PLANT BASED DIET

Leslie Beck is a Toronto based dietician who has written a dozen books on nutrition and appears on television, radio and has a weekly column in the Globe and Mail.  I have been reading her nutrition columns in the Globe and Mail for quite some time.  I find her logic and rationale for explaining nutritional information and providing recommendations easy to follow and simply makes sense.

Past columns of mine have provided information on Mark Bitten and Michael Pollen who have both advocated a plan based diet.  I have also followed Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Oz and Mark Sisson among the diet gurus.  All of these experts have advocated for increasing the consumption of vegetables and fruit in one's diet.  

I have always eaten vegetables and fruit and have flirted with following a vegetarian or vegan diet.  I also firmly believe that a diet based on plants has a number of positive effects in terms of optimizing your health, preventing heart disease, reducing blood cholesterol levels and weight loss.  In 2012, Leslie Beck wrote a column that promoted a plant based diet and she said that being vegan is more than just rice and beans.  I liked this article and bookmarked it last year for further reviewing.

The recently published book on a plant based power diet provides 10 easy steps and tips for transitioning your current diet to one consuming more plants.  It also includes recipes and I will be testing a number of them and blogging them.

One chapter in Leslie Beck's book highlights becoming more familiar with whole foods and plant-based eating.  She stated in one of the chapter's paragraphs about changing your mindset and focusing on the foods you can eat.  When we change our diet, we usually focus on the foods we can't eat.  I know I think about the foods I am eliminating or giving up and build my food choices on what I should avoid.  Her statement about focusing on what I can eat and NOT think about what I can't eat made me have a paradigm shift.  I have started to focus my meal planning about foods I can eat.  I also have started to shift my focus to increasing my vegetable consumption and bringing more vegetable variety into my cooking.   I also realized that I have to to jazz up the salads I make and use vegetables that I hadn't considered before.

I recommend this book if you are wanting to make a shift in your diet and increase your consumption of  plant-based foods.