Plant-based diets are the talk of the town, but they’re frustratingly vague. Is it a raw diet? A vegan diet? The newest fad or a lasting lifestyle change?
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Beginners Guide to Plant-Based Eating: What You Need to Know
- Why Embrace a Plant-Based Diet?
- Do You Have to be Vegan to be Plant-Based?
- How to Start a Plant-Based Diet
- Plant-Based Diet Macros
- Potential Plant-Based Deficiencies
- A Day of Plant-Based Eating: Recipes for Meals, Snacks & Dessert!
Chances are you've been hearing a lot about how incredible plant-based diets are. But when you boil down to why you should adopt this lifestyle, the reasons start to become a little murky. There are a ton of reasons why a plant-based diet is a great change to make, but the two key reasons are that it benefits both your body and the planet.
When it comes to our planet, the fact is that the meat industry is a major contributor to climate change. The unnecessarily high demand for meat is causing massive surges in greenhouse gas emissions and also harming the environment by cutting down swathes of important rainforests to make room for farming land. By simply reducing your meat consumption (not even cutting it out completely!), you can majorly reduce your carbon footprint and help protect the planet.
Most
of us want to protect the planet, but we also want to protect our
bodies. Adopting a plant-based diet can do wonders for your health, such
as helping you with weight loss by eating fewer processed foods and
more fiber, helping you prevent illnesses by consuming more vitamins and
minerals and less and fats, and overall improving your nutrition by
eating better foods.These are just two of the main reasons to adopt a plant-based diet, but there are a million other reasons that might coincide with your lifestyle, your values, and your outlook on life. If you’re curious about what else might drive a plant-based lifestyle, check out our plant-based ebook.
Do You Have to be Vegan to be Plant-Based?
This is a hugely popular myth, but it is in fact a myth. A plant-based diet doesn’t necessarily mean you’re vegan, or vegetarian. A plant-based diet simply means your diet is based on plants, but not only plants. You can follow a mainly plant-based diet while still occasionally eating meat, and that’s a very balanced and achievable lifestyle for most. You don’t need to cut out animal byproducts completely to still reap the incredible benefits of a plant-based diet.
How to Start a Plant-Based Diet
Like with anything new or daunting, the best way to start a plant-based diet is to simply start. You don’t have to go cold-turkey right off the bat and cut out animal byproducts completely, start by making small changes in your day-to-day. It could be as simple as one plant-based meal out of three a day to start, or cutting out all highly processed snacks and switching to fruits, vegetables and whole grains instead. These easy swaps can help you ease into a plant-based diet without even noticing.
Making these small shifts are a lot easier than completely eliminating meat and dairy at once, and make it a lot more feasible to adopt this lifestyle shift long-term. Small, consistent changes are the key to success, just like when developing any habit or goal, and information is power. Arm yourself with all the information you can by checking out reliable sources like our plant-based ebook.
Plant-Based Diet Macros
You’re probably already very familiar at measuring your macros, and the idea of a plant-based diet probably throws off your macro game in an overwhelming way. But it’s completely doable, and pretty simple once you get the hang of it. You still want to get the same amount of carbohydrates, protein and fats, they’re just coming from food sources that you might not have ever really thought about.
Learn more about macro-measuring for plant-based diets in our Plant-Based Vegan Guide.
Other than where your macros are coming from, nothing else really changes. Your particular body type still needs the same percentages of macros. Carbs are fairly easy to figure out when moving to a plant-based diet, but fats and protein are what trips people up.
While plant and animal protein are very different, you can absolutely maintain your macro intake of fats and protein on a plant-based diet, you just need to get good at understanding what plant-based foods include. For example, beans are an incredible protein source, while nuts are a go-to fat source.
Calculating your protein macros is a little trickier, and a lot of vegan bodybuilders use protein supplements to ensure they’re getting enough protein. But if you’re not bodybuilding, you can probably get enough protein from what you’re eating.
This protein calculator and our plant-based ebook can help you figure out how much protein you should be eating based on your body, goals, and lifestyle.
Potential Plant-Based Deficiencies
While a plant-based diet has so many benefits, it’s not always for every lifestyle and body. Before switching completely, you should understand the potential deficiencies that your body can develop due to a plant-based diet. Understanding these potential risks can help you mitigate them, if you’re determined to go completely plant based.
Some nutrients you’ll miss out on from a completely plant-based diet are omega-3s (mainly found in fatty fish), iron (mostly absorbed from animal products), vitamin B12 (found in meat), iodine (mainly from seafood, dairy, eggs), zinc (highest levels in meat and shellfish), calcium (mainly from milk and dairy), and vitamin D (mostly in fish, dairy, eggs).
For most of these nutrients, you can still manage to get a healthy intake from plant-based foods or supplements, but you have to know what you’re missing and how much you need to consume. Otherwise, you can accidentally become deficient in them and experience a variety of issues from low energy to immune weakness.
Find out more on these potential deficiencies and how to eat to avoid them here. Keep reading...............
