Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [38]
Gauge your energy levels throughout the day and notice if you feel better with a small snack before or after lunch. Try a protein-rich snack of nuts or hummus with carrots in the morning and fresh fruit in the afternoon. If your body doesn’t respond well to those foods at those times of day, switch them around.
Choosing a variety of plant-based foods provides you with all the nutrition you need! Make sure you’re choosing protein, complex carbohydrates, and mineral-rich ingredients for each meal. This variety of whole and fresh food will protect your long-term health.
Quality is key
Rather than focusing on specific serving sizes, choose your meals from a wide variety of truly healthy and whole foods throughout the day. Nutritional experts’ understanding of food has led to a better understanding on a scientific level of what real food includes. It’s simply much more difficult to eat 500 calories of brown rice than 500 calories of cheese. When you eat a huge bowl of fresh vegetable salad with some cooked garbanzo beans, slivered almonds, shredded carrots, avocado, cherry tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil, you’re giving your body the recommended daily servings of vegetables, but you’re also getting a whopping dose of fiber, antioxidants, vitamin C, protein, healthy fat, and phytochemicals that support your body in countless ways.
A healthy vegan diet is mainly comprised of proteins, complex carbohydrates, healthy fats, and unrefined sugars. Choose a variety of proteins from the lists and suggestions in Chapter 5, and foods that offer consistent iron, calcium, B12, and other nutrients from the lists in Chapter 4. Planning your menus on paper using the charts in Chapter 9 for the first few months of your vegan life will help you put together delicious meals that are truly supportive of your health.
Picking and Choosing: Healthy Vegan Food Groups
Your body needs to consume amino acids and protein, carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins, and water to survive. Choosing vegan foods that provide all these essential dietary players isn’t difficult. Plant foods offer everything you need in terms of nutrition; they also offer a variety of colors, complex flavors, textures, cooking techniques, and preparation methods.
The most important qualities to remember when choosing foods are variety and vitality. Choose foods that are fresh and nutrient rich, not overly processed and packaged. Get to know the food groups in the following sections and begin to experiment with different ways to get several servings of each into your diet on a regular basis. You also can use Figure 6-1 as a guide.
Complex carbohydrates
Most healthy eating guides and gurus recommend getting most of your calories from complex carbohydrates. Complex carbohydrates are the main source of fuel for human activity and productivity. The old USDA food pyramid recommended 6 to 11 servings of grain-based foods a day — that seems like a lot, especially when there was no talk of quality! Nowadays, nutritional experts know better, and they recognize the division between processed, refined carbohydrates and whole, complex carbohydrates. White bread and bagels, white sugar, and high-fructose corn syrup are common refined carbohydrates found in American homes. When you look at the true nature of foods that contain complex carbohydrates, such as beans, whole grains, and vegetables, getting most of your calories from this group doesn’t seem hard or unhealthy at all.
You find complex carbohydrates in brown rice, millet, quinoa, barley, yams, potatoes, beans, legumes, and whole-grain flour products like crackers, bread, pasta, and seeds. When you look at this wider variety of sources, then yes, getting most of your calories from complex, carb-rich food makes sense. You’re not just getting the carbs; you’re also getting minerals, protein,