mine:

You’re going to find time and time again that plant-based whole-foods are the best for your body, they can be way more delicious than the old inflammatory junk, and you get the added benefit of removing yourself from a cycle of environmental harm.

Delicious/Energizing Plant-Based Snack: mango, banana, orange, turmeric, ginger, oatmilk smoothie.

Spent the morning writing a manifesto of plant-based whole-food amplification, filled my belly with PBWFs, and then spent the afternoon in the yard with Q.

The Plant Proof podcasts I had listened to multiple times, but the Dr. Will Bulsiewicz interview on Switch4Good had been a single listen, while gardening I was able to do a second listen, and it will definitely involve another write up soon. I think it may be my favorite of the lot, because it is the most accessible, it has some vitally important info explaining why your microbiome can’t handle animal products, and an explanation of what nasty bacteria sprout up in your system when you do.

Constantly learning, moving, and, feasting over here. <3