Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [3]
Maybe you’ve heard that eating vegan will help you lose weight. Maybe it’s your affection for animals that’s driving you to take a look at your diet. Or maybe you read somewhere that it takes sixteen pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat and realized that if you stopped eating meat you might help feed the world. Any of these would be reason enough to reduce your meat consumption. But once you do that you find all the other benefits too.
Being a veganist is good for your health, it’s good for the environment, and it’s certainly good for the animals, but it also has a powerful spiritual component. When you begin eating consciously, with compassion and thoughtfulness, you attain a certain lightness and inner peace, a sense of connectedness to the larger world. When you lean more toward a plant-based diet, you help liberate acres of farmland to grow food for more humans, not more pent-up cows and pigs and chickens. And that also connects you to the web of life. It’s all upside.
It feels so good and empowering to know that we are bigger than our habits and hankerings, that we can actually make a subtle switch in what we put on our plates for the promise of a better life all around. It feels so liberating to know that we can be in charge of our well-being and our choices, and that those choices will ripple out in their effects, both personally and globally.
That’s what this is about too. Being a veganist (or veganish) is about choosing behaviors that support your values, that make a positive contribution to the kind of world you want to live in. Our food choices can contribute directly to well-being and consciousness, or they can do just the opposite. It’s so completely up to us.
How to Read This Book
The book is organized into ten promises and is packed with information, some of which will appeal to you right now and some of which might just be too much to take during the first read. I know, because it took me years to get around to reading certain books; I avoided delving into the truth about how what we eat affects us and the world around us, because much of it was simply a shock to my system and made me really uncomfortable. I recommend that you browse the table of contents and then start with the chapters that appeal to you and circle back to the others when you are ready to layer on some more information. For instance, you may be interested in weight loss and cancer prevention, but don’t really want to look at animal cruelty right now. Or you might want to take a good look at the spiritual aspect of diet and also understand about how the food industry affects the global food supply. Personally, my favorite chapters are the last two (Promises 9 and 10) because I tend to be more interested in spirituality and personal growth. And the Afterword is practically a whole book in itself because it’s chock-full of tips and information on how to make changes of habit, so definitely read that. But I completely understand if the middle of the book becomes overwhelming; it is a lot of information. Feel free to skip around, dipping in and out of the subjects that catch your attention; the information will surely trickle in. If you encounter something that makes you uncomfortable, please don’t put the book down or stop reading; just move on to the chapters that are most compelling to you. Then lean in a little more when you’re ready and inform yourself at a pace that’s comfortable for you. There is some fascinating information within these pages, and I expect you will want to digest it according to the pace that feels right to you.
No matter where you are on this journey—whether you have cut back on eating meat already or are just starting to consider what that might look like—get ready for some miracles. Truly. Taking animals out of your diet is a game changer.
VEGANIST
PROMISE 1:
Your Body Will Find and Maintain Its Ideal Weight—Effortlessly
Did you know?
On a healthful vegan diet, weight comes off effortlessly and sustainably, without calorie counting.
Fiber, which is only found in