The Smoothie Vegetarians

When I was in my twenties I wanted to lose weight. I became a Susan Powter fan – she was the low fat guru back in the nineties. Her whole premise was eating very low fat – no exceptions. It worked. I lost about forty pounds and felt great. I never “cheated”. It became somewhat of an obsession. No cake, no butter, no oil, no nuts – none of that. I missed it, but to me it was “bad”. I especially missed eating nuts. I love them. I continued this way for several years. I wasn't always eating healthy though. Lots of unhealthy things are low or no fat – sugar and alcohol being two big ones – and I consumed quite a bit of both pretty regularly. Ways of eating go in and out of fashion. Currently Keto is the big one. I tried this awhile back – I like to try different eating styles and see how they make me feel. For me, it's not sustainable, and it's particularly difficult as a vegan. I've also tried meal shakes, low glycemic index, plain old calorie counting and a fe...

For quite a few years now I've been making my own face cream. It's nice. It's easy to make, only four ingredients and I've been happy with it until recently. I'm getting older and it's starting to show. So I went on the hunt for a vegan, cruelty free face cream – I wanted something with retinol to help with the getting older thing. It took awhile, but I found one! It's a great product by a Canadian company called Maritime Naturals. Picked it up on Amazon and it was quite inexpensive. Now I can age with grace! It gives me great satisfaction to find a product that is wonderful and is in alignment with my beliefs. It's a constant battle though – looking for cleaning products, personal hygiene products, even things like vitamins and supplements. It involves scrutinizing labels and then googling the company, googling the ingredients, looking at who the parent company is – it's exhausting. I've gotten a lot better at it as time goes on, bu...

A few weeks ago my daughter had a friend in town. He'd never been here so I made sure that we planned a few day trips around the area so he could see the sights. He'd never been to the zoo and seemed like he really wanted to go, so off we went. I had mixed feelings about this. As a vegan, zoos are a BAD THING. They're right up there with honey, horseback riding, backyard chickens, and the never ending discussion about what to feed your pets. I wanted the kid to have a good time and I know that this particular zoo is known for doing its best to have reasonable habitats for the animals etc. I hadn't been for probably fifteen years so I decided what the heck – we'll do the zoo. I still have mixed feelings. I've come to the conclusion that it seems to some degree to be an issue of what kind of animal is being housed. I'm not talking about how intelligent they are, more about the fact that some animals require a large territory to roam and don...

In the past year or so I've become more aware of the minimalist movement and how I can actually apply that to my life. I've always been pretty disorganized, and I can also be a bit of an impulse shopper. I'll buy something because it's pretty, or I think it's cool (usually online) and then find that it's really not that great and it ends up in a junk drawer or just taking up space on my counter. I moved recently, and in the process got rid of literally truckloads of household items. It was horrifying and rather embarrassing. I really had no idea I had so much useless stuff; clothes, artwork from when my kids were little (ALL their artwork), bits and pieces of lumber, old electronics, papers and documents I don't need anymore etc. It was endless. When it was put together for disposal, my entire garage floor was a huge pile of junk. The thing is, having so much stuff is stressful. It really is. You know it's there – you look at it and then wal...

I have a long running interest in health and nutrition. I work in a hospital and have done for a number of years; I've often been shocked, and even appalled at the food that patients are fed. When my daughter was a patient, one of her doctors once marched down to the kitchen and gave them heck, and made them prepare a good “kid” meal for her. I've been taking nutrition courses since last August. I know a lot about vitamins, minerals, carbs, proteins, fat. I know a lot about the various effects certain toxins, including alcohol and cigarettes have on the body. I read a lot of articles about food. I google a lot of stuff about food. I collect recipe books. I rarely use my recipe books. I frequently come home from work and eat a bowl of cereal, or my all time favourite – a bowl of chips and salsa. I'll just pick at food. I'm tired, I've worked all day, I've prepared food for my family and it really seems like just too much effort to make myself some...

I will be going to the city where I grew up in a month or two for a few days. When I left, I wasn't a vegan – I was a lapsing vegetarian. I'll be seeing a couple friends – they may not even know; one of them isn't on Facebook (gasp!). So I've been thinking a lot about where I'll eat, how I'll eat, what I'll tell people if I eat at their homes. Do I take food with me? Am I going to be a royal pain to everyone? Most likely! But I'll take the ribbing from my brothers and I'll explain things to my friends. One of my brothers is an avid hunter, and has been for a number of years. He only hunts what his family needs, he butchers and wraps it himself. Years ago, when I lived there, he used to give me venison from time to time and I'd cook it in a stew for my family. It was good and I enjoyed it. I wouldn't eat it now, but it was good meat and even then I felt better knowing that it hadn't been factory farmed, that up until t...

I have a seventeen year old daughter. At the age of eleven she was diagnosed with celiac disease, and a long, slow, uphill battle began. The learning curve was huge, overwhelming, and at times depressing as hell. Telling a child she can no longer have birthday cake at a party, she can't eat pizza, she has to take her own food everywhere she goes. Sleepovers become a major production. Schools trips become something that can never happen. There's a bit of a grieving process, and grieve we did – and the battle continues. Celiac disease is much more serious than most people think. People with celiac disease have a much higher rate of bowel cancer. They suffer from infertility, they have a higher rate of mental illness (gut chemistry and the brain are closely related). My daughter suffers from severe bone loss; she has osteoporosis equivalent to a woman in her seventies. Her gut doesn't absorb nutrients properly. She has chronic low iron, and has to take a handfu...

I spent a few days on holidays with my son last week. He's twenty-one and everything is very black and white for him. There's no in between. We often get into debates about the ways of the world. I try to offer a broader (older) perspective, usually with little or no success. But I keep trying! We got to talking about people who participate in protests; not just about veganism, but about anything. He has no patience for those people or the events they go to. He thinks they're radicals, they're being stupid, etc. I can remember thinking similarly when I was his age. I thought I had the whole world figured out. A few decades can change an awful lot, including the way we think about things that go on in this mixed up world of ours. I was watching footage today of a protest in Australia. A group of fifty or sixty vegans broke into a piggery and locked themselves onto the cages so the pigs couldn't be accessed. The footage was horrifying. I ...

It's been a good vegan week. I was in Vegas for a few days and this year I found a huge variety of kombucha available on the Strip (not necessarily a vegan thing I know, but I love the stuff and couldn't find any last year). Progress! I went on a bus tour to the Grand Canyon, and a buffet lunch was included in the ticket. This lunch was in Williams, Arizona and I had already resigned myself to the fact that I'd spend the day starving. Instead, there was a good selection of food for me. I happily stuffed myself and wasn't hungry again till well into the evening. My hotel in Vegas had a Ben and Jerry's with multiple dairy free selections. I think I may have eaten my body weight in ice cream! A “regular” restaurant in my city introduced a full vegan menu alongside their regular one today. We went there for dinner tonight and the meal was amazing! So often I can only choose one thing off a menu – to have choices was a luxury I rarely find. ...

I just finished an audio book called Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. It's an amazing book. He talks about the aging process and how nobody is really prepared for it, nor are they willing to have the important discussions about it, particularly in Western cultures. He also discusses how doctors (he is one) often give patients unreal expectations when they have a terminal illness, and how those patients often spend their last months fighting a battle that they can never win, when they should be spending their final days surrounded by the people they love, preferably at home. The book discusses hospice care, assisted living, complex care facilities and how much these things have veered away from their original course. We treat our elderly like children. We want them to be safe, so we do the equivalent of baby proofing; we take away their right to choose. It got me to thinking about a lot of things. I've worked in healthcare, both hospital and complex care for a number ...

  More antics at the office. |Up until recently I've had a job that kept me very physically active. I walked all day long at work, often to the point of exhaustion. Now, due to some health issues, I have an office job (as I've mentioned almost weekly!). With a sedentary position comes a host of issues; sitting all day is a new thing for me and I'm not sure that I like it. I miss flitting around, always being on the go. I work in a hospital and I enjoyed seeing the various people I know and like on the different floors as I went about my day. Several of the women I work with are trying to lose weight, which is frustrating for them because they, too, are sitting for most of the day. I've only been there for about two and a half months, but I've already heard several of them cycle through their various diets. Currently on the table is the keto diet. Now, I have to admit I've tried this – I was a vegetarian a the time, and I don't need to lose we...

Today at work I felt alone in a room full of people. One of my coworkers is having a birthday on Monday. In this particular office, traditionally the birthday person brings in a cake for everyone. This afternoon we were all goofing off waiting for four o'clock and they start asking the birthday girl what kind of cake she's going to bring. Lots of happy female chatter going on around me, but I'm not chiming in. I felt awkward. I felt like I wasn't part of the group. And I wasn't. At one point the birthday person turned to me and said something like “oh, I'm sorry – you won't be able to have any”. I replied that I was just fine with that, not to worry, etc. And I am fine with that, I really am, but the fact remains that I was not part of the conversation, and therefore not really part of the merriment. It's a sacrifice on many levels – being vegan is not particularly vogue in most circles. I am often made fun of, ridiculed, looked at strang...

I'm not a fan of New Year's Resolutions – I think they rather set one up for failure. However, this past couple of years have been chock full of new things for me; being off work, a major career shift, going sober, going vegan, really embracing yoga and meditation, writing these articles, taking online nutrition courses. It's funny, I complain about being busy and I complain about all the learning I'm doing and how tired I am; but really it's been fabulous and so mind opening, and eye opening and life opening. Many of us get into our routine, our way of doing things, and it's comfortable – boring but comfortable. Often the older we get the more we shy from major changes, from taking a leap and embracing something new. Fear gets hold of people and it can be such a difficult thing to conquer. It's easier to take a step back into the familiar, into the routine, into the rut and just continue along on the journey of life. Rather than mak...

Last Sunday was my one year anniversary of being sober. Not long after I chose veganism I also chose to quit alcohol completely. I'd always been a regular drinker, and at times would drink way too much. After being ill and having some other very stressful events in my life, I found I was drinking daily, and not always stopping at the two glasses of wine I would tell myself I'd have. It's a slippery slope, and I was sliding down it quickly. I felt mildly unwell most days; headache, dehydrated etc., and then by five or six o'clock in the evening I'd have a glass of wine and start the whole process all over again. It took me a few stops and starts, but I finally got the momentum going and here I am one year later. The differences were subtle, but I noticed them almost immediately – that little bit of fat around my waist melted away (well mostly anyway!), within a week I was sleeping like I hadn't for many years – all night long, good, solid ...

I've been vegan for over a year now and there has most definitely been a learning curve, but at this point I'm pretty darned good at it. I know which ingredients to look for on packaged foods (you'd be surprised at the sneaky names they give animal products), and I know which brands I like and don't like. So on the home front I have it pretty much mastered. I don't really think about it anymore, it's just the way it is, and it's been long enough now that it's just who I am. What I do find to be a challenge, however, is eating out. I've read a few distressing articles lately about cooks and servers who say something is vegan when they know that it isn't. This is disturbing on a number of levels. Firstly, as the mother of a teenager with celiac disease, I'm not thrilled with any restaurant who is serving me something without telling me exactly what's in it and how it was prepared when I ask. Eating out is an expense and I...