As any freshly graduated high school girl knows, the months before you leave for college consist almost entirely of dorm shopping. Anything from picture frames to bedspreads to storage bins. During my freshman year of college, I was lucky enough to secure an on-campus apartment, which meant the shopping process doubled. Now I needed living room furniture and kitchenware. As excited as I was about the apartment, I was equally worried about the financial implications of having a home, meaning I spent a lot of time at the thrift shop.Â
As I was searching for some kitchen decorations a few weeks before move-in, I stumbled upon a cookbook with two middle-aged hippie-looking dads on the cover. The blue book was titled The World of the Happy Pear by Stephen and David Flynn. A sticker on the cover labelled the book as half off, meaning it cost a whopping $2. Without thinking twice, I bought the book along with some ceramic plates and put them into one of the moving boxes as soon as I got home.
Upon arriving at college, I skimmed the pages and realized the book consisted solely of vegan recipes, which I am not. My longest streak of plant-based dieting lasted a whole two weeks in high school, but I only started because my father bet me that I wouldn’t last a month. He was right.
According to UT MD Anderson, a plant-based diet can support immunity, reduce inflammation, and reduce the risk of some common diseases. A Netflix documentary, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, found similar results. They showed that many of the places where people live the longest, sometimes called Blue Zones, eat around 95% plant-based whole foods.Â
Growing up, I remember my mom and older sister partaking in popular fad diets. I can remember the few months that my mother went Keto like it was yesterday. It’s engraved in my brain because instead of cake for her birthday, we had some horrible almond flour loaf, and I can still taste it in the back of my throat some nights.
Watching the two women that I admired most in this world try everything under the sun to change themselves obviously took a mental toll. I grew up thinking that food was just a way to change your body, not something to enjoy or even take pride in. This mindset really affected me in middle school, when I stopped valuing food at all. I would go a day or two without eating, and then consume everything I could get my hands on. One day, it got so bad that when my parents and I were out to eat at a diner, I started sobbing because they had the calories listed on the menu (3 years later, I got a job as a hostess at that same diner, so quite a full circle moment). It took me a long time to reframe my mindset: to eat intuitively and stop viewing health as a “diet”. However, plant-based eating has been around much longer than any fad diet, and it does have proven health benefits for many people.Â
Nowadays, it seems that there are two standout ways of organized eating. Plant-based vegan or vegetarian diets, ultra-high protein diets, and our grocery stores have grown to reflect that. Every aisle is either almond milk, dairy substitutes, and Impossible Burgers or protein smoothies, protein pancakes, protein coffee, even protein Doritos (saw those the other day and gagged). It’s hard to figure out the difference between which habits are actually healthy and what’s being fed to us by the conglomerate that owns Ozempic. The only way to know for sure that you are getting the proper nutrition you need is to speak with your doctor and listen to your body. Everyone is different, which means “healthy” can look different for everyone.Â