The Transition: No one likes a righteous vegan

[Guest guest]

Posted: February 12, 2009, 2:20 PM by Brad Frenette nutrition, The Transition, Liz Taylor

Liz Taylor has recently resolved to eat real food. She has teamed up with The Appetizer's resident nutritionist Meghan Telpner to go through an eight week cleanse followed by a diet defined by whole, organic foods. She'll be posting here fortnightly on her progress. To follow her daily progress, recipes and musings visit her blog, Diet Rehab.

 

The final stretch of the cleanse is the easiest: food cravings are a thing of the past, take-out no longer has the appeal it once had and buying organic produce is a matter of habit.

Clean eating feels good. So good, in fact, that it’s practically all I think and talk about. We cleansers have to be careful that at this final stage we don’t turn into nutrition bullies. There is no doubt that my sense of wellness has improved with a clean diet, but I need to be careful not to damage personal relationships and so do you. Even though I haven’t lost weight, family and friends think I have because I’m no longer bloated or constipated. Since I feel so much more comfortable, I’m sure that I stand taller and probably look better too. Questioned about weight, of course, tempts us into providing long-winded descriptions of the cleanse and how good it makes us feel, how we could never go back to a life of margarine and toast with our new-found knowledge and how everyone should eat like us, but we must stop ourselves from saying these things; let’s just say we’re trying to eat healthily. And

when people ask us if we miss anything like meat or alcohol, answer truthfully, but if it’s no, make it a light-hearted one. It’s important to lead by example, not by force—no one likes a righteous vegan.Though we may, at times, have to muzzle ourselves, we must learn to keep our eyes open—especially at health food stores. Bad manners run aplenty at most grocery stores, but they’re even worse at health food shops: be prepared to be crashed into. Do conscientious eaters tend to be self-involved? We spend so much time thinking about our food choices—whether local is better than organic, whether organic is ‘organic’ enough— and reading labels and nutritional information with increasingly critical eyes—that we sometimes forget just to eat—to enjoy our food without an agenda. It’s hard to do because cleansing is about mindful eating and being self-conscious about what we put into our bodies. It’s a

serious thing, but it’s important to get outside of our selves every so often. Fun doesn’t have to mean chips and soda, it can be something as simple as complaining about the weather. – Liz Taylor

[The Ottawa Farmers' Market. Credit: Mike Carroccetto for Canwest News Services]

 

Peter vv