At the Supermarket A LOT MORE these days 🙂
Why Vegan? I thought it’d be a good idea… why not? What’s the big deal? I’ll eliminate meat protein and dairy for the week and be vegan!
So why would I even come up with that idea? I sorta, kinda blame it on my clients. Oh boy. I said it: it’s all their fault! Sure, I quit red meat and pork about 25 years ago, and yes, I’ve been on a ‘healthier’ eating journey for quite some years but it was my clients that have recently pushed me off the edge. Well, I can make that sound better: linking arms with my clients and coaching them through their own health journeys despite the limited amount of medical conditions I myself had been exposed to or even experienced, I’ve developed a deep sense of empathy for what some of them go through. Each condition, each concern and each dis-ease that was brought to my attention had me seeking meaning, cause and remedy. With everything I read, heard and watched, I found an underlying, crystal clear (yet not so clear) theme: our food is our medicine. (Angelic harp resounding). But with that, an even more profound thought took root in my mind: our food is also our poison! Duh!
What’s most interesting is the fact that 90% of the information that I’ve learned is very much available to us all and literally (figuratively) lives in our palms and at the tips of our fingers! It seems like everything I’d been reading from articles and from textbooks or hearing from medical doctors and from people who have healed themselves naturally with with unprocessed, living, whole food inspired me. I started to realize that as ‘healthy’ as I thought my food choices and meals were, many (most) of the foods I was consuming were poison (I know, I’m a bit dramatic (but it’s true!))! Tricky labels such as ‘healthy’, ‘zero calories’, ‘low fat’, ‘no sugars’ placed on over-processed, packaged foods are a joke -and make us the biggest group of butts (of the joke) EVER. As the brilliant marketing industry captures our hearts, entices our taste buds, feeds our appetites, and devours our pockets, our overall health becomes more infested with the poisons available on every supermarket shelf.
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
-Hippocrates
So everything I’ve been learning (and inherently knew to be the truth) was leading towards the gardens and farms where the organic plants and vegetables of which we should all be consuming more, reside. And what seemed to happen quite quickly, was my willingness to explore a plant-based style of meal prepping and eating. (And by ‘plant-based, I don’t necessarily mean becoming vegan or even becoming vegetarian. I simply mean that most of what I eat will be fruits, veggies and leafy greens- raw and minimally processed). The thought of refraining from purchasing packaged and overly processed foods seemed fascinating. For me, it was the onset of my new-found knowledge and my consistent craving for a new challenge, (see what I did there 😉 ) was what truly inspired my decision. The actual decision to remove all animal products from my diet and go full vegan felt rash and impulsive but oddly exciting and fresh! So I leaped! Weeeeeeeee! No, I was not pushed by anyone, least of all my clients! I was inspired- almost dared by my inner self to immerse myself in my health in a completely new way! I can’t wait to experience new foods and new pairings… a whole new world- in a sense, Eden awaits me and I know, despite my lack of dis-ease, that this is a big deal and a f*cking great idea!
Carmelle Jean-Francois
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