Vegetarianism has been a way of life for me for almost twelve years. But once upon a time I had an almost pathological hatred of vegetables. So much so that I’d gather them up from whatever plate of food I might be eating and hurl them from me, shrieking like a midget banshee. My mother learned to extort a measure of compliance by telling me stories about a trio of vegetable friends—a carrot, potato and tomato—that lived in an enchanted garden. The more engaged my imagination, the less likely those tiny championship hands would lob veggie grenades onto her clean linoleum floor.
It’s hard to say why I was so greens-defiant. My mother only ever cooked whole fresh foods so my behavior certainly couldn’t be blamed on lack of exposure. More than likely it had something to do with a congenital need to rebel. Which explains in part why I committed to a plant-based diet in the first place. The beef-chicken-pork-heavy American diet never sat well with me; neither did the glorification of over-processed foods my mother refused to let me eat (she really did teach me something after all!). By 2011, the jig was up and I was ready for a culinary revolution.
There were other reasons, too. By my mid-forties chronic fatigue and other health problems had made day-to-day functioning extremely difficult. My body needed attention; and the more I read about vegetarianism, the more it struck me as a way to not only keep my freezer clear of meats I knew I’d never eat but also cleanse my body and help protect it from a genetic history that included hypertension and hyperlipidemia on one or both sides of my family.
And so the veggie revolution— what passed for it at the time—began. I watched Joe Cross juice his to health in Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and learned to enjoy kale juice cocktails (mellowed with apples, grapes and kiwi) which I downed along with homemade fruit-rich frothy juice drinks. I ate more spinach, salads, rice and beans. And because I loved grains, I ate more pasta and baked my own breads, cookies and muffins. I tried a variety of nut-based beverages which I drank alongside gallon jugs of low-fat milk. There was yogurt, too, of the kind that came in the cheerful, red-topped Yoplait containers that made me feel I was giving my body the best.
I was on the right track but there was more work that needed doing. Like breaking up a quietly scandalous two-timing romance with sugar and its equally diabolic cousin carbohydrates. The triglycerides in my blood—fat derived from sugar and stored in cells for energy— flirted with much higher numbers than was healthy. My doctors, though, never seemed too concerned about it so I didn’t worry either. Cholesterol—fat used to make cells, vitamins and hormones, partially derived from sugar—was the real villain and mine was better than normal, just like everything else on the blood panel my doctor ordered a year after I did away with meat.
All those sugars and carbohydrates would eventually catch up to me, especially as my metabolism entered the great mid-life slowdown. But I didn’t start to notice the changes until about a year ago. By then I had replaced the Yoplait with plain Greek yogurt but also eating more pasta and bread, which I was now making with organic flours. I had also stopped juicing and begun drinking “low sugar” Honest juice fruit punches. The result? A bloated, slightly overweight body, sluggishness and irritability. Worse, my cholesterol had shot up along with my triglycerides and blood pressure.
I blamed it on age; my holistic hippie doctor told me a different story. Vegetarianism was good but what I needed were more infusions of healthy fats and a closer eye kept on all sugar consumption. Because now I had all the symptoms of metabolic syndrome which at its worst was a precursor to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Green as I had believed myself to be, the part that unrepentantly craved sugar had been sabotaging all my efforts. Like an addict I had been hunting down whatever sources of the stuff I could find—pasta, bread, dried fruit and fruit juices—that masqueraded as healthy food. Now that addiction was finally taking a toll on my body.
It took me one very hard month to break up with sugar and accept that my body could no longer tolerate carbohydrates in the amounts I had been eating. I leaned into a mostly veggie keto diet—occasionally complemented by small pieces of fish—to lose the bloat, the gut, the high triglycerides and blood pressure and all my extra weight, then gradually worked a few carefully-selected whole grain carbohydrates into my diet while upping my intake of greens, legumes and low-glycemic fruits and vegetables. And to quell that untamed sweet tooth, I baked almond flour shortbreads with non-sugar sweeteners like monkfruit.
None of these changes were easy. The urge to go back to old habits is always there because the addict never forgets: but neither does the rebel. In the daily battle against the twin tyranny of genetics and a wasteful—and ultimately unsustainable—processed food industry, she reminds me that eating a plant-based diet is one of the most powerful and life-affirming things I can do.