Plant Based Diet? Are you serious?

Crazy as it may seem, I went plant based on July 1st for 6 weeks and I plan to incorporate much of what I have learned to lead a much more healthy lifestyle for years to come!  I'm sharing in hopes that I can help others with their health as well, as that truly is my passion. Short story is that I was having a lot of inflammatory pains mostly musculoskeletal and both my otherwise healthy parents had been diagnosed with prostate and colon cancer in the last year.  I mentioned these to my women's health doc who was just seeing me for a routine screening. She asked if I had ever thought about going plant based and I said, no! I could give up meat, but cheese is my weakness! She said cheese is the worst and she gave me a paper that looked like this:

I came home and did some research and thought it might be a good idea. Ever since I had covid in May, I had been having weird wrist pains and some other joint pains, but thought it was because I was playing a lot more tennis. 

In the coming days, I met a new friend, Nikki who is a wife of  Dustin's coworker, and she mentioned she was Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB) and she gave me a magazine called Forks over Knives and a book entitled How Not to Die. The next day Dustin and I watched the documentary Forks Over Knives, soon to be followed by Game Changers, and What the Health, and there ya go, that was motivation for us both!

Just to be clear, I did not know what I was signing myself up for, I thought I was going to avoid meat and dairy and be good, but noooooooooooo this was giving up all processed foods, all added or excess sugars, even OIL (which I did not always comply with). 

Nikki then shared with me an app called Daily Dozen and I credit that with my (our) success!

Basically, every day, I tried to check off all the servings of these healthy things that would give me all the vitamins, nutrients, and YES, PROTEIN that a healthy body needs. Dustin went along with it because he loves checklists and when we were eating at home, he would eat plant based. It's a little harder at restaurants, so our restaurant spending went WAY down in that 6 weeks! BTW, it was REALLY hard to turn down shrimp trucks, kalua pork nachos, burgers on 4th of July, poke, and orange chicken on the first 4 days, but I did it!

Breakfasts were easy with either oatmeal or avocado toast with berries and seeds. Lunch smoothies or salads were pretty simple, but dinners were a little daunting at first!  The below helped, for dinners I would try to do a grain, a green and a bean, plus a sauce. Not too hard.

We both love to cook and this gave us unique and different ideas on how to use new and fun ingredients, at the same time knowing it was good for us!  Did we consume some wine in the process, yes, BUT drastically reduced consumption, which we both needed to do!

I cheated once on my birthday and had baked brie and I had a tiny bit of poke on Dustin's birthday (why did I pick July again?), but I had learned how badly cheese and even fish can cause systemic inflammation and high cholesterol, and how red meat is a class 1 carcinogen, so my motivation stayed high! I was also preparing for Tennis Sectionals in Maui with my 18 and older women's team and I wanted my body to be in peak shape for us to win and secure a spot at Nationals in Scottsdale, AZ in October!

I realized I was eating so many animal products from butter, to greek yogurt, to hard boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, and my collagen powder I was adding to my coffee, plus a ton of cheese that I would sample with wine way too much!  I didn't focus on what I was missing, I just focused on how to fuel my body with better ingredients and it worked! I also didn't realize how low my vegetable intake was. I love vegetables, but it takes a little more time to prepare them. Easy excuse to overcome: broccoli, carrots, cucumber, celery with hummus, pretty much every day now!

I'll share some of my favorite recipes if anyone wants them. Most of them came from Nikki and I'm very thankful she was supporting me throughout! The biggest winner of a recipe (threw it together one day) for kids and adults alike are my banana tortillas (whole wheat tortilla, banana, peanut butter, cinnamon, flaxseed, chia seed-blend in a tiny bladed blender and spread in tortilla to take on boat, hikes, afternoon snack with coffee).

So, my results are that I have WAY more energy (some of you are like, how is that possible Angergizer Bunny?) but I would get really tired later in the day or after meals and that doesn't happen now. My joints feel better and I recover faster from intense tennis workouts.  I  also never got hangry because there is no portion control, eat until you are full! And Dustin says I'm faster on the tennis court too! We had been using a FitIndex scale that our nephew recommended which shows more than just weight. I wanted to make sure I was remaining strong, while making a major change in diet and I did!

If you'd like to know my numbers,

If you'd like to know my grocery list, to make sure I had a lot of variety and didn't get bored,

So, we did qualify for Nationals and I'm so excited, so I will continue to mostly eat plant based with a few cheats here and there and hope my body will continue to treat me well since I'm feeding it well!