Animal products are bad for everyone’s health, but eliminating them flies in the face of thousands of years of habit, tradition, and even religion. It takes courage, patience, and tolerance to live a meat-free life in a meat-driven world. I try to not make a big deal of it. Good manners require me to respect others’ decisions about what to eat and what to serve, but they also require others to respect my choices when I say, “No, thank you.” I don’t define myself by a label. I am not A Vegan or A Vegetarian or A WFPB. I am a human being who most of the time chooses to eat plants and nothing else.
Whether you follow someone’s plan or make it up as you go, you will benefit from becoming conscious of everything you take into your body. Ask yourself what it is doing for you and what it is doing to you. Acknowledge your reason for taking it in, whether you eat it as food, drink it as beverage, or swallow, inject, snort or smoke it as therapeutic or recreational drug.
Fruit and Stuff is mostly about improving health through food choices, and this blog has the Do-It-Yourself Plant-Baser in mind. My hope is that everyone will switch to plant-based and make it their way of eating for as long as they live. In addition to personal health, there are moral, spiritual, and environmental reasons to do that.
If you are following a prescribed plant-based diet for a specific health outcome, by all means you should comply with the requirements of that diet and the recommendations of your health care provider, but long-term success is more likely if you assume responsibility for your health and your choices. You may choose to adhere strictly to a prescribed eating plan, but that is YOUR choice, and YOU, not the experts who designed the plan, must make decisions every day about what you eat, what you think, and how you live. You alone will enjoy or suffer the consequences of the plan you choose.
Mary Ann Lesh