Category: Motivational

Chasing the Vegan Yum @ the LA County Fair!

Let’s start w/ what NOT to eat at the fair:

None of THIS

And none of THIS

And none of THIS

And none of THIS

And certainly none of THESE…

But do try the bbq’ed corn on the cob (w/ tangy lemon, no butter or mayo). The natural taste is naturally buttery sweet!

How about a Ten Pound Bun? Unfortunately they have no vegan option, so just order w/o cheese & add some guacamole from the Mexican food booth:

If you watch the waterless cooking pots & pan demo they’ll reward you w/ some healthy coleslaw (dressing-free).

You can order a beans & greens taco w/o the cheese.

There’s a Plant Food for People booth on the north side of the old horse race track. They sell vegan tacos.

To “healthy it up” I ordered the naked taco (called a vegan boat). It comes with jackfruit carnitas on a bed of pinto beans, topped with their coleslaw & all of their signature toppings. Unfortunately these include oily additives, even on the slaw – it was swimming in fatty vegan mayo! My only option was to get the carnitas (which tasted great) & beans w/ no toppings… boring!

So I carried this to the taco stand for guacamole

and combined it all inside a giant baked potato w/ broccoli from this place (plez hold the liquid fry-fat & the greasy cheese/creams!)

Check out the Subway Sub booth. I ordered veggie (no cheese, no oil).

If you’re really good (or really bad!) you might indulge in a slice of cherry pie, but eat the inside fruit & trash the fatty crust!

They have some Indian Tacos (served on fry bread, but you need not eat the shell… just the beans, veggies & salsa are great!) I brought my own avocado, but you can buy some guacamole at the Mexican food booths.

Or some Cowboy Potatoes on the bbq (w/ onion, bell pepper, and plenty of vegetable cooking XL-oil!)

I found some steamed Veggie dumplings inside one of the commercial buildings:

At Maria’s Restaurant you can order a plate of pasta w/ marinara sauce (minus the meatball)…

Or you can order their salad w/ dressing on the side (greens, tomatoes, garbanzos, cucumbers, olives, carrots, pepperoncinis, and oily Italian dressing, minus the cheese.)

Try some lovely dairy-free Pineapple Whip in a cup or cone!

Or some mango-on-a-stick from Mexican Village:

Bone apetit!

The Vibrant Vegan Life of an Obesity Survivor

Jun 19, 2012 | Updated Aug 19, 2012
by  Victoria Moran

I am an obesity survivor. I spent the first 30 years of my life either bingeing or dieting; each of those states was sufficiently unpleasant that I’d revert to the other out of desperation. I was not uneducated about food and nutrition. I had, after all, been trying to “fix” myself since childhood. It’s just that a lot of the information I got, like much of what’s available now, was myth-based — i.e., the late, great “four food groups” — or commercially motivated: all those classroom posters from the Dairy Council, all those TV ads about the white bread that would build strong bodies in an ever-increasing number of ways.

I grew up and became a health writer, interviewing the experts for magazine articles, under the assumption that getting their knowledge firsthand would seep in and change everything. It didn’t.

The turnaround came the day I realized that, as for any addict, the drug- – in this case, food, and manufactured products pretending to be food — had me. I knew there was no escaping, that my situation was beyond the reach of my nutritionist and the library of diet and self-help books I’d collected. With nowhere else to turn, I had a chat with God and said, basically: “I’m done. No more diets, no more games. It’s okay with me if I never get thin, but please — please — make me free.”

A series of remarkable events followed. I joined a gym — only this time with no “goal weight.” Then I met a group of people who’d recovered from eating for a fix and who knew how to do that, a day at a time. And although I’d been vegetarian for awhile — I cared about animals and didn’t want them killed for my sake — I was able to become, imperfectly but committedly, vegan. No animal products, mostly whole foods. I immediately felt that freedom I’d prayed for: a lightness, a relief, a sense of being able, with great love and no guilt at all, to look a cow or pig or chicken in the eye.

I was also astounded by how well I could eat when I built my menus around vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, and a few nuts and seeds. I could finally eat enough. Those little half-cup-of-this, three-ounces-of-that proscriptions didn’t apply anymore. I could eat really big salads and regular-sized portions of veggie-burgers and veggie-chili and veggie-tofu-stir-fries over brown rice. The promise of a thousand infomercials, “Eat all you want and lose weight,” had finally been fulfilled, and I didn’t even have to make three easy payments.

I’m not perfect, but what’s wonderful about eating a plant-based diet is, I don’t have to be. French fries have crossed these lips — white flour, too. It’s just that, these days, those are the last foods I want, and when I eat them on the rare occasions that nothing is else available, it’s no big deal. What has happened over the years is that feeling good has become its own addiction. I like it. I want to feel even better. I drink fresh juices (my favorite is celery, kale, apple, and lemon) and make a morning power-smoothie (almond milk, banana, berries, blackstrap molasses, ground flaxseed, and a nutrient-booster called Vega created by vegan triathlete Brendan Brazer) every day.

“Make your plate look like a Christmas tree,” I tell people, “mostly green with splashes of other bright colors.” As I see it, a green salad is an open invitation to carrots, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, and the sprouts that grow in jars on my kitchen counter. I add some “oomph factor” with steamed broccoli, asparagus, yellow Finn potatoes or bright orange yams; garbanzos or red beans or black ones; sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, artichoke hearts or black olives or slender slivers of plant-based cheese. (Yes, these days there’s even cheese that bypassed the cow. Life has become very generous.)

I’ve found in this way of life a series of adventures. I raised my daughter, Adair, as a vegan. (Yes, she still is one, and she’s fine, and she’s even trained as a stunt performer.) I’ve traveled all over — Iceland, Tibet, Switzerland where the rivers practically run milk chocolate — and have nowhere on earth been denied three plant-based meals a day. I’ve been through life and loss and 40 and 50 and my weight stays steady, some 60 pounds less than it once was. Every year when I put away my winter clothes and get out my summer clothes, they fit. And I haven’t been on a diet since the Reagan administration.

Victoria Moran is the author of Main Street Vegan.

Ideal Diet Dominated by (Minimally Processed) Carbs 

Excerpts from THE STARCH SOLUTION by Dr. John McDougall

With all those efficient calories, you would think that starches would promote excess weight gain, but they don’t. That’s because your body efficiently regulates the use of the carbohydrates you get from starch. Even if you consume them in excess, the body will burn them off as heat and energy rather than store much of them as fat.

Worldwide, populations with the highest consumption of starch are the most trim and fit.

Excess Starch Does Not Turn To Body Fat

A widely held myth holds that the sugars in starches are readily converted into fat, which is then stored visibly in our abdomen, hips and buttocks. If you read the public research you will see that there is no disagreement about this whatsoever among scientists, and that they say that this is incorrect! After eating, we break down the complex carbohydrates in starchy foods into simple sugars. These sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream, where they are transported to trillions of cells throughout the body for energy. If you eat more carbohydrates than your body needs, you’ll store up to 2 pounds of it invisibly in the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen. If you eat more carbohydrate than you can use (as your daily energy) and store (as glycogen), you’ll burn the remainder off as body heat and through physical movement other than sports, such as walking to work, typing, yard work and fidgeting.

Turning sugars into fats is a process called de novo lipogenesis. Pigs and cows use this process to convert carbohydrates from grains and grasses into calorie-dense fats. That’s what makes them so appealing as a food source. Bees do it too, converting honey (simple carbohydrate) into wax (fatty acids and alcohols).

We humans, on the other hand, are very inefficient at converting carbohydrate to fat; we don’t do it under normal conditions. (The cost for this conversion is 30 percent of the calories consumed.) Subjects overfed large amounts of simple sugars under experimental laboratory conditions, however, will convert a small amount of carbohydrate to fat. For example, both trim and obese women fed 50 percent more calories than they usually ate in a day, along with an extra 3 ½ ounces (135 grams) of refined sugar, produced less than 4 grams of fat daily (less than 1/8 ounce). That’s just 36 extra calories stored as fat per day. You’d have to overeat all of those extra calories and table sugar every day for nearly 4 months just to gain 1 pound of extra body fat.

In the seventies, researchers from the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department at Michigan State University (my alma mater) asked 16 moderately overweight college-age men to add 12 slices of white bread (at 70 calories a slice) or high fibre bread (at 50 calories a slice) to their diet daily. On average, subjects eating the extra white bread lost 14 pounds (6.26 kg) and those adding the high fibre bread lost 19 pounds (8.77 kg) during the next 8 weeks. Appetite-appeasing breads worked by replacing the easy-to-wear fats found in meats, dairy products, and vegetable oils, causing them to spontaneously, without any additional conscious thought or effort, lose the weight. The general health of these college students also improved as reflected by a very large and rapid reduction in their blood cholesterol levels (by 60 to 80 mg/dL).

The warning about carbohydrates turning to body fat is a myth and nothing more. In humans, even substantial quantities of refined and processed carbohydrates contribute only a trivial amount to body fat. The same is not true of animal and vegetable fats, however. A passenger on a cruise ship gains an average of 8 pounds on a 7-day voyage – caused by dining on buffets of meats, cheese, oil-soaked vegetables, and high fat desserts.

So, where does all the belly fat come from? It bears repeating: The fat you eat is the fat you wear.

Fat Is The Metabolic Dollar Saved For The Next Famine

After you eat dairy, meat, nuts, oils, and other high-fat foods, you absorb their fat from your intestine into the bloodstream. From there, it is transported to billions of adipose (fat) cells for storage. This is a very efficient process: it uses up only 3 percent of the calories you consume to move the fat on your fork and spoon to your body fat. This storage takes place almost effortlessly after every fat-filled meal. If you have your body fat chemically analyzed, it will reveal the kinds of fats you commonly eat. Margarine and shortening, for example, result in high proportions of trans fats in stored body fat. A diet high in cold-water marine fish shows omega-3 fats. The saying “from my lips to my hips” expresses the real-life effect of the Western diet. Fortunately, starches contain very little fat for you to wear.

Starches Help Us To Radiate Vitality

Every year, millions of people lose weight without necessarily improving their health. In fact, these weight-loss methods often cause illness. The best example of this negative effect of dieting is the once-popular Atkins-type, low-carbohydrate, high-protein approach. These diets work by severe carbohydrate deprivation, which causes a state of illness (with the common outcome of ketosis). When people become sick they lose their appetite and lose weight. This method for losing extra pounds is analogous to the weight loss seen in people taking cancer chemotherapy drugs. To the careful observer, people following low-carbohydrate diets look and acts sick, too.

A starch-based diet, on the other hand, brings radiant health along with the loss of excess body fat. Endurance athletes know the benefits of “carb-loading.” In addition to enabling peak performance, a starch-based diet improves blood flow to all tissue in the body. The skin glows with a clear complexion from the improved circulation. A welcome by-product of eating low-fat starches is the elimination of oily skin, blackheads, whiteheads, and acne. From weight loss and the resulting relief from arthritis, people on a starch-based diet feel active, agile and more youthful.

https://durianrider.com/2013/03/18/why-carbs-keep-you-slim-and-fat-adds-fat/

2016 Vegas Health/Healing/Happiness Conference

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Eeeeeeh-hhhaaa… it’s back! I’ve waited all year for the Vegas HHH (Health Healing Happiness) Conference.

Why??? What’s the big deal?

Is it the high energy opening meet & greet?
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Could it be the wealth of informational download emphasizing health, wellbeing & personal expansion?

Some of that information is alarming, to set us straight, like this video:

https://youtu.be/Qo6QNU8kHxI

… some empowering like these promos for the new upcoming film, “EATING YOU ALIVE” :

https://youtu.be/BZJLsDEIx-M

How about the creative array of health vendors filling the hall?
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Is it the two full days of wild fitness activities (like this weight room plant-based meetup)?

image (In addition to the weights, I was taking quick powerwalks about the resort grounds between speakers… never miss an opportunity to move!)

Maybe it’s the evening entertainment factor on the sidewalks of Las Vegas!?! I found this guy “playin’ real good for free“, as Joni Mitchell would say. He had engaged a most appreciative crowd for over 30 minutes & we were happy to toss $$ into his bucket.

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Apparently there was some clandestine filming going on because the next morning I found this brand new youtube post. This dude ain’t no street musician… but we got an outstanding professional concert under the gorgeous evening desert sky for a drop in the bucket! Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/-OcAEjzRze0

It was ALL these reasons, each one is enough to draw you back next year!

LUNCH!

All of these events are highlighted by the Low-SOS, mouth watering vegan buffet prepared by Chef Lonnie Beals & his staff at the Vegas Tuscany Resort!

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Our Two Day Vegan Lunch Buffet:

* fresh fruit with coconut cream
* Thai salad with spicy peanut vinegarette
* macadamia nut rice
* curried potatoes
* vegetable mango stirfry w/ lomein noodles red bell pepper, tofu, mushrooms, broccoli, mango
* veggie kebabs w/ panzu glaze
* pita bread
* fresh veggie platter w/hummus
* sautéed green beans w/ olive oil with hint of garlic
* potato salad
* avocado/chickpea salad
* green salad w/ almond vinegarette (oil-free)
* Spanish rice
* pinto beans
* guacamole
* grilled veggie enchiladas w/ corn tortilla
* black bean burrito (w/ plantains, mango salsa & tortilla)
* fresh fruits tossed in agave syrup

THE MESSAGES

If you missed this conference I want to take you on a virtual tour of the messages from some of our 2016 presenters. I will provide links to youtube presentations similar to their HHH talks below their photos.

TrueNorth Health Center founder & author Dr. Alan Goldhamer:
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Physician & author Dr. John McDougall:
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Physician & author Dr. Joel Fuhrman:
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Author, Comedian & Chef AJ:
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Natural bodybuilder & author Robert Cheeke:
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“Whole Food Medicine Cowboy” Don Tolman:
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https://youtu.be/jMxwOjCnONY

Nutritional mixologists Shane Stuart:
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Living Superfood Chef Keidi Awadu:
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https://youtu.be/8-BL-zlCORQ

Kickbox instructor / trainer Joshua Newman-Gomez:
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And for all the others… click here HHH Presenters

See ya’ll in Vegas next summer! 🙂