90 Days: Going Dairy Free
At 19, when I told my parents I was cutting out meat from my diet, every time I'd come home from school, my mom would complain that she didn't know what to cook for me anymore.
"Just make what you'd normally make, and I'll eat what doesn't have meat in it."
"But everything I usually make has meat in it."
After 16 years of vegetarian eating, it's time to give my gut a little break from dairy.
Choice: To make smarter food choices for my gut in order to feel less bloated/sluggish.
Behavior: To eat more fruits and veggies during each meal by way of eating far less dairy. This will be accomplished by cooking our way through the Frugal Vegan cookbook for the majority of meals.
Habit: To consistently cook healthy, dairy-free meals that keep me feeling energetic and spry.
When I started to think about what challenge I'd like to try out first for 90 days, removing dairy from my diet was my immediate thought. Although my goal is to eat less dairy, specifically cheese, I'm going to focus on incorporating more fruits and veggies into each meal.
Everything I've read about forming new habits that actually stick, says that we're bound to be more successful if we view what we're doing as a value add and not a restriction. So, technically I'm going to see how it feels to remove dairy from my diet, but in practice I am seeing it as a simple swap with a more gut-healthy item.
For the past 16 years, I've been switching between a strict vegetarian diet and a not-so-strict vegan diet. Basically I'll re-watch Forks Over Knives or Food Inc. (my soul can't handle Earthlings or Blackfish, and What the Health was too much propaganda to be taken seriously) and decide that I don't want to be a part of the cruel food industry that is chickens smashed into battery cages and overly-artificially inseminated cows. For a few weeks, I'll diligently eat with the chickens and cows in mind, and then a cheese pizza happens and I'm back on the mozzarella cheese wheel.
Now that I'm volunteering at an animal sanctuary and spending more hands-on time with these lovely creatures, I've become less comfortable with my current consumption habits.
However, the main motivator for this particular 90 day challenge has more to do with how my body feels when I eat copious amounts of cheese and eggs, and not as much to do with the animal rights side of my morality.
Then, last week I watched The Game Changers on Netflix, a documentary about finding a diet that is optimal for human performance. I'm always skeptical of lifestyle documentaries with a curiously strong angle, but I found this one to be well done without too much misleading. It questions how effective a meat-protein based diet is for athletes (and humans in general) and dives into the history of what our ancestors really ate (spoiler alert: a lot of plant-based foods).
The storyline that Nick and I found to be most thought-provoking was when three college athletes had their blood analyzed after eating a meat burrito and then the next day after a veggie burrito. The visual of the blood vials with the cloudy plasma floating on top from the meat meals and the clear plasma from the veg meals was rather eye-opening. We don't often get a look into the insides of our body, which is probably why so many of us continue to eat and drink garbage until we're told that our insides are congealing. I don't feel like waiting to be diagnosed with a slow and painful death sentence, so I'll just start treating my body now like the queen it is.
While the documentary provided some interesting research to chew on, I was already convinced of the benefits of eating more plants over more meat. Although when it comes to dairy, I've always been a Wisconsin girl who likes her cheese fried, baked, smothered, and squeaky. Lately I've been tuning into my body after meals and it has been grumbling, "That block of cheddar cheese was probably not a great idea. Good luck processing that for the next 17 hours."
I'm excited to see how modifying my diet for the next 90 days will make me feel, but also to see what behavior effects start to compound. Once you start eating better, you often feel more energy and motivation to regularly move your body, and then that confidence starts to spread to other areas of your life. It might just look like a bowl of mixed greens, but it's quite possibly the path to a promotion at work or taking on a new physical feat.
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