The Casual Vegan

Oh, Internet. How often I use you, but how little I accomplish!

I am still here, still pregnant, and having much more fun eating now that I’m 23 weeks along with things. I admit to still being much more “casual” about veganism than I had been prior to pregnancy, but I’m finding nice ways to temper that when I eat at home. My cravings ebb and flow. For a week, I was eating cheese slices at home, but found a nice way to up my fiber and vitamin intake while fulfilling that craving was to pair the cheese with apples and oranges and cucumbers sliced up and served to myself like an elaborate appetizer.

Greg is not a big fan of texturized soy protein products, and while I certainly don’t think they’re fabulous for me, I do find them to be a better alternative than running out and grabbing some real chicken nuggets, et cetera. Plus, for someone that kind of shies away from salads, they can be just an excuse to eat a lot of great veggies for flavor. Today I was cooking up a vegan burger patty and chopping up tomatillo, cucumber, thin yellow onion slices, and a small handful of red lettuce, when I realized I had way too many veggies to put on the bagel I had planned to use (I visualized them all falling out of the little hole) — So I grabbed a whole wheat pita, cut it in half, popped it in the toaster to make it warm and tasty, slathered it with hummus and a little salsa, cut up my burger patty into smaller parts and made a yummy hummus sandwich!

That’s all. Just checking in, Friends.

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A Dutch study concludes that giving kids choices about vegetables does not make a difference in the amount of vegetables they eat. However, on average out of hundreds of 4-6 year olds tested, most ate around 50 grams of vegetables, which is roughly 2 ounces. Sure kids don’t eat a lot, but 2 ounces is 14 calories of spinach. Any parent who doesn’t do something when their children only consume 14 calories of vegetables in a meal is neglecting their children’s health.

The story was reported by major media, and they didn’t mention the shockingly low consumption of vegetables in the study. In fact the coverage implies that nothing you do makes any difference in how children eat! If the researchers had given the children all healthy foods, and no unhealthy options at all. They would have made shocking discoveries about the amount of vegetables the children ate.

Hungry children, whos parents eat vegetables, will eat healthy! Even if your child is picky and “refuses to eat anything but french fries” he or she will eventually get hungry and give in. There’s almost no nutritional value in french fries. So, you need not worry about what they are missing out on by not eating their french fries. If you don’t have healthy foods in your house, your children will make healthy choices too.

It is harder to make healthy choices when unhealthy choices are in your house though. I still don’t feel good after last night’s french fries.

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Hello, Readers! I’ve been MIA for some time now, and with a pretty good excuse — Greg and I (but mostly *I*) are pregnant! This is a murky ultrasound of Dax at only 8 weeks and some change, but I am now at 14 weeks, and the little guy or gal has shed his or her tail and become quite a bit more human in the past several weeks.

Dax, through no fault of his or her own, made me quite ill through the first trimester and I am only just coming out of that now. The consequence of the nausea, headaches, fatigue, and picky taste buds (picky is actually an understatement) was that I fell off the vegan wagon entirely and not even in a casual way. My body was saying NO WAY to green foods and whole grains and even beans, so the lack of nutrients unfortunately started to signal the need for all those old foods in my life, cheese and meat, to fill the gap in my diet.

I’m writing here today to simply say that it was very hard to be in this state, and Greg struggled with it too as we momentarily lost our bond in eating. I felt sick to begin with and the food that I was eating was not helping me feel better. I felt strange, too, having to eat against the principles that I had developed over the course of being a nutritional vegan.

It’s a little disconcerting to be in that state and to open a book or a website that tells pregnant women to eat their greens and their beans to keep healthy. Even my favorite nutritionist, Dr. Fuhrman, doesn’t really offer a lot of good advice for this dilemma, although I will let you queasy readers know that a homemade fruit smoothie (Fuhrman has a bunch of recipes for these in his books) with some spinach added in is a fantastic way to trick your body into consuming some greens, because you can’t taste the spinach and you can’t smell it either. Also, while I once sort of scoffed at the idea of a multi-vitamin, I realized that I needed to be consuming all those vitamins and nutrients that had once been included in my daily meals. Going on my sister’s advice, I chose this prenatal vitamin. (After I attempted to take the same brand’s Prenatal One Multivitamin, I quickly realized that I could not swallow a horse pill everyday due to a pretty bad gag reflex, so I switched to the Petite version.)

I have a lot to say about pregnancy and diet, and a lot more time to put in being pregnant, so now that I feel better I will be updating about topics related to this more often. I’ve been able to put aside most of the cheese and meat and start to get back to a plant-based diet, but I will not forget this time in my pregnancy, and I really have to imagine that a lot of you out there are experiencing the same thing. Although everyone I talk to in person seems to have had a really easy, no quease pregnancy, studies say that nearly 75% of women get nausea in the first trimester — so from the perspective of this blog, I’m going to update with some things that you can have around the house to make you eat well and feel a little better!

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The Marine Daily 16 is a set of calisthenics exercises that Marines “lovingly” refer to as PT (emphasis on the P) which is short for physical training. I’m writing a series of posts about this training program in this series I’ll walk you through the Daily 16 describing each exercise sharing my personal preferences and experience as well as putting together the entire program. My brother is a Marine stationed in Afghanistan, but before shipping out he got to come home and teach me exercise the Marine Corps way. I’m not writing about politics because this blog is about food and exercise. I’m proud of my brother, and hope they can all come home soon.

Home from boot, my brother showed me a series of exercises called the Daily 16. It is a series of warm ups, stretches, core calisthenics, and cool down exercises. The program used to be called the daily 7, but the new marine daily 16 program incorporates exercises for every major muscle in your body. You don’t need any equipment to do any exercises, and they are a safe, effective full body work out.

When you begin you’ll start just by doing the exercises, but as you get more comfortable with the exercises, the marines do what’s called a double. They mix running or hiking in with the exercises. So you go through the warm up exercises, then go for a short slow run. Then you stop, perform an exercise, and then go back to jogging. After a short jog, you stop and do another exercise. The exercises are your breaks from running, and running is your break from exercise. You end the workout with a jog and your cool down exercises and stretches. I’ll walk through each of the exercises in the series, and provide links to the very little information that’s available on the Internet about this exercise program. While the program was designed to turn boys into physically fit soldiers, the program works remarkably well for people of all ages and fitness levels. It’s fun and entertaining.

The marine corps provides a rough PDF file explaining each of the exercises: Marines Daily 16. The next post will follow shortly.

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Jana DrJoel is a new blog that chronicles Jana’s journey through Dr. Fuhrman’s eat for health book. She’s making all the recipes and posting pictures of each one. This blog makes me hungry. This is a website that Dr. Joel should have made. I love his recipes, but it’s so much easier to eat them when I’m reminded of them in photographs. While, you’ll need a copy of eat for health to follow along with the recipes, Eat for Health is a book that I recommend everyone read anyway. The blog is an inspiration, and I’m going to be enjoying a couple of the recipes myself this week. You should too! Follow Jana in her new blog and subscribe to her updates.

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