Nature Tip 007: Plant Based Diet
Nothing in this post is a recommendation.
About 4 years ago, I decided to try really committed to a plant based diet. I had tried being a vegetarian in college which lasted for 4 years, except for when I would visit my family in Michigan who refused to accept that meat was unnecessary for health. I would experience food FOMO like no other and I lost a ton of weight, replacing meat with carbs and with sugar for energy. I did “plant based” totally wrong. For 10 years while I modeled and worked in fashion and traveled, I had zero food rules. I never gained weight because I was hyper active and physically very active, but I was not healthy. I struggled with many health issues to which I had to stock up on pharmaceuticals I could get over the counter in other countries. Finally, a friend of mine suggested I take a probiotic. As soon as I did this my whole experience daily changed. I thought it was bizarre. Then I read that many cultures believe the brain is in the gut. And then I started reading. I read Genius Foods, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The China Factor, and I ordered Sakara’s cookbook. Then I ordered Sakara. I realized, I am a great chef and with some effort and paying attention to Sakara’s 9 pillars of nutrition, that I could try again to do plant based diet, but right this time.
Sakara taught me to aim to eat the color of the rainbow. That’s because certain color foods have specific nutritional value. So the more colors, the more nutrition I was getting. I learned that carbs are not a healthy substitute because corn and wheat are laced with chemicals. I learned that not eating organic was exposing me to poison and so I committed to paying more for my food but I saved money on not buying the meats and dairy and breads. I learned to not eat the same food within a 24 hour time period, no leftovers the next day. This is because the goal is to get DIVERSE nutrition into your body. I started adding their minerals to my water. I drank water with lemon. I started to do intermittent fasting. And I didn’t beat myself up if I failed. No doubling down on my pain! I decided to not be strict with myself. If I wanted to eat something I would eat it, especially when eating in restaurants in Naples, FL, which may as well be Michigan. But I didn’t feel great when I did that so I often did this less and less. But then I stopped eating in restaurants because menus there often had 1 vegetarian dish and they were usually pretty awful. After I didn’t let the food FOMO get to me, although after 1 year of only eating off my diet in restaurants which was not often, I could let it go and enjoy my process. I started really working out my favorite recipes and my mom would say to me “If I could make food taste like this, I would be plant based too!”
When I stopped craving the meat and cheeses, I started to be somewhat grossed out by them. I was always lactose intolerant but I would suffer through cheese and dairy treats because I thought I loved them. But when I learned about how evil the dairy industry is, I couldn’t even bring myself to buying 90% of dairy anymore even if I physically paid a price for it. If I was going to eat meat, I decided it had to be sourced from a small farm. I learned that any farm with over 50 animals has to carry insurance, because it is impossible to safe guard farms over that size from disease. I watched What the Health and didn’t eat meat for a year. If I wanted meat I would eat it about once a month from a good farm. But the less I ate animals, the less I wanted to. Now I will occasionally eat wild game since I live in the mountains but I usually have the same reaction which is not liking it in my mouth at all. If I wanted fish it had to be wild and sourced sustainably. I watched Seaspiracy and cried and was depressed for 2 days and ruined a vacation with my boyfriend at the time. I had been pescatarian for years after being vegetarian and the whole time, creature still suffered. I had no idea what the fish were going though! As a mermaid it cut me deep. I rarely eat fish anymore but if I do I source, like I do everything else. I know the restaurants I eat sushi in are sourcing sustainably, or I eat wild Sardines since they are sustainable. If I need cheese, I try to find cheese that is certified humane and is goats or sheep milk since that is lactose free and doesn’t bother me. These meats and seafood and dairy that I do occasionally eat, they actually are more like a condiment on my food. I never eat them as a large portion. And I’ve found that this works for me. The point is not to be so strict, it is to be healthy and have energy and care about our planet. I won’t eat fake food because it usually has a ton of soy which is not great for women apparently. I think it helps that I grew up Italian and know how to cook. Maybe one day I will add some recipes on here or make a cookbook for how to do this lifestyle well. For now, I just want you to start reading and watching and paying attention to this process, if you are looking for a change. I had one friend watch me grocery shop and clean and prepare my food, storing it in glass containers and treating it with respect. He said “If this is what you do for your food every day and week, I see now why it is such a big part of your life. I respect that.” I struggle with this in relationships because while it may be gross to say, I can smell meat on a heavy meat eaters - someone who eats meat daily - it comes through in their scent, which to me is disgusting. I think there is something to be said about that. When I stopped eating so much meat and cheese and grains, my own scent got a lot sweeter, and I even found it more pleasant than the scent I often felt before was mine but belonged to someone else. Now I say if you’re out every once in a while and want to just indulge, your body on a plant based diet is equipped to fight toxins so go for it. But don’t make it a habit. No one will ever eat perfectly and that is okay. Perfection, let us remember, is a disease in and of itself. The reality is, keeping our diet to 95% plants, eradicates many of modern day diseases AND inflammation which leads to disease, as well as protects us from exposure to the disease that lives inside of many of modern day farmed animals who are treated inhumanely. These animals live in awful conditions, conditions we would never let humans live in, and we don't eat humans. If we can only see one millionth of the electromagnetic spectrum, it is safe to say that it is likely some of that genocide ends up in our bodies when we eat genocidal meat. I for one do not want to participate in genocide. Do you? Even more intense - do you want to be eating it??
Before covid started up, I remember being horrified to reading that the pork stock in China had been eradicated by a disease. I remember seeing it quickly spread to Australia and destroyed large amounts of their pigs. Fortune magazine reported that “Experts estimate that since 2018 as many as 300 million pigs, the equivalent of 25% of the global hog population, have died or were culled in China owing to ASF outbreaks.” The reality is that while they said humans had nothing to fear with this outbreak, that the humans handling the infected pigs were wearing hazmat suits and months later covid broke out of China and has affected global life as we all know it. The truth to me is that the animals carry the disease and spread it to us. And it is unavoidable because they are the largest genocide the world has ever seen. We are eating animals that don’t have a life and are not healthy - for profit of greedy psychopaths. We did not evolve for thousands of years eating meat with every meal, and in fact it is killing us in multiple ways now. We are now chopping down football fields of rainforest every minute to pave way for cows to be treated awfully to feed us. When will the insanity stop? If covid doesn’t get us to each look at our meat intake, what will it take??
Einstein - yes the man who gave us the Theory of Relativity which defined our laws of physics and changed the face of our planet in infinite ways - said something about a vegetarian diet and with covid running around our species, it was a huge reason for my shift 4 years ago and I hope it will help you in your own journey to be more conscious about what you put into your temple. Albert Einstein said, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
If he knew it and figured it out, and he was the smartest human to every live, we should listen to him. Don’t listen to me. Listen to Einstein. But do it right. Listen to the leaders.
Read Sakara’s 9 pillars of nutrition and get started treating yourself and this planet better. If you would like some recipes please reach out to me I’m happy to share a few of my own creations and in time will replace this section of this blog with a few of my own. If you don’t have time to cook healthy for yourself, use Sakara or any other organic plant based food delivery program you can find. I think they are the best but I am biased because I’ve known the girls since the start. I’d follow them on social media, I have learned so much from following them and people like them in different industries, over the years. Get inspired. The time is now to treat yourself right and to let that temple shine!
