Vegan Coconut Oatmeal Cookies and Where to Splurge on Ingredients

I hate scrolling through pictures over and over to refer back to a recipe on food blogs like this one, so I'll start with the instructions.  For more information and additional comments, continue reading.

Ingredients:

1/2 Cup Coconut Oil (preferably unrefined)

1 Cup Dark Brown Sugar

2 Tablespoons Light Agave

2 Tablespoons Maple Syrup

1 Cup Flower

1 Cup Whole Rolled Oats

1 Cup Unsweetened Flaked or Shredded Coconut

Pinch of salt

2 Tablespoons Boiling Water

1 Teaspoon Baking Soda

Instructions:

Melt the coconut oil in a saucepan on low or microwave on high until melted, stirring every 15 seconds. Coconut oil has a lower melting point than butter, so keep an eye on it.  

Combine the melted coconut oil with the brown sugar, agave nectar, and maple syrup.  Stir, then incorporate flower, oats, and flaked coconut.

Stop eating the dough!

In a small bowl, add the baking soda to the boiling water.  I boiled about a half a cup of water on the kettle and measured out two tablespoons of water.  The baking soda will fizz up a bit (science!), so make sure there's enough room in your bowl. 

Add the baking soda/water mixture to the dough.  It should resemble a crumb topping - not liquidy like a batter but not compact like dough - and form into a solid when pressed together.

Seriously stop eating the dough!

Form the dough into walnut-sized balls.  Each cookie should contain about two tablespoons of the dough.  Cover and refrigerate for at least three hours.  

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Prepare baking sheets with cooking spray, parchment paper, or more coconut oil.  Place cookies onto baking sheets with ample room to spread out (they will end up about four inches in diameter). You want the cookies to be as cold as possible when they start baking, so minimize the time spent in between the fridge and the oven.  Bake on a center rack for 8-9 minutes. Remove from oven, but let them cool on the pan for an additional 5 minutes.  

Store at room temperature and enjoy!

Witty and Insightful Commentary:

That's right, I'm sharing my wealth of knowledge.  Do I sound like a real vegan yet?

One of the lessons I've learned in trying to cook and bake vegan is that the end result will only be as good as the ingredients you use.  The difference between fine dining and driving through often has less to do with who prepares it than it does with what goes in it.  If you don't believe me, google, "what are Mcnuggets made of.  I couldn't bring myself to add the picture to this blog.  Especially in vegan or healthy recipes, the freshness and quality of your ingredients is a big deal.  However, I know what it's like to be standing in Whole Foods between the unrefined-non-GMO-whole-raw-vanilla-beans and the unbleached-virgin-flour-that-has-most-likely-been-blessed-by-an-organic-priest wondering if you're going to need to sell everything you own in order to afford the food that won't give you cancer.  Keeping that in mind, there are some things that you should consider possibly spending more on.

I based this recipe on Averie Cooks' Chewy Oatmeal Coconut Brown Sugar Cookies, which were probably delicious but not vegan.  However, the only non-vegan ingredient in this recipe was butter, which is an easy fix.  Between Earth Balance, Canola Oil, and all the other plant-based oils out there, it can be hard to pick the right one.  Especially if you have only been a vegan for a month and you don't really know what you're doing...

Because this recipe already included coconut deliciousness, I used Cadia Brand unrefined Coconut Oil.  I just love this stuff. Smells good, tastes good, melts well, hardens well... I might just marry coconut oil when it becomes legal in California. Unrefined coconut oil is sweeter and has more coconut flavor, and refined is more neutral.  Either would be fine, but if you use refined, you might want to get sweetened coconut flakes.  I didn't see it in any smaller jars, but there are a zillion uses of coconut oil, so I thought it was worth it.  As I mentioned above, coconut oil has a lower melting point than butter, so keep that in mind.  This may be the reason my cookies come out much thinner than the original recipe, so if you really want thicker, chewier cookies, lower the temperature of the oven to 300 degrees.  I was okay with the thinner ones, though, so I didn't try it.

I ALREADY LIED TO YOU.  Worst food blogger ever. There was one other non-vegan ingredient: honey.  I always forget that it counts as non-vegan, but it does.  Also really easy to substitute, though!  Light agave nectar (I used Madhava brand) is basically the same thing.  From the very same plant that makes Tequila, it's a bit sweeter and more liquidy than honey but works very well as a substitute.  It's also quite widely available, and is getting cheaper as it gains popularity.

Okay... one more vegan thing.  It's tough to find truly vegan refined sugar.  For some reason, people decided to use animal bones in the process of whitening the sugar.  "Hey, let's use animal bones to make sugar whiter because white is always better!  It'll cost more and is pretty unnecessary, but people will like it more."  "Great idea, Stan."  You can call the vegan police and take away my vegan badge right now if you want, but I have to admit I used sugar that was considered by some, "non-vegan."  For a list of companies that produce refined sugars without any animal products, click here.   

My biggest problem ingredient in this recipe is the maple syrup, because it's often not maple at all, but a filthy impostor.  Look at the ingredients of the Costco-sized bottle of syrup in your pantry.  For one thing, it becomes clear that "Syrup" is not preceded by "Maple," but, "High Fructose Corn." Different. It's hard to avoid GMO's, particularly in this form, so it makes me a little angry.  But the other thing is that of the ingredients listed, none of them come from trees.  If you're from Vermont or Canada, you know that Corn Syrup and water are a poor disguise for the much deeper, more interesting flavor of the real thing.  You can find real Maple Syrup in some grocery stores - you just have to read the label.  And if you're already mid-recipe and you don't want to go out and buy the real thing, you can skip it and add extra Agave.

The rest of the ingredients are pretty straight-forward.  There are thousands of variations of flower, and though I used regular All Purpose Flour, I'm sure there are possible alternatives.  If I really wanted to take the next step with my health, I would probably cut down on the processed gluten.  So if you have knowledge about that, please share!  On a separate note, I want to emphasize the importance of the pinch of salt.  Though it might be unnecessary for the non-vegan alternative to this recipe, it is important to the flavor of these cookies.  The coconut oil will add extra sweetness that needs to be "cut" by the salt.  Other than that, choose better quality ingredients where you can, be patient, don't eat all the dough before it gets in the oven, and your cookies will be wonderful.  

Thanks for reading!

A Very Vegan Christmas

Happy holidays, everyone.

I'm hoping to get this blog posted before it is officially Christmas Eve, but it's not looking so good at the moment.  But it has been far too long since I've written anything, and there are so many exciting things to cover!  Before I go any further, let us all take a moment to appreciate the wonder, majesty, and beauty that is my mother's new kitchen:

When I went away for the most recent semester, my kitchen was a black hole of cement and drywall, so this is quite an improvement.  It is indeed a work of art that was hopefully worth the months of cooking on a camping stove on the back patio.  I knew that coming home would be both a huge opportunity and an equally huge challenge for my fooding adventures.  I was not wrong.  Though my resources seem boundless in comparison to those of my dorm room, I also have the (well-intended) adversity of my family members.  I've prepared myself for this in three major ways:

1. I got my facts straight.  One of the best things about my ADD-type personality is that when I do find something I'm willing to focus on, I focus on it a lot.  And when I do focus on something, it becomes really important to me to become as knowledgeable as possible on the subject.  It leads to some pretty useless information about the ocean and ballet and stuff.  In this case, I did hours of internet research about the ethical, nutritional, and environmental benefits and downfalls of a vegan diet.  I also read The Starch Solution by John A. McDougall, MD, and Mary McDougall.  It was really helpful because it provided me with information in support of a vegan diet from all the aforementioned categories.  I was able to stump my older brother with some information about Egyptians and Heart Disease from this book, which was pretty cool.  I know that my family only questions what I'm doing because they don't want me to die, so having information to support my decisions is extremely important.  
2. I collected an arsenal of vegan cookie recipes.
   
    I had to find a way to combat my Christmas cravings.  As I've mentioned before, my mom is a very, very good non-vegan cook.  I knew I would have to have some substitutes for myself in order to avoid caving in and eating the  New Zealand Holly Cookies.  My dessert board on Pinterest  is overflowing with vegan and raw vegan desserts to make. So far, I've made vegan versions of Giada De Laurentiis' Chocolate and Coconut Lace Cookies and Averie Cooks' Chewy Oatmeal Coconut Brown Sugar Cookies.  I'll be posting the veganized recipes, as well as the recipe for my Roasted Vegetable Quinoa Slaw, shortly. 
3.  I scavenged for vegan ingredients.  The little town of Vista, California may not be Brooklyn, but it's also not Kansas (I actually know nothing about Kansas there may be a surplus of hipster vegans there):  there are some hip stores with the ingredients I need here.  I bought a ton of vegetables, fruits, and starches to start off, of course.  Then I found some vegan butter and virgin coconut oil for butter replacements, Agave nectar to replace honey, and so on.  Though vegan shopping may require a little research ahead of time, it really isn't that difficult to find what you're looking for in this day and age.

With these three tactics the foundation of my technique, I ventured to the turbulent battle lines of my kitchen.  My mother greeted my at the airport with a vegan-friendly granola bar and my brother had been looking up vegan cookies for me - they are supportive my fooding and that made me very happy.  However, they also have no problem challenging me to explain my motivation for going vegan, over and over again, and they're not used to the level of health I'm trying to achieve.  Though I've been eating more fat than I had been at school, it has helped me expand my knowledge and skill in this fooding experiment.  

Thanks for reading and happy holidays again!  Stay tuned for my Vegan Lace Cookies, Vegan Oatmeal Coconut Brown Sugar Cookies, and my Roasted Vegetable Quinoa Slaw.

The Initial Effects of a Vegan Diet

      One of my major motivators for creating a blog was to give people an honest and accurate account of my experiences with making diet changes, so I thought I'd take a break from my more intellectually-driven ideas to give a report of how things are going for me.  Overall, it has been an extremely positive experience that I would highly recommend to anyone feeling discontented.  What I've noticed is that even if it isn't the source of your problems, knowing that you have control to change something and the drive to commit to the change can give you a new perspective that is really motivating.  It definitely hasn't been easy, though, and I plan to be completely honest about that.  Here's what has challenged me throughout the process:

1.  Cravings:
      In an interview by KD Traenger, Anne Hathaway stated, "The moment I learned, I evolved.  I have never, not once, craved a single non-vegan food."
...
     Now, maybe Anne Hathaway didn't have roommates who brought Frosties back to her room late at night.  Maybe she doesn't have a Pinterest account to scroll through grilled cheese after grilled cheese at any given moment in the day.  Maybe she's just one of those weirds who doesn't actually like ice cream that much.   Or it could be that she really did just poof her cravings away with magic.  Whatever she did, I haven't figured it out.  Throughout this experiment, I have wanted to eat so many things that I shouldn't eat.  When I started, it was milk, ice cream, and other non-vegan desserts.  I realized, though, that I was never craving the animal products in these things; I was craving the sugar.  And sugar, for all it's other possible flaws, is vegan friendly.
     I've always heard people say "well if you crave sugar, eat an apple!" and laughed at them.  'You obviously don't understand,' I would think.  'I don't want sugar, I want pure white refined sugar in heavy cream.  An apple isn't going to do it for me.'  And I was right.  But the thing is, though I thought I was craving the heavy cream and other things in the recipes, I really just wanted a large amount of sugar.  It takes a lot of apples to get to the amount of sugar in a Frosty.  The good news is, eating lots of apples is okay!  Way more okay than a Frosty.
     Once I adopted this new idea, I didn't have cravings anymore.  What I did have a few weeks in, was a craving for meat.  Really weird.  I've been a casual vegetarian a few times in my life, and never actually craved meat.  But after I eliminated milk, cheese, etc., I actually wanted meat.  These ended after about a week, though.

2.  Quantities:
     "Enough," I have learned, is a relative term and will change when you change your diet.  Animal products are much richer than their plant based alternatives.  If you make the switch to plant-based foods, you'll find yourself eating Cheesecake Factory-style heaping plates of food for almost every meal.  That's just what your body wants, and it's not over eating.  I know this now, but I grossly underestimated my caloric needs at the grocery store, and I basically ran out of food half way through the week.

3.  Being that guy who has to ask if there's cheese on the pasta:
       It's really easy to be a vegan when you already went grocery shopping and all the food in your house is vegan food.  But food is a social thing and I am a social person.  I'm not a picky eater so I'm not used to having difficult food preferences, and it feels weird to ask people questions about the free food they put in front of me.  Again, it helps to have eaten enough at home.  But I've found that it's more than just being full.  It's being comfortable with your choices about food to discuss them without feeling pretentious or needy.  Because I do feel confident in my choices, I've been able to get over the initial weirdness.

4.  My body was like "What are you doing?"
     This was a pretty major change for me and my body responded to it as such.  I don't want to go into details here, for the sake of the general body of readers, but if you really REALLY want to know you can contact me elsewhere and I'll probably tell you?  I don't know.

    The major drawbacks have been, for the most part, physical.  But the major advantages of this switch surpass the needs of my body.  I know that there is one element of my life I am consciously making changes to.  To feel like you have enough knowledge, skill, and commitment to successfully change even the smallest aspect of your life is really empowering.  I urge anyone reading this to find one thing about their life that they're not happy with, and consider changing it.  Baby steps.

Doctors are great but this is just silly.

       I went to the doctor today and it brought up a lot of issues I have with the way the health care system.  Oooo that sounds controversial.  It's really not.  It's just one girl's struggle with having migraines and having doctors not help.  

My first migraine happened this summer.  I was at a dance class and all of the sudden I could only spot half of my face.  That is, I could only see half of my face. I sat in my car after class ended for a few minutes, trying to understand what was going on and how I was going to get home.  I drove home on all the backroads going fifteen miles an hour like a big douche-bag, using the median to guide me because most things to the right of it were covered by a silvery blob. I arrived home and burst into tears, to the extreme confusion of my dad and brother.  I composed myself enough to described to them what was happening and while my dad tried frantically to get me to stop crying, Kevin looked up my symptoms.  He came back with the verdict that it was probably a migraine. Shortly after that, the severe pain kicked in.  I spent the rest of the night in bed with the exception of when I got up to vomit. I fell asleep around 4:00AM and woke up at 8:00AM.  That morning, we went straight to Urgent Care.

I described my symptoms and they confirmed the migraine diagnosis.  Then they gave me a shot of Imitrex, a commonly used migraine medication.  “This should make you feel better,” they said.  The nurse left, turning the lights off and practically tucking me in - she was really nice.  Then, it felt like the bottom of my brain was on fire.  It spread to the rest of my head, then to my lungs and stomach, until it was all over my body.  If you have ever cut a thousand jalapeno peppers and breathed in their gas, that’s basically what it felt like, but all throughout my body.  My dad went out and asked the nurse if she knew what was happening.

“She’s in there and she feels like her insides are burning, do you know what’s going on?”

“No, I don’t.  Doctor!  Do you know why her insides are on fire?”

“Nope, sorry!”

The nurse got out some kind of nurse’s encyclopedia and said, “well look at that, it’s an uncommon side effect!”  They performed an MRI Scan which came back normal, eliminating tumors as a cause.  Hooray!  They said I could follow up with a neurologist, but advised me to wait and see if it was an isolated incident.  

It wasn’t!  I got my second migraine a few weeks into the semester.  It started while I was waiting for a train after going away for the weekend.  I didn’t want to deal with another doctor, and didn’t have a private physician at school, let alone a neurologist.  But by the eleventh day of the migraine, I thought maybe I should find out if I was dying.  I went to my university’s infirmary on a Friday afternoon, hoping to get some advil for free or something.

“Are you on Birth Control??”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well then it might be a blood clot.  Yeah, Birth Control causes blood clots.”

“Oh… What do we do about that?”
“We’ll have to get you a blood test right away because it might be a BLOOD CLOT.”

Clearly, what the doctor was saying here was, “you might have a blood clot.”  But what my anxious irrational migraine mind was hearing was something closer to, BLOOD CLOT BLOOD CLOT DEATH YOU’RE DYING YOU’RE ACTUALLY ALREADY DEAD THIS IS HELL HELL IS A DOCTOR’S OFFICE.  This made me stressed out and, since I already had a migraine, nauseated.

“Um, I’m sorry… I’m listening but I think I’m going to throw up.”

She sent me to the Emergency Room.  In an ambulance.  They put me on a STRETCHER.  I waited in the Emergency room for three hours, so that a doctor could come in and be very condescending.

“I can’t really do anything for you except give you migraine medication.”

“I had an adverse reaction to migraine medication.”

“Well I can pump you full of glucose?”
“Oh okay, yeah…  Oh, but the doctor at the infirmary said I might have a blood clot.”

“Pft… A blood clot where??”

I DON’T KNOW SIR YOU’RE THE DOCTOR I JUST WANT TO GO HOME I DIDN’T CHOOSE THIS PLEASE DON’T BE ANGRY.  They gave me an IV of glucose which was rad, then we waited for three hours for them to discharge.  Oh, and I didn’t have my insurance card because I don’t need it at the infirmary and DIDN’T EXPECT TO GO TO THE ER, so they charged me $900.  :)

After this, they referred me to a neurologist.  I won’t go into the details of how difficult it was to get an appointment - that’s a whole other story.  She was the most pleasant doctor I ever had, aside from her notorious lateness.  My appointment was at five, they saw me at seven fifteen.  Super.  It was clear that her lateness was caused by her thoroughness, though.  We sat, separated by an enormous desk that emphasized her tiny size almost humorously, and I gave her a really detailed explanation of my issues.  She gave me a packet of information pages and pages long about migraines, then described, in detail, my options.  She then gave me a physical examination and prescribed a brain test of some kind.  Since migraine medication wasn’t really an option for me (and shouldn’t be for anyone… I’ll explain that in the future), the other options were preventative medication and dietary changes.  Here’s the list of foods to avoid to prevent migraines that my doctor gave me:

• Ripened cheeses
• Herring
• Chocolate
• Vinegar
• Anything fermented, pickled or marinated
• Sour cream, yogurt
• Nuts, peanut butter
• Hot fresh breads, raised coffee cakes, donuts
• Pods of broad beans
• Foods with MSG
• Onions
• Canned figs
• Citrus fruits
• Bananas
• Pizza
• Pork
• Excessive amounts of tea, coffee, or cola beverages
• Avocado
• Fermented sausage
• Sourdough Bread
• Canned figs
• Raisins
• Papaya
• Passion fruit
• Red Plums
• Sauerkraut
• Soy sauce
• Meat tenderizers
• Seasoning Salts
• Canned soups
• Frozen TV Dinners
• Alcohol

Boy, wasn’t that fun?  So that wasn’t going to happen.  How would I ever know which of them cause migraines?  How would I ever enjoy food again?!  While I did plan on making some diet changes,  I also agreed to go on Beta Blockers, a preventative medication.  Two weeks later, I’m doing my best to avoid most of these things.  I’m on the medicine that, for the first week, kept me up all night (a common side effect).  And I get a migraine!  That was cool.  This is about when I gave up on relying on doctors to solve my problems, and took matters into my own hands.  Hence my experiments, and this blog.  

Today I had a follow up appointment (that was supposed to be two weeks ago… I got busy) with the neurologist.  “Your brain scan was normal.  How are you doing?”  

“Well.  I think my migraines are caused by dairy products.”  

“Oh, yes that happens sometimes.  Good for you!  And are you still taking the beta blockers?”

“No, they didn’t work, I got a migraine two weeks into taking them.”  

“Oh, well if they don’t work I can proscribe more.  You should have called me, I would have done that for you.”

“Oh, well I think I’m okay.  I think I’ve pretty much gotten it figured out with the diet thing.”

“Okay, well good for you for figuring it out for yourself!”

If you get migraines, I highly recommend that you go to the doctor.  Migraines may be a symptom of a much larger and more serious problem.  The scans and tests that I had done were completely necessary.  But You can avoid dealing with all that I just described by taking your health into your own hands.  Do your research, consult experts, get the necessary medical tests, and commit to making changes.  Do not rely on the doctor or the medication to heal you, because that often means masking the symptoms, rather than the causes.  I didn’t write this to scare you away from hospitals or convince you that doctors are bad, because they’re not.  I wrote this to emphasize the ineffectiveness of the common strategies for curing ailments.  Think about it.  Let me know what you think, and share your similar or contrasting experiences.  

Things that Stop Us and Why/How We Should Destroy Them

To understand how people feel about a friend or family member going vegan, think of how your loved ones would feel if you got a random facial piercing.  Oddly enough, if you’re my mother, it’s very similar.  I know that because this semester, I both pierced my nose and decided to go vegan. Oh God that sounds so angsty. First, surprise: “you did what?”  Then, disbelief: “Today?  No you didn’t.  Really?”  Really. She had always said nose piercings were cute, so I was confused.  “Yeah, but… not on you.” 

She’s skeptical about the nose ring (just wait until you see it, Mom, I promise I’m still pretty) as well as this whole vegan thing.  So is almost everyone else.  So am I.  I just don’t know if I can handle it.  But deep down, I know that this diet experiment is a really good idea for me, and that now is the right time.  Not to mention, I need to make these migraines stop as soon as possible.  So I am going to do this.

I feel like my hesitations are the hesitations a lot of people feel when trying to make drastic changes to their diets and their lives.  So I thought I’d put together a list of arguments against going vegan that came from my own mind (that can be applied to other dietary changes) and how to combat them, both internally and externally.

1. Vegan food tastes bad.

Wrong!  Vegan food tastes good!  (I mean, obviously, there are people who don’t like vegetables.  I don’t really know how to attack this if you’re hoping to go vegan without vegetables… Good luck to you.) But maybe you’ve had bad vegan food before, but it was either the wrong vegan food for you or just not prepared well.  Not a lot of people are good at cooking these days.

How to attack this:

Invest in some good spices.  A lot of vegan recipes call for a much larger quantity of spices than I’d expect or spices I’ve never even heard of.  This is because though vegetables have a lot of flavor, a lot of standard (western) recipes call for animal products like cream or butter to bring out flavors, or to tie multi-ingredient recipes together on your palette.  Smart use of spices can do basically the same thing. 

Try new things.  If you’re only eating vegetables, fruits, and grains, you’re going to get tired of the same five vegetables, fruits, and grains you’ve enjoyed before.  Some of them will be bad.  Some of them will not be.  For me, Medjool Dates, Acorn Squash, and some vegetable I still can’t identify, have all been successful new additions to my diet.

Find good vegan recipes.  I mean good vegan recipes.  The internet is a thing!  Contrary to popular belief a lot of vegans do use computers, and they are happy to share what they know.  (How do you know who the vegans are at a party? … Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.)  One of my favorite new internet discoveries is http://www.mynewroots.org/.  She’s a nutritionist who is not strictly vegan but has a lot of healthy, delicious looking recipes and good resources for this kind of diet.  There are lots of good resources on the computer, it’s just a matter of finding them.  And maybe, with practice, you won’t be a bad cook anymore!  

2. Okay… some vegan food is good.  But so is cheese and ice cream.

True.  I’m not even going to pretend.  I love ice cream.  Ask literally anyone who knows me.  And cheese was never an optional food.  It was like cooking with water.  But I do know they’re not good for me.  They’re just not.  

How to attack this:

Eat enough of what you can eat.  You won’t crave anything if you’re truly full.  And the good news about a lot vegan foods is that they will make you actually full without giving you the false fullness caused by fats.  This includes eating enough before you go somewhere where these foods will be offered to you.  Because they will be.  They’ll be right there smiling at you on pretty trays.  But you are strong!  Making yourself a smoothie in the morning to carry around every time someone mentions cake is a good way of doing it.  I actually do this.  It’s ridiculous.

Find good replacements.  Again, I mean good replacements.  I’m really not into vegan cheese and butter.  You can put on the cheese costume and dance around and say “I’m cheese!” but I’m never going to believe you’re really cheese.  What I do like, though, is Trader Joe’s brand Frozen Coconut Dessert.  I get that “frozen coconut dessert” doesn’t sound like as much fun as ice cream but it is pretty delicious.  Look for the replacements that are prepared convincingly with readable ingredients (“vegan” and “healthy” are not necessarily the same thing).  

3. I won’t have a balanced diet.

Wrong!  Sort of.  You can get all the nutrients you need without animal products.  The issue is, you might not.  It becomes more difficult to balance your diet, especially if you, like most others, are really accustomed to gaining nutrients through an animal-based diet.  There are really healthy vegans and vegetarians, and then there’s my brother circa 2004, who decided to be a vegetarian for a year and ate bean and cheese burritos religiously.

How to attack this:

Do your research.  One helpful resource that Lettuceboy found me (he’s starting to love the alias I’m sure) is http://cronometer.com/, which keeps track of all the food you’re inputting.  You make a personal profile that can include your height, weight, dietary preferences, and exercise routines, and you input the food you consume.  It converts all that into helpful, personalized health information.

Plan ahead.  Give yourself enough time to buy, prepare, and eat the right things.  What I’ve noticed about my vegan diet is that it takes a little more time to do all of those fooding things, and it’s easy to say “uhhh… pretzels are vegan!” When you’re running to class.  Also, packing lunches and whatnot might be nerdy but it can be done with style, and will probably keep you from being unbalanced/unhealthy.

4. I don’t want to be annoying to people I hang out with.  Literally no one wants me to be a vegan.

Here lies the nose piercing issue.  But, like my nose ring, it really shouldn’t directly affect your friends and family.  And as for the second thing: wrong again!  There are people who want you to be a vegan.  They just might not be your friends… or your family… or anyone you know.

How to combat this:

Don’t be pretentious or invasive.  There are ways of sharing ideas, even ones you feel strongly about, without coming off like that guy standing outside of the movie theatre with pamphlets about how to bring Jesus into your life. 

Let them know you’re having a positive experience.  They’re probably just worried about your health.  But also, if you’re not having a positive experience, pay attention and have an open mind. 

Find the believers!  Every vegan out there wants you to also be a vegan, they’re like religious people.  The food blogs I’ve mentioned before as well as www.vegansociety.com are places to find resources and communicate so you don’t feel like a kook.

5. I won’t be able to eat out, and it’s just not convenient in general.

It may not be convenient to be healthy, but it is always healthy to be healthy.  Again, I’m not saying “vegan” and “healthy” are the same thing, but if you are going vegan for your own health, you know it’s worth the extra work.  As for eating out, the task may seem more impossible.  

How to attack this:

Look (ahead) for the right dining-out options.  Though a lot of your favorites may have you saying, “I’ll have the water.”  There are a lot of solid restaurants that have vegan options.  Panera Bread, for example, is a beautiful glorious magical place that has a section of their website dedicated to their vegan menu options.  Also, a lot of Thai and Indian food restaurants will have a lot of inherently vegan menu options.  You may just have to look ahead online or call before arriving.

Plan.  Again, fooding vegan is difficult and time consuming.  There’s a lot of chopping, processing, and chewing involved.  Give yourself the time to do all of those things because they’re important.

6. It’s kind of extreme.

I mean, yeah.  It is.  If you’re feeling like you can’t do it, remember there is a middle ground.  It can be overwhelming to read all the different dietary options and opinions, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make changes.  Baby steps.  Don’t feel obligated to give everything up at once, and don’t feel like every decision you make is permanent.  Focus on the things you add rather than the things you subtract.  This is true for any diet change. Also, doing what I did and committing to a small period of time is a non extreme way of going about an extreme change.  I am beginning to feel a strong sense of empowerment from knowing that I am taking control over this aspect of my life, and I can tell you quite honestly that it has been worth the sacrifices.

Some Background Information (and Wit to Impress You)

  Food is a beautiful thing. We shouldn't let it negatively affect our bodies. And it should never feel like a burden. From development to production to transportation to consumption, there's a lot we're all doing wrong. All of these things fall under the category I call "fooding" and I hope that through this blog, we can start to understand fooding better, and learn how to food correctly (trust me, you'll get used to the term eventually). Before I get started, I thought some background information would be helpful. Here are a few questions and answers that hopefully give us all an idea of what to expect from this blog.

When and why did I start caring about food?

A few things have happened to me recently that have really influenced my perspective about my body and what I put into it. Their significance varies, but they have all contributed to what I hope is a large and necessary lifestyle change:

• Moved away from my home in San Diego, California, to go to college in Long Island, New York.  How did that affect my diet?  Lots of ways:
• The “fresh” produce here is just a joke to my little Californian brain.  Where I come from, lemons are free because they fall on the ground in our yard.  Everyone I know knows what an avocado is.  Not to mention, in California, Oranges tend to be, um, orange.  
• In my second year here, I got off the meal plan and began cooking for myself.  This gave me the opportunity to choose what I ate.  I like to shop at Whole Foods and make recipes by Ina Garten and Giada De Laurentiis.  It was much healthier than the campus food.  However, this also meant the responsibility of purchasing, preparing, storing, and consuming this food at appropriate times.  Difficult.  I have to eat every day.  Yikes.
• College is hard.  Stress eating.  No eating.  Wendy’s is the closest and most convenient dining hall to my building.  You get the idea.
• Winter.  What the heck is this business about.  The Wendy’s convenience becomes soooo much more significant.
• My athleticism has significantly slowed down.  I started dancing when I was eleven, and by the time I was in high school, I danced enough to consider myself a pretty intense athlete.  It was always very easy for me to get the proper amount of exercise because I just didn’t think of it that way.  It wasn’t working out, it was dancing.  And I usually liked it.  Now that I’m in college, I don’t have the desire, time, or resources to exercise as much as I used to.  All the sudden I looked in the mirror and realized I might someday have to start thinking about maintaining my weight.  To be honest, it hasn’t happened yet.
• Here’s the big one:  This summer, I started getting migraines.  Loss of vision, nausea, vomiting, chills, the whole nine.  After the first migraine, we waited to see if it was an isolated incident.  If only.  After the third migraine, I went to a neurologist, who gave me a list of foods that I should avoid to prevent migraines. In a future blog, I will go over the specifics, but for now just trust me: it was ridiculous.  When every time you eat you think, this could make me feel great, but it might make me vomit and temporarily lose my vision and make me miss my classes tomorrow and force me to wear sunglasses inside even when it’s dark out and look like a big douche-bag, you really start to think about the significance of food.   
• I started hanging out with this vegan boy.  I know… DUMB.  Stick with me here, though, please.  The more I got to know him, the more I realized he is sooo vegany.  Like, the I-walk-around-with-a-head-of-romaine-lettuce-in-my-back-pocket kind of vegan.  Yeah.  He feels very strongly about food, and definitely lives a much healthier lifestyle than many of the people I know.  Conveniently, he came into my life while I was a walking diet experiment and has therefore been a big contributor to my research and implementation of diet changes.  

Why the blog?

I am a privileged middle class Caucasian female living between California and New York who willingly gets a surplus of exercise and consistently had all the resources necessary to living what many would call an ideal lifestyle.  My mother is a fantastic cook who has always taken pride in providing our family and others with delicious and healthy meals.  Our family income allowed her to be a stay at home mom, which gave her the opportunity to do so.  If you compare me to the rest of the world, I really should be the picture of health.  But I’m not.  This really freaks me out.  The food that I eat is definitely on the healthier side, and it is causing me severe physical pain.  

If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone.  The food we eat can shape the way we live, but making changes to something so routine, so inherent, is extremely difficult.  I know, because I have every resource I need, and I still have trouble understanding and implementing the necessary changes.  So in writing this blog, I hope to be a resource to people who don’t want to get heart disease but also aren’t quite ready to join lettuce boy on the slackline (no disrespect to lettuce, boy, or slackline… I enjoy all three).  The middle grounders who want to make changes to their lives, but just don’t know how.

What is a “healthy diet?”

Gosh, I don’t know.  Don’t expect the answer to that in this blog, because I really can’t give it to you directly.  I’ll keep everyone updated on my food experiments and let you know what I find out.  A huge frustration for me in my research has been the fact that I do not understand my body or my food on a chemical level, and so the research that I do is often another person’s interpretation of something I can’t validate because I simply don’t have the base knowledge.  But chances are, neither do you.  So rather than a regurgitation of my research, I am your willing example.  Because honestly, the proof doesn’t come from a chemical understanding.  It comes from how the food makes you feel.  So I’ll find out, and let you know.  

What’s the plan?

First, in the next few weeks I plan to record my experiences with a vegan diet.  I’ve done the research.  I know that it is better for the environment as a whole and better for the animals.  Many experts suggest that it is also the most beneficial diet to our bodies.  But of course,  I have been influenced by previous generations enough to be skeptical about this one element of it (my dad’s favorite argument is that “meat keeps you warm in the winter”).  So this is an experiment, and nothing more.  I’ll let you know how I feel and we can all make our decisions when the time comes.

After that, I plan to implement elements of a mediterranean diet.  This is a budding fad diet that seems to be pretty nutritious and also extremely appetizing.  Also, starting in February I’ll be studying abroad in Florence, Italy.  I’m taking an Italian Vegetarian Cooking class, and I plan to utilize this opportunity to absorb more knowledge and gain perspective about food.  Food was one of the main reasons I chose Italy.  Granted, that was before I wasn’t eating cheese… it’s okay though!  I will make it work!  

I will document each of my subsequent adventures and let you know how my lifestyle changes affect my diet, how my dietary changes affect my physical health, and how my physical health affects my lifestyle.  Full circle dude.  With each blog, I hope to be a resource myself and also give you the resources I find helpful, informative, and interesting. Additionally, even if no one reads this blog except my mom, I plan to use this to keep myself motivated to continue my fooding journey. With that said, please let me know if you have any questions or specific topics you'd like to see covered.