This is a good question for each one of us to ask ourselves and answer honestly. It is important to understand that everything we do has a consequence regardless of whether it affects just us. It amazes me how food can affect people. The mere subject of food causes people to react passionately about a certain food product or genre. Why is that? 30 years ago the closest thing to food television that we had was Public television how to programs. But since the food network takeover, it is crossing into every aspect of our lives. The question you need to ask yourself when watching all this food porn is what they are teaching me good for my health or putting me into an early grave?

All the chefs that promote healthy eating disappear after one season to be replaced by either super spicy or fat laden dishes that promote disease in our bodies. Some of the shows are just one big infomercial for specific products or causes and self promotion. Most of the products are made in China and horrible to use.

To live a life disease free, you have to understand the nutritional value of the food you are putting into your mouth. A healthy steak has negative nutrition along with the white potato. Fruits and vegetables all are high on the nutritional scale along with healthy grains such as brown rice, quinoa, and coucous. Sugar and fat are not your friends no matter how sugar coated they look on the television set.

When you look at your meals, you should always make salad the main course and dot it with a lean protein and more vegetables. The amount of starch on your plate should be no more than 1/2 cup. If the plate you get from the restaurant is covered in rice than you know that portion is for more than one person even though they are calling it a single serving.

Life is too short to  continue to be confused about this whole thing. Look up Dr. Joel Furhman who has made his life work nutritional studies. He is a practicing physician who has reversed disease easily by converting his patients to a plant based diet. It can work for you as well. The hardest part for you is understanding that life is not about just boring meat and potatoes and constant pain from your disease ridden body.

So this lunchtime, start out your meal with a nice salad, less than 3 ounces of lean protein and 1/2 cup portion of starch. Drink lots of water and rid your diet of fats and sugars. In just one meal, you will start to notice a difference.

My dream today is to teach people about living a happy full life. What I didn’t know was the dream was going to include being a vegan for the last part of it. They say, that age is just a number and I believe them. I am in my early 50’s and I feel like I am still in my 30’s. I attribute the energy and the vitality to what I eat every single day. I also attribute my health to my faith in Jesus Christ as he is the sustainer of all things.

Being the only voice in the crowd has its ups and downs because eating plant based is so misunderstood by the public in general. Honestly, how can it not be, with all the new magic pills coming out every day, telling us to spend our money on them instead of doing the right thing and just cleaning up our diet.

I feel blessed if I only reach one person a day who takes the time to sit down and read my meanderings about the plant based diet and its benefits. Even if they do not follow through I know that the seed is planted. The next step is teaching people how to shop and prepare the bounty of foods that they purchased in such a way that there taste craves this kind of food over the old diet. 

I believe that door will open eventually so I can use my culinary skills to benefit more than one or just my family.

Thank you followers for blessing this site with your presence and I will continue to post pictures from my cookbook and articles of interest to help you make the right decisions for your improving your health daily.

It is so hard to convince people that what they eat is important to their well being. Our bodies work as a combined system and there is no way to really spot cure anything by a magic pill or a special treatment. The body needs to retain its balance in order to stay healthy and be disease free.

Our food system is set up to cause us harm, no matter how it is sugar coated and idolized in the media. Doctors Sanjay Kupta and Oz get it and although their focus is not entirely on whole foods and fresh fruits and vegetables, they are slowly convincing the audiences of a different way to eat.

I have come to the conclusion that watching food shows need to be only for entertainment rather than advice because of the unadulterated promotion of foods that will kill you on them. The sponsorship dictates the menu and the calorie count.

The food you eat should be healing your body every day. Instead it is impacting detrimentally. Plant powered foods give you more bang for your buck and heal your body faster than any steak, chicken or fish ever will. But the resistance is fierce out there to going back to a simpler food system that is not highly processed and sugared. As humans we have a highly addictive mentality when it comes to food.

I can tell you even after four and half years into being vegan, the old food addictions still haunt me from time to time. Why is that? Well it might have something to do with the constant food porn on the television. Even when you are not hungry that fast food commercial will make you feel like your hungry at 8:40 in the evening.

We complain that we are too busy to cook a decent meal for our family and it is easier to run through the drive through, then to run to the grocery store and pick up the raw ingredients for dinner. As Gordon Ramsey says, “That is rubbish”. Life is too short to eat rubbish day in and day out.

Our bodies are so toxic from the over processed foods that going to the doctor is almost a weekly event for more prescriptions to ease our woes. It is time to take control of your own health and get back to Nature’s Farmacy instead of going to the chemical pharmacy. Our food needs to come from it’s original form instead out of a box or a can and needs to have little or no processing in order to stabilize our already depleted immune system.

Once your immune system is destroyed, it is very hard to get it back to functioning normally again. Think of cancer survivor, Christina Pirello and Kris Carr. Their wake up call was the cancer and the switch to a plant based diet saved their lives, so they could become spoke persons for the plant based diet cause. My type 2 diagnosis was the wake up call for me to become a spokes person as well even my audience is much smaller. You only have one life to live and your quality of life is dependent on you and what you put on your fork every day.

Breaking through the food myths about vegetarian and vegan plant based eating is a daily struggle because the media calls them too rigid when in fact, they are more freeing than being on a meat and potatoes diet. Compared to that, the rainbow of foods available is amazing. So think about it? What did you have for dinner last night? Meat and 2 sides? Were the vegetables better than the meat or were they cooked to death or slathered with gobs of butter and sour cream?

Menu variety is well worth going plant based any day. If you look at each food you eat as medicine, then it becomes clear very quickly, the foods that are not. The best foods are whole foods because they carry all the nutritional qualities your body needs to survive. Highly processed foods of any kind are just calories and no nutrition. Bottom line.

What do you see when you look at your plate of food? Is it colorful or brown and beige? Does it make you feel good when you finish eating it or do you feel tired and bloated?

Let’s take a look at what may be on the plate. The standard plate will have a 6-8 oz piece of meat, 3-6 oz of starch, 4 oz of overcooked and over salted vegetables.

A person who is eating to protect their health will have an entirely different plate. First off, there is no meat, no dairy, no added oils. The plate will have 3-4 oz of brown rice, 2-3 oz of beans, and the rest of the plate will have steamed vegetables.

Who decided that our plates should have so much animal based protein and that milk is supposed to make a body good? Why is it that the real food that is good for you does not even get a headline or a study that can be published in the medical journals?

When you really sit down and think about it, you being sick is so profitable to a lot of industries out there. And because you buy into the advertisements and eat the mountains and mountains of processed foods out there, you body gets a little sicker every day.

Guess what you have the power to change that? Just by not buying the animal, heavily processed, dairy and oil products. So simple, yet so hard for us to do. The reason it is so hard, is our food system is being doctored to make us crave it to the point of death.

So instead of giving in and giving up, load up your plate with beans and rice and the rainbow of fruits and vegetables and nuts out there. It is going to be difficult at best to cross over to the other side because the cravings are tremendous at first. But remember you can have all the fruits and vegetables you can eat in a day.

I always jumpstart my morning with some freshly juiced carrot and apple juice. Instead of my regular coffee or tea. (side note: If you lose your addiction to caffeine, you will be much more energetic)

I follow it with a great big bowl of fruit salad any variety. For example: this morning I had a Waldorf salad made with apples, celery, pecans, zest of a lime, lime juice, vegan sour cream and a teaspoon of sugar. It was delightful. Now I should have used the rice bran syrup instead of sugar so as not to spike my blood sugar, but I did not think about it.

I will have a salad with a no oil vinaigrette and maybe some brown rice and leftover curried vegetables for lunch.

For dinner, another salad and eggplant deganku with some more brown rice.

Drink lots of water during the day.

Our bodies were built specifically for the plant based whole food diet, no matter what is being taught by the media and the government. When you follow it you not only feel better, you body glows. Don’t you want to go the doctor for your next visit and send his tests into a spiral? Change your thinking to this way of eating and not only will your numbers start to reverse and go back to normal, but all of sudden you no longer need all that medication that has been masking the problems to begin with. He will in fact, try to get you back on the other band wagon, because your illness provides him with super luxurious vacations sponsored by the drug companies out there. Why do you think that doctors no longer receive nutritional studies in medical school? It is not rocket science.

A better life for you can begin today all you have to do is take the first step and get back to the basics.