Is your New Year’s Resolution to eat less meat? More plants? Get healthy? You have come to the right place! My tips this week are a quick-start guide to a painless transition from wherever you are with your eating to easily eating more plants in a healthy way! The Beginner’s Guide to Being a Healthy Vegetarian gives you the steps to take to make it easy + make your resolution stick!
Tara’s Tuesday Tips:
The Beginner’s Guide to Being a Healthy Vegetarian
If you have resolved to be a vegetarian to get healthier or lose weight or save the animals, whatever your reason is, if you are willing to put in the hard work, let’s do it the healthy way. I know you don’t want to be the person that swears off meat In January but ends up quitting before the calendar hits February! Learning how to be a healthy vegetarian is essential for plant-based, plant-curious, plant-forward eaters or anyone in between! Let me show you the way in 8 easy steps.
Step 1:
answer this question – why do I want to be vegetarian?
You must define what being vegetarian means to YOU. If I asked every reader of this blog to write in their answer to this question, I am sure I would get a variety of answers. What is your answer?
Here is my answer: I don’t believe that anything should lose its life so that I can eat. This is the fundamental place that I come from when I choose my foods. You MUST know yours. Just food for thought to get you started + onto step 2 …
Step 2:
answer another question – what kind of plant-based eater will I be?
Will you continue to eat eggs? Dairy? Gelatin? Not sure? Will you simply be plant-forward or flexitarian? Know the difference + why. Read this: The Difference Between Plant-Based Diets , find your answer, and pop back over here for the step 3.
Step 3:
pick a starting point
I would be lying if I told you I was ok with all of you out there just swapping your beef burger for a Beyond Burger once in a while. I want all of you to be all in all of the time! However, I am a realist. So, let’s find a realistic place for you to start.
Remember, small changes eventually add up to big results.
Try one of these ideas:
- When ordering at a restaurant, swap out your beef or chicken burger for a veggie burger
- Meatless Monday is a thing for a reason. Make every Monday the day you take the meat off your menu!
- If you are ready to jump in a little more, make breakfast the meal that you skip the animal products every day for the next 6 weeks. Try nut butter or avocado on toast for breakfast instead of eggs.
- JUST egg + Beyond Meat are plant-based swaps that are sold in most grocery stores now and you can easily take any recipe and make it meatless.
- Swap out your dairy milk for almond, oat, or soy milk at breakfast or in your coffee.
- Skip the cheese/meat on top of your salad, sandwich, or taco.
Step 4:
be prepared
Time to make a game plan.
Ok, so we know why, what kind, and what meal we are starting with. Now, the plan. Let’s figure out what we are eating + go shopping … with a plan.
If you have been stopping by my little blog for a while, you know this is something I say a lot! Be prepared!!! It applies to all facets of your life, but especially your food! I have spent many years at ideal body weight, in good health, have been a successful plant-powered athlete, and I have raised two beautiful vegetarian children. The only way I can manage all of that is being prepared! Meal prep, grocery shopping, stocking the pantry, packing the lunches, making breakfast foods easy, carrying a snack bag + a water bottle, I could go on and on! If you want to be a HEALTHY vegetarian, this is essential!
Check out these tips to help you get started: 10 Things To Do On Weekends To Make Weeknight Cooking Easier, Go-To Lazy Vegetarian Meals, 10 Things On My Grocery List Every Week, What’s In My Pantry.
Step 5:
add, don’t subtract
After thinking about the first 4 steps, you might be rethinking this whole healthy vegetarian thing. Let’s shift the mindset.
Instead of thinking of what you can’t eat, think of what you can eat! I authored an entire article on this topic because I feel that passionately about this concept: Improve Your Health By Adding Not Subtracting.
Instead of fixating on all of the things vegetarianism subtracts from your life, get out a pen and paper and lets start thinking of all of the things we can add! Add things into your life such as hummus, air fried edamame, JUST egg bakes, nutritional yeast, and homemade chili or nachos. Did you ever imagine eating plants could be so yummy?!?
Step 6:
get out of your own way
Challenging the status quo is not easy. You wouldn’t be here on this page of this blog if you weren’t interested in something new, better, or different. If you want to make changes in your life, you need to make yourself uncomfortable. Hands down. It’s that simple. Embrace the discomfort, and growth will follow.
I’m not saying you must gag on disgusting plant-foods every day to be a healthy vegetarian. I am saying that you might need to work at being good at shopping, prepping, decoding labels + menus, and preparing new types of foods. Maybe challenging the norm of eating meat is exactly the catalyst you need to jumpstart your health + might actually lead you to make other necessary (but uncomfortable) changes in your life.
If being vegetarian is your goal for 2024, let this be the year it sticks, get out of your own way! In addition to this guide to being a healthy vegetarian, these other articles might help: How To Read Food Labels As a Vegetarian, How To Order Plant-Based At A Restaurant, 9 Hacks to Make Being a Vegetarian Easier, How To Stop Meat Cravings As A Vegetarian.
Step 7:
jelly beans + garbanzo beans are not equal
Sorry. It is true. Yes, they are both carbs, yes they both give you energy, neither one is an animal product. That is where the equivalency ends. My friends who are lovers of the carb-free life have put these 2 foods on the same playing field. Nope.
I love jelly beans just as much as the next girl, and I do eat jelly beans. However, if we are looking to optimize our health, improve cholesterol or diabetes or weight or fatty liver. We must be regularly choosing the garbanzo beans over the jelly beans for vitamins, protein, fiber content, and overall health.
A carbitarian aka “junk food vegetarian” can swear off meat all they want but if their food is consistently empty of nutritional value, they will not achieve optimal health. These vegetarians likely have elevated visceral fat, fatty liver disease, high triglycerides/cholesterol, diabetes or pre-diabetes, and/or metabolic syndrome. This is not a product of being vegetarian or eating carbs or eating beans. This is a product of not paying attention to making good choices ‘most’ of the time. Read this: The Vegetarian’s Guide to the 80/20 Diet.
For Step 7, my challenge to you is to put beans on your menu at least one time per week for the next 6 weeks. Learn to love beans. Choose black or pinto or garbanzo beans 80% of the time and leave the jelly beans for the other 20%. Beans (and complex carbs) are not your enemy!
Step 8:
remind yourself that you are human not perfect
Accepting this fact is hands down the most important step to take when trying to be a healthy vegetarian. Being 100% anything is hard to do. So, 100% plant-based is, you guessed it, going to be hard to do at first. But not impossible!
As with any goal, build in a buffer. If enjoying butter or ice cream or cheese or cookies or chips on occasion is what makes you happy, sociable, or satisfied. Then, that is 100% what is right for you. Go for it! If your goal is to eat less meat, give yourself 6 weeks. If your starting point is Meatless Taco Tuesdays, that is 6 Tuesday taco dinners with no meat. Six seems more doable than an entire year, am I right? You might find it easy and after 6 weeks + want to add in another day of the week. If you slip up, don’t throw your hands in the air and give up, just pause and reset, you are human not perfect. You don’t need to throw all the progress away, move forward, you are human not perfect.
Read this: What To Do After Overeating.
Food For Thought
You can’t arrive at your destination if you don’t know where you are going. Be intentional with this list. If you made it this far in this post, you clearly have an interest in improving your health by eating less meat.
Inertia: the tendency to do nothing or remain unchanged. Don’t let this be you. From this day forward, don’t ignore things, don’t remain unchanged.
I’ll leave the first food for thought of 2024 with a Maya Angelou quote my dear friend sent me this morning: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
I hope these 8 steps help carry you where you want to go in 2024. So glad you are here! Reach out to me with any questions or comments: tara@myvegetarianfamily.com 💚
All the best,
Tara 🌿
For the first post of 2024, I decided to write you a beginner’s guide to being a healthy vegetarian. In years past, I’ve given you resolution inspiration. Need some New Year’s resolution inspiration this year too? Read these: New Years Resolutions Worth Fighting For, Dear New Years Resolutions, 10 Tips To Help You Stick To Your New Year’s Resolution.
⭐️Did you enjoy reading The Beginner’s Guide to Being a Healthy Vegetarian? I love to hear from you, leave me a comment below! ⭐️
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