Category Archives for Discussion
Plant-Based Low Fat Meal Examples – Yes They’re Filling and Tasty!
I run through a variety of plant-based meals that I’m making these days. Great for guys, people trying to get off of meat and dairy, or raw til 4 types.
Kicking The Caffeine Habit – Plant-Based Diet
My new Dandy Blend drink.
I started drinking coffee in university during my engineering days. I’m sure I needed the energy boost. But I really remember drinking coffee at work when I felt tired or needed to get away from the desk for a few minutes. I also found it to temporarily suppress my appetite. I always seem to be fighting hunger so it would help although I would add cream and sugar so I probably wasn’t doing myself any favours.
For the past few years I’ve been working from home and generally drinking 2 cups of coffee in the morning. I don’t do it for energy but it’s become a daily ritual over the past 25 years. In Canada it’s often cold but in the morning it’s nice to have a nice warm roasted drink of coffee.
There are some negative aspects to coffee such as more frequent urination, adrenal stimulation, acidity, and laxative effects, but also many benefits as mentioned by Dr. Greger in various videos – although he does recommend green tea instead. The fact that stopping a food has all these side effects might be a good indication that it’s not the best thing to drink! I also noticed that I don’t really like coffee on it’s own without adding non-dairy milk and sugar as it has a bitter flavour.
I’ll be honest, the idea of giving up coffee altogether was something I was very resistant to. I would focus on Dr. Greger’s videos as a way to justify it. But since I tend to trust doctors like Dr. McDougall and Dr. Esselstyn I decided to give it a try.
Because there can be side effects like headaches I decided to phase out the caffeine gradually. I use 6 small scoops of coffee when I brew it, so I start swapping in decaf for caffeinated coffee, I scoop at a time. I went from 5 caffeine and 1 decaf scoops for 2-3 days to eventually 2 caffeine and 4 decaf scoops. Each scoop reduction was a few days so a few days at 5, then 4, etc.
There were definitely some headaches – in the back of the head, tension type headaches along with some eye strain. My wife Bonnie also had issues so we took some Tylenol – we still have to function during the day, especially her studying Accounting at the moment.
When I got down to 2 scoops caffeinated to 4 scoops decaf I received my order of Dandy Blend from Amazon which I had heard good things about. Dandy Blend is a combination of ingredients such as roasted chicory, beets, barley, rye and dandelion roots. They say you don’t have any side effects but I can’t be sure as I had already scaled down to some extent.
Dandy Blend is very rich and has a roasted flavour like coffee. I just heated up a cup of water and added about 1.5 tsp of Dandy Blend. I also added some sweetened soy milk. Feel feel to vary things, different nut milks or none at all, add cinnamon or other spices, and adjust the amount of Dandy Blend to your strength preferences.
My recommendation would be to scale down the caffeine as I did but also drink a cup of Dandy Blend which they say helps with the withdrawal symptoms.
Fast Food That’s Healthy for Busy People – Plant-Based Diet
I talk about the benefits of frozen foods and canned foods and other things. I also mention Jeff Novick’s Fast Food DVD series.
Plant-Based Diet – Not Losing Weight? – Troubleshooting Tips
I talk about how to troubleshoot your meals and habits to see where the problems might lie. Calorie density is key! And check out The Starch Solution.
Sign Up To Get the Free Potato Strong Quick Start Guide & Newsletter
I created a quick start guide so you can get started eating healthy and feeling better. No fluff here, just 3 easy meals to get you started plus some tips and tricks. I’ll also be sending a newsletter from time to time with my best health and wealth loss advice I’ve discovered in case you missed them on my social media sites.
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Vegan Problems No Good Fruit What can I Eat?
Tony Robson from Thriving Vegan asks me some questions about starches in this YouTube video for people that can’t find quality fruit or are short of funds.
Plant-Based Diet – Organic Blue Corn Tortillas
I order from http://www.latortilleria.ca They ship to many countries.
Calorie Density
One of the core concepts that I like to talk about when losing fat or maintaining a lean, healthy physique is the concept of calorie density. It vastly simplifies things as the complexities of trying to figure out what you should be eating.
Each food item has a certain amount of calories per pound. See diagram below, taken from Doug Lisle’s talk on The Pleasure Trap.
If you eat food at the left side of the graph you get to eat a larger volume of tasty food than you do if you eat foods on the right side of the graph. Volume, or stomach stretching is an important component of feeling satiated. See diagram below, also taken from Doug Lisle’s talk on The Pleasure Trap. Someone noted that this photo may have originated from the book Eat to Live by Dr. Furhman.
So this would be salads, fruit, vegetables, legumes (beans) and whole grains (rice, quinoa). Things to be careful of, even as a plant-based eater is flour and anything higher – crackers, meat, dairy, nuts, oil.
You can hopefully see from the picture that lower calorie dense foods fill up the stomach more than higher dense foods like oil and fatty foods. So the bottom line is that for a given amount of calories you can eat more lower calorie dense foods or less higher calorie dense foods.
Our bodies have an ability similar to animals (who don’t tend to be obese unless they live with humans) to detect the caloric content of whole foods, but when they are processed and higher in density it becomes more difficult.
We are also set up to seek high calorie foods and can get addicted to salt, sugar and fat. So a lot of the products that we see in the stores have just the right amount of these items to keep us hooked.
I’ve had a lot of success focusing on caloric density and satiety via starches so I recommend you check out The Starch Solution by Dr. McDougall, The Pleasure Trap by Doug Lisle and Calorie Density by Jeff Novick to fully grasp this concept.
Finally, an amazing benefit of this method aside from losing fat and getting healthy is that you don’t have to count calories anymore! This is incredibly freeing and a stress-free way to eat!