By Heather Nicholds
One of the most common questions I get through this site is, “what do you eat in a typical day?” A vegetarian or vegan diet plan can seem intimidating at first glance.
I always feel like the answer is simple, but then I remember how far I’ve come in terms of a healthy eating plan in the last few years. Things that seem second-nature to me now were brand new a few years ago.
A typical day of food for me would be like this:
Breakfast – rolled oats, soaked overnight with ground flax and another nut or seed. In the summer, I use less oats and add lots of fruit since I don’t seem to have issues with that food combination.
In the winter, I might add a bit of maple syrup and some frozen berries. I try to use different grains too, cooked with lots of water. Sometimes I have just fruit for breakfast, and maybe baked fruit in the winter.
Mid-morning snack – I might have something small mid-morning – a piece of fruit with some nuts or seeds, or a rice cake with peanut butter – but not always. Phil usually has a snack – he needs more food than I do. 😉
{jumi [files/includes/youtube.php] [taCOEfodOns]}
Lunch – Phil and I have green smoothies – an apple, a banana, lots of sprouts or parsley, spirulina powder, hemp protein powder (for Canadians, Phil and I buy from The Good Seed) and whatever other interesting supplement we might have. Phil’s favorite smoothie addition is effective microorganisms (EM) that he brews for probiotics.
I often open up our capsules of multivitamins and pour them into the smoothie so that we have one less capsule sitting in our stomachs, and I like to think that giving the probiotic a couple of minutes to work on it might make some of them more available to my body.
We leave half an hour to an hour for the smoothie to digest, then have a mainly vegetable lunch, with perhaps a grain or bean. In the winter, I might have a salad, soup or steamed veggies, depending on how cold I am. In the summer I almost always have salads. I love to have homemade hummus or a bean salad at lunch, since this is usually my hungriest time of day. We’ll make this into lettuce wraps, put it on rice cakes and sometimes have a sprouted grain wrap.
Afternoon snack – I often have a snack in the afternoon so that I’m not ravenous by dinner time. Like I said, afternoons are my hungry time of day. I like to have a bit of fruit with some sunflower seeds or vegetable sticks with bean dip, or something similar.
Dinner – I usually make grains or a starchy vegetable (potato, sweet potato, squash, etc…) and lots of veggies. In the summer I do more raw, in the winter more cooked (steamed, baked, sauteed, etc). For me, I try to avoid too much fat in dinner because I digest fat slowly and I have some crazy dreams if my dinner is still making its way through during the night.
So I began by talking about how so many of the health choices I make are second nature to me know, and how it’s easy for me to forget that other people don’t know them yet.
I’m curious – what’s the most valuable bit of information you’ve learned about health in the last year? Do you ever forget that other people don’t know it?
