Mira Weiner’s Top Tips for a Vegan Lifestyle
Mira Weiner, food consultant and plant based advocate www.miraweiner.com is passionate about conscious living, plant based nourishment and holistic healing. She shares her top tips for a vegan lifestyle.
Concept, words, recipes and styling by Mira Weiner.
The plant-based movement has become an unstoppable trend globally as well as in South Africa during the last few years.
Choosing to incorporate more plants into your diet and to live a life of kindness and compassion has incredible benefits for your health, for animals and for the life of the planet. Whatever your personal reason is for going plant-based, find your why.
Plant-based living is for everyone regardless of socio-economic status or background and it is possible to live simply and affordably by focusing on natural whole foods.
Here are Mira’s top tips for Veganuary
- WHY: Find your why? Your personal reason for doing this. It will help to keep you motivated and so that you can enjoy this new process too. There are incredible benefits to being vegan – environmental, animal cruelty and for your health. Watch documentaries like Forks over Knives, Game Changers, What the Health, Earthlings and Cowspiracy. It will help you find your why.
- SIMPLIFY: Don’t over complicate things. Start where you are with what you have. Learn to read labels – this is so important and will get better with time I promise! This is a big one as you won’t believe where all sorts of things are hidden like milk powders, eggs, gelatine, etc. Check out what your local grocery store stocks as vegan products and build from there.
The easiest way to start with this is to simplify your meals and focus on plant based and whole food products that don’t have long ingredient lists (i.e. whole grains, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables). You will also start to learn that many products are accidentally vegan too!
- SUPPORT: You can support local restaurants and food businesses that have vegan menu items or even entire vegan menus to choose from. This way you can still eat out and know that what you’re getting is vegan friendly without having to read the labels all the time.
- NUTRITION: Vegan nutrition – this is so important if you are just starting out and making a drastic change to your diet. Remember, all bodies are different and require different nutrients. There is no one size fits all here. Learn to get to know your body and listen to what it needs. There are different approaches to this, you can learn to “veganize” your current diet by simply swapping out animal based products for vegan ones (i.e. vegan dairy for animal based dairy or vegan fake meats for animal based meats). However, you won’t necessarily get all your important nutrients this way and some vegan replacements are expensive.
Personally, I find the best way to eat in the beginning is with simple foods that are economical and not difficult to find or expensive to purchase. I like to look at my plate and divide it into sections – 1/2 veggies, 1/4 whole grains or starches and 1/4 protein (beans, legumes, organic soy, etc). Then you can add healthy fats in the form of a marinade, dressing or sauce. I also like to treat myself to vegan treats so I don’t feel deprived. If you want this way of eating to stick – it needs to be sustainable.
- SUPPLEMENT: Don’t worry so much about your protein intake, it’s important but you don’t obsess about it. There is protein in plants! But do take a B12 supplement – this is so vital for everyone regardless of dietary choices. Our soils are simply not like they were before and sadly our food production and supply has so changed in recent years.
- CONNECT: Social media is a powerful tool to connect into an online community. There are some amazing content creators and influencers who post weekly vegan recipes and share videos and tips on easy, quick and healthy meals. Having an online space to share, vent, create, ask questions and have support is so important!
Most importantly, have fun.