The Backsliding or Mostly Vegan Diet Cure
It’s been a couple of years since the Frugal Pig urged readers to consider celebrating Meatless Monday. While we haven’t talked about it much, a lot of us here have slowly been switching over to a vegan or semi-vegan diet. Some people call this being a flexitarian, which sounds better than semi-vegan or backsliding.
It’s fair to say that many of us got started by trying out vegan menus for one meal or for all of the meals and snacks for one day. The concept of Meatless Monday or Tofu Tuesday helped us sample a vegan diet without the pressure of committing for the rest of our lives. Anyway, we’re so excited about the positive changes we’ve experienced, that we decided to include an entire frugal vegan section right here.
The Partly Vegan Diet Plan
The New York Times agreed that a partly vegan diet is probably the best solution for the most people. The author of that article calls himself a “vegan before six” and even wrote a book about it. What works for him is to only eat plant food for meals and snacks before supper and then to allow himself animal products afterwards.
Hey, it works for him and might work for you. While full-time vegans might hope that everybody would join them, that’s probably not going to happen. It’s more likely that people will try being vegan if they know they can reserve the option to not be vegan sometimes.
One Vegan Day Led to Many More Vegan Days!
Hey, we tried it and liked it, so then living without consuming animal products started to become a more pervasive habit that we began to follow every day. Since this is a frugal website, we even started enjoying our dollar store vegan finds, and of course, that led to further research and an article.
Anyway, many of us found that we could enjoy (healthy) carbs again, lose or maintain our weight, and eat a lot of variety. I mean, that low carb stuff gets old fast, even though we’ve tried that too. You don’t have to believe us. You can read this report from Daily about how vegans get to eat carbs and still lose weight!
To be fair, most of here are backsliders. But even when we backslide, we still tend to focus upon getting most of our nutrition from plants and just a bit from animal products. It’s not always easy to avoid animal products when we dine in a restaurant or at another person’s house. Look, if you can’t stand the thought of making vegan turkey and stuffing, go for the traditional meal and forget about it.
You do what you want to do; however, we’ve found that a little bit of backsliding and a mostly vegan diet suits us pretty well, improves our diet, and helps avoid the problem of consuming too much meat and dairy.
Vegans Feed Their Guts
Here’s the deal. Your gut contains a complex and large ecosystem of gut bacteria and connections to your brain. See, we came to figure out that carbs don’t make you fat, but your brain does. If you starve your gut, it will start sending alarms to your brain. The thing is you might interpret those calls for more fiber and other probiotics as cravings to raid your fridge for the worst possible kinds of food.
Instead, you can keep your gut happy, healthy, and quiet by simply feeding it the kinds of food it needs. The alarms go quiet, and you find yourself with more energy, few cravings, and so on. If you just try it for a day or two, you might find that you feel better, have more energy, and can save money by focusing on such plant-based protein sources as legumes, seeds, and whole grains.Even if you only eat vegan for one or two days a week, you’ll probably do your diet a favor.
So When Do You Start Your Vegan Adventure Day?
Spend the extra dollar or two on sprouted grain bread and see how you feel. Being frugal doesn’t mean you should be cheap; it means you should spend your money on getting value. Go head and smear on some peanut butter, a slice of banana, vegan margarine, and even a few chia seeds. You probably will feel like a kid again, and that’s the reward.
Here at the Frugal Pig, we don’t like to get fanatical about anything, so we’d just prefer to ease into these new eating habits and not try to convince anybody to make a total 180-switch for something that won’t work for them.Let us know what you think.
Is it OK to be a backsliding or semi-vegan?