Why You Should Go Plant Based Right Now

There are so many great reasons why you should go plant based, but we are going to talk about them here in general categories.

1. For your ultimate level of health and to increase your longevity
2. More energy, better physical performance, weight loss, and overall sexiness
3. Save the animals
4. Save the planet

Most things will fit under these categories. Let’s examine why these reasons are great, and discover which is best for you!

Defining Terms: What is Plant Based, Exactly?

First, let’s taco bout what exactly plant based means. Is it vegan? It can be. Is it exclusive of all animal products? It can be. Are there any variations on what plant based can be. Oh yeah baby. It’s a spectrum, and we will find you a home somewhere upon it.

Plant Based, by itself, means you eat a diet that predominantly centers around plants. If 10-20% of your diet falls in the “other” category, like processed foods, animal products, and I dunno, plastic? Then you can still call yourself plant based, since PLANTS consist of the majority of your diet.

Vegan means you will exclude absolutely ALL animal products, no matter what. No meat, dairy, honey, wearing fur or leather, or even using body care items that have been tested on animals or participating in activities that exploit animals. It’s a moral code, and as far as the diet goes, does allow for a lot of junk food. There are tons of vegan items that are full of crap, like Oreos, Pop Tarts, Coke, Ben and Jerry’s vegan ice cream, French fries, etc… Being vegan doesn’t mean you eat crap all the time, but it also doesn’t mean you can’t have it.

Whole Food Plant Based, also known as WFPB, is the stricter and healthiest way of going plant based. This means you only eat items that are whole food and plant based, no processed items. This excludes sugar, white flour, oil, and any processed foods from the diet. All plant foods in their whole, fiber intact form, are allowed. There are grains and flours that are whole food but have been milled down to a more processed looking form, but still contain all the parts. Let’s also use the word ‘processed’ to mean highly processed. Technically fresh frozen fruits and vegetables are processed, as are tofu and tempeh, but quite minimally and all are welcome in the WFPB world.

Like I said, it is a spectrum, and you may find your own level of compliance and your reasons for why. It is important for your decision that you get the facts and understand why the WFPB lifestyle is by far the healthiest, so that you can decide using all the information.

Why You Should Go Plant Based

Let’s roll through the top four, My friends! I know that inquiring minds want to know, so let’s get to it!

1. For your ultimate level of health and to increase your longevity

Eating a Whole Food Plant Based diet is the ultimate in self care. It contains all of the nutrients you need in perfect balance without ever having to count your calories or macros, since you are eliminating processed foods, which are the cause for the imbalance.You will get the perfect ratio of Protein, Carbs, and Fats.

Making sure to eat fruits, vegetables, beans, grains, and nuts and seeds every day will help every cell in your body to thrive, heal, repair, and reduce inflammation.

Inflammation, yes, you hear this buzzword a lot. That’s because inflammation is the root of all of our dis-ease. Eating WFPB is the best thing you can do to boost your immunity, prevent and fight against heart disease, cancer, stroke, obesity, type 2 diabetes, gut problems, and allergies. All of those first world probs.

STOP IT ALREADY with the conversations about PROTEIN, and START the conversation abut FIBER. We are getting sick from too much protein, and eating too many processed foods to get more of it, and there is NO SUCH THING as a protein deficiency. There are, however, oodles of problems associated with not enough fiber. Read more about it here, let’s keep it light in this post!

Protein- Can we get enough from Plants? How much do we really need?

It is written, it is proven, it is scientifically documented without question that people who eat a plant based diet live longer. Vegetarians live longer than omnivores and vegans live longer than vegetarians. You bring it full circle with whole food plant based, and you are giving your life its best possible fighting chance, guaranteed!

So yes, live long ad prosper with plants! A great motivating force, and if this is your number one goal, then WFPB is your way.

2. More energy, better physical performance, weight loss, and overall sexiness

Here we have some more support for reason number one, with slightly different motivation. In our first scenario, we just want to strive for living our best possible life, on principle. Since, we are awesome badass go getters who don’t stop at mediocre! IN reason number 2, we get more into some specific motivations.

More energy. Plants are the most easily digestible foods, full of enzymes and phytonutrients and water. Our bodies are designed to easily assimilate them into our blood streams. When we keep them in their whole form, intact with their fiber, we are slowing the absorption rate to give us long term energy and satiety.

When we consume animal products, we use a ton of energy to break the tissue down into the components we need. So that “complete protein” your trainer tells you to eat, is actually not the best. Plants contain the nutrients we need, all of the amino acids. The we reassemble them into useable protein. When we eat animal tissue, they have already done that. So we have to work very hard to digest it and break it back down into the components and amino acids we need, and then reassemble them to build our protein. There is no need for the middle man, he just wears out our system! This is why you feel fatigued after a heavy meat or cheese meal. Stick with clean energy, man! All of the is also very acid producing to our system, causing unnecessary inflammation Bad.

Not only does this superior nutrient high fiber diet preserve our energy levels, helping us recover more quickly fo enhance athletic performance, but our digestion greatly improves and we get to use all that energy to do super fun stuff, like snow ski and rock climb and run marathons and beat our kids down the block on the bike. Yeah! Suck it, kids!

This superior digestion keeps you from having a distended belly. Fiber flushes excess fat from your body. And best of all, when you exclude processed fats and sugars from your diet, you get to eat all the food you want, including sugary and fatty fruits, veggies and nuts, without worrying about it one bit.

No oil! The fat you eat is the fat you wear, 100%. The next time you pour “heart healthy” olive oil (BS, olives are heart healthy, their oil in a bottle is straight up going right to your trouble zones and staying there) think about how much you want to wear it. Eat avocados, with the fiber and nutrients that satisfy you and fill you up. Quit mainlining marketed healthy oils. Think of oils as the processed white sugar of the fats world.

No sugar! Stripping away al the healthy parts of nature’s foods is just a great way to spike your blood sugar and crash hard. If you need a sports fuel pick me up, eat dried fruits, dates, mangoes, pineapple and you know, WHOLE FOOD.

If weight loss is your goal, you want to stay firmly in the camp of 100% WFPB compliant. Wait until you see how much energy you have and how amazing you feel! Watch the pounds drop off as you eat absolutely as much as you want! As soon as you start to add back in processed foods, you are putting yourself in the calorie counting camp. Forget that noise! I like to eat.

3. Save the animals

If your motivation is compassion, then you are going to want to plant yourself in the Vegan mindset, and go completely off all animal products. Cheese does NOT come from Happy Cows. I won’t go into it, but you can google vegan animal activists at factory farms and learn things you wish you had never known. No one wants to see how the sausage gets made. For real. It’s freaking horrendous. Whatever idea you have about grass fed and farm raised and all that stuff, research the actual guidelines of those definitions. It’s not at all the beautiful picture that’s been painted for us.

Even the most humanely raised animals are eventually being slaughtered, at an early age, and they are sentient beings who are not really interested in being your food. As awful as the slaughter industry is, the dairy industry is far more cruel. So don’t kid yourself into believing that we aren’t harming these animals. This was not my main reasoning for going plant based 30 years ago, but it has kept me in check. It has become a really strong motivator for me in the long run.

I don’t like ‘going there,’ so I will post no links! I am not here to judge anyone, but knowing the facts helps us make educated decisions.

One more thing, our planet will not be overrun with cattle if we stop slaughtering them for meat. They aren’t breeding in mass scale on their own, this is an epic operation. We aren’t really being overrun by animals in the wild, elephants aren’t taking over the world, and neither will cows and pigs. (Rabbits, maybe. LOL.)

4. Save the planet

Duuuude. Animal Agriculture is our biggest manmade threat to the environment. You will do more good for the planet by going vegan/plant based than by never driving (or riding) again. The impact is so huge, that even encouraging the masses to sip meat for one meal a week will make a huge impact. There are a lot of controversial industry washing rebuttals to this theory, but facts are what they are. If you are an environmentalist, and you eat animals, then you are not an environmentalists, so if this is your reasoning, then stop eating them immediately and encourage others to have a few plant based meals here and there. Vegan is the way to go for you.

Let’s Go! It’s Plant Based Party Time!

Now that you are more familiar with the reasonings to go plant based, what is stopping you??? It’s time for you to step up and walk into that persona that now belongs to YOU. Finding the motivation to go Plant Based is just the beginning!

Once you are living that Plant Life, there is just no going back. The way you look and feel and how good you feel about your decisions are the stuff that make you stay, and let’s all stay here awhile, shall we? I’ll see you in our hundreds!

What you think about that?

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