To add to what Greg says in the previous post about feeding children, I wanted to mention that it’s pomegranate season (from now, October, until about January) — and pomegranates are a great way to satiate a kid’s desire for dessert! They take forever to eat, and they aren’t too messy when cut into quarters by an adult and served in a wide bowl. While I have a hard time getting the seeds out without sending juice flying, kids’ nimble little fingers are well-suited for this task, and it’s fun for them.

Chock-full of health benefits, as pretty much every plant is, pomegranates are a good idea for anyone’s dessert — so share a pomegranate with your favorite person tonight after dinner!

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Oatmeal is, of course, a vegan food. But in my informal research, I have concluded that a lot of people take a perfect food like oatmeal and muck it up with animal proteins and fats. As I happened upon oatmeal as an adult, already eating plants more than anything, it never occurred to me to put milk in oatmeal, as a bowl of steel-cut oats is naturally creamy.

Greg has been eating oatmeal since he was a kid (granted, it was probably the instant kind with lots of sugar and he added his own sugar too), so he was more than happy when I mysteriously started to eat it for breakfast every single morning. It started one week, and then it just made so much sense to continue because it was easy to make, filling without being too many calories, and low in fat when made in the vegan way. I eat old-fashioned organic oatmeal or more recently, steel-cut oats from Trader Joe’s. They’re inexpensive, organic, and excellent quality.

Oatmeal is a great way to get a serving or two of whole grains everyday. Getting at least one serving of whole grains reduces the risk of getting cancer. Oatmeal and other whole grains stabilize your blood sugar and reduce the risk of developing diabetes. Due to beta-glucan, oatmeal also assists your immune system and fights against the everyday stuff, like colds and flus.

I realize that most people grow up eating oatmeal loaded up with milk and sugar and butter, but oatmeal is naturally delicious, it just takes some adjustment to realize that. If you’re not a vegan, try eating it without the milk and butter, not worrying about the sugar content at first. If you’re a vegan, give up the sugar and stick to whole foods. I cook my oatmeal with just water, or sometimes a really simple soy milk (the kind with just filtered water and soybeans!), and I add 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed for some omega 3′s and a nice nutty flavor, and some raisins to sweeten it naturally. You can cook the raisins into the oatmeal to make them soft and expanded or add them cold after the oatmeal is cooked.

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Lunch at work is usually filled with all kinds of temptation. Vending machines, cookies and cake in the staff room, fast food nearby, the midday habits that you’ve designed to take the edge off of your stressful morning. It’s so easy to give in and indulge in these offers. While I might be a vegan most of the time, deli sandwiches with refined breads and animal products still beckon me when I’m confronted with them, and while it’s okay to have them once and a great while, or in nutritionally insignificant quantities, I need filling and nutritious foods in my possession so I don’t make unhealthy food a daily habit.

Bringing your lunch to work is a much better option for your health and it can be a lot less work than you imagine it might be. Plus, it’s much less expensive. I always pack a huge lunch from leftovers or fresh foods on hand and the cost of my lunch is a few dollars at most.

Once you have the goal to take your lunch to work, grocery shop with that goal in mind. Don’t look for convenient foods that you can make in the microwave, look for whole foods that can be eaten as they are and be immediately delicious.

When I was buying strawberries this week at $2.50 a pound, I bought two extra pounds and went ahead and brought a whole pound to work with me. Fruit doesn’t require refrigeration and I realized that strawberries are even more delicious warm, as I always eat them right out of the fridge at home. Bringing the whole container allowed me to eat a lot of fruit rather than just a little, and it was already packed for me in its plastic case.

I also like to make more food than I plan to eat for dinner so that bringing lunch the next day is convenient. I make two cups of brown rice for dinner instead of one, or the entire package of whole wheat pasta, because it’s inexpensive to replace and the leftovers last for a long time in the fridge. I can mix the brown rice or whole wheat pasta with hummus or spaghetti sauce and green vegetables the next day and have a hot nutritious meal from work’s microwave. If you don’t have access to a microwave, whole wheat noodles and rice can taste pretty good cold too with the right combination. Maybe a peanut sauce or with an olive oil and balsamic vinegar salad.

Beans are also a really easy way to fill up at lunch. Grab a can of no-sodium beans at Whole Foods from 365 (really inexpensive!) or soak and cook your own at home in the evening (even more inexpensive, of course). Make weird combinations from whatever’s on hand in your kitchen. The other day I found some cashews at work and some peanut butter in the fridge. I threw my beans in a bowl, sprinkled in some cashews, dolloped in some peanut butter, heated it up in the microwave and had a really awesome lunch!

The best part about not eating dairy and meat products is that going a few to several hours without refrigeration is not a big deal at all – so take advantage of it and take your whole foods with you wherever you go!

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Jennifer McCann over at Vegan Lunch Box is totally on the same page and started a blog with nothing but photos of eating well and living well for daily inspiration submitted by her readers. The blog was started as a reaction to another blog called thisiswhyyourefat.com, a site filled with, um, well, pretty gnarly foodstuff, and so Jennifer’s blog is called This Is Why You’re Thin. Read her introductory post and submit some of your own photos!

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Maybe you find yourself in a situation where you’re gradually changing your diet. Maybe you find the idea of completely overhauling your diet to be overwhelming or cutting out dairy to be too much. Let’s look at some other ways that you can start to improve your diet that will get you ready for bigger changes.

1. Read about food:

Read far and wide about the nutritious effects of eating a plant-based diet. Read anything about food. Cross-stitch information about food and see who agrees and who disagrees and what the evidence is, then make your own decisions about what you think is the right way to eat. Just reading and thinking about nutrition in food is a big step for starting a better diet. It makes it more difficult to eat the foods that you know have no nutritional value on a regular basis.

Our favorite books on food so far are: The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber, Healthy at 100 by John Robbins, Eat For Health by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and Disease-Proof Your Child by Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

I also like to read while I’m eating, so sometimes I will search for the foods that I’m eating to reinforce how I feel about them. If I’ve just added some ground flax seed to my morning oatmeal, I might check out the health benefits of flax on whfoods.com or in wikipedia. It helps me feel positive about the food I’m eating, and believe it or not, makes it taste better.

2. Stop buying the foods that you don’t want to eat:

This sounds hard, and it is. And it’s going to be exponentially harder if you live with people who will resist your changes or ignore them and buy their own food. But if you just don’t buy foods that are bad for you, then it will be much more difficult for you to eat them. If you’ve got a stockpile of something in a cabinet somewhere, you’re going to dig into it in your weak moments, and weak moments can happen everyday.

Try phasing junk food out one item or two items at a time. It might be hard to even know at first what should stay and what should go, so read those books and change at your own pace. Once you get used to not eating certain foods at home, you desire them much less. Your preferences and cravings start to change. Which leads me to #3.

3. Buy more fruit & vegetables, splurge in the produce aisles:

Yesterday I saw a Peapod truck advertising that ordering groceries online would reduce the number of impulse buys that one makes at the grocery. But when you’re shopping in the produce aisles, impulse buys should be encouraged. In-season produce is less expensive than other produce and it looks fantastic and appetizing. Even out-of-season stuff that’s shipped in from the other hemisphere is usually inexpensive and it’s full of nutrition, even if it’s not organic. Don’t refrain from buying fruit and veggies because they aren’t organic – the food you buy in boxes and bags in the other aisles or the meat or dairy that you might buy isn’t going to be organic either, nor is it going to be so nutritious as fruit and vegetables.

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