As a vegan for well over three years, it’s safe to say I’ve learnt a lot about how to eat as one, mostly through making mistakes. Here are some you can avoid if you’re starting out.
Eating too few calories or too many
Some of you may be aiming to lose weight, gain weight or keep the same weight. I, for one, gained weight; 7kg of it in just a matter of months. How? You may ask. You’ve probably heard many stories about how vegans lose weight, almost effortlessly, since plant foods tend to have fewer calories. I heard the same stories, and I love food, so I ate a lot more as a vegan – thinking I would be a size six in no time. What I didn’t understand, and perhaps it was naïve of me, was that vegan junk food is still junk food.
The bottom line here is to be mindful of what you eat. Not all vegan food is automatically fat burning and washboard-abs building. For those of you who are trying to gain weight, as an expert in that field, I recommend high calorie vegan foods. Nuts and nut butters, seeds, avocados, dried fruit and legumes are a good place to start. Oh, and snack a lot.
Protein deficiency or protein obsession
The thing with protein is that if you’re eating a whol- food, plant-based diet and getting enough calories, you can’t get a protein deficiency – so don’t worry. But if you are anything like me and, in your transition to veganism, you never replaced the protein element of your diet with anything and just ramped up the simple carbs to make up for the calories, then I suggest you try to incorporate some legumes, nuts and other sources of protein in your diet.
Not supplementing Vitamin B12
Some would dedicate a whole article to the topic of Vitamin B12 but I’ll sum it up in a few lines. For those who don’t know, B12 is made by bacteria in places like dirt and soil. Animals don’t make it, they just eat grass and the like with bits of dirt on it, like humans did for hundreds of thousands of years. But because people like to wash their veggies first, and understandably so, if we don’t eat animals that eat dirt, we might be deficient in B12. The good news is that consuming dirt-eating animals is not the only way to get B12. There are tonnes of supplements in the market and many vegan foods that are fortified with B12, like plant milks, nutritional yeast and tempeh.
With these three things in mind, I wish you a happy vegan journey – one that is free of lessons you have to learn the hard way.
