Mastering the Whole Food Plant-Based Lifestyle: Practical Tips and Ideas

Introduction to Whole Food Plant-Based Living

In this and our next few lessons, we are going to get even more specific and practical when it comes to applying how to put the whole food plant based lifestyle into action. And so today I will share with you various practical tips and ideas for how to make this meal preparation easy and efficient to meet any of your lifestyle needs.

So let’s start by talking about breakfast. If you have just a few minutes of your morning, perhaps you are a busy individual who has a long commute before work. Or perhaps you need to get kids ready for school. Either way, there are three main breakfast options that can be extremely fast and easy to make.

The first and most obvious, perhaps to you already is a smoothie and specifically, again, the green smoothie.

Practical Tips for Transitioning to a Plant-Based Diet

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And so it’s as simple as putting your ingredients all into your blender, blending away and pouring

into an appropriate cup.Now, what’s neat about a green smoothie is that you can easily take this with you on the road and smoothiewill take typically less than five minutes.

Another quick breakfast meal idea is some of those optimally healthy breads we talked about in our grand lesson.You can easily choose to top that with a wholesome nut butter or even with a bean spread like hummus and making sure that we include leafy greens, other vegetables, fruit, nut seed and similar ingredients along with your breakfast.

Daily Meal Planning for Plant-Based Success

Another option for a quick meal idea would be if you’re going to make a cooked grain to prepare a cooked grain, it would take as little as five minutes and up. It depends which grain you choose.So good options here would be, as I mentioned previously, in our grain.

Listen, something like oat bran, which once you’ve got boiling water going, it cooks in less than two minutes.Of course, you can depend on quick cooking oats, but you’re going to get more nutritional value if you actually go for their more wholesome counterparts. This means something like steel cut oats or old fashioned ruled oats that will typically take 10 to 15 minutes to cook.

Now, as you may recall, you can drastically reduce that cooking time simply by soaking the oats the night before.

And so this can also be a quick and hearty and very easy meal option, which you would add then to any of your grain bowls is just to balance the mode with a few other nutrients. This is where fresh fruits as well as some dried fruits can be added in and or some raw nuts and or some other superfood options that are easy to include as part of your hot Gramble are something like dried, unsalted, unsweetened coconut. And for those of you who would like a little touch of chocolate, think also of rock accounts.

Nutrient Essentials in a Plant-Based Diet

And of course, don’t forget about your herbs and spices to add those in whenever possible. And so an easy one into your Green Bowl would be something like cinnamon. See, the thing is that when it comes to breakfast, even though we tend to focus on certain foods being breakfast foods, there really are no rules.

And you can eat any whole plant food for breakfast, lunch or dinner. It’s all up to you, your personal taste, but preferences and time constraints. Now, what else we can do for breakfast if we have a little bit more time, such as time to prepare few foods by chopping and cutting them up would be something like a salad. Now you can go for a fruit based salad or a vegetable based salad if you make it a whole meal salad by including some nuts and or seeds and or beans, then you are making a nice, hearty, wholesome meal.

Of course, when it comes to getting more creative with your breakfast ideas, you can consider making some optimally healthy homemade pancakes or crepes, and then you can fill them or top them with fresh fruits or other wholesome plant based options.

You can even use something like a decadent chia pudding or an avocado chocolate pudding as part of your breakfast. And these are so easy to make.

Shopping Guide: Choosing the Best Plant-Based Foods

So the average breakfast can be put together in about two to 15 minutes. You decide how much time do you have and what are you most in the mood for when it comes to lunch meal options?

Really, there’s no need to differentiate them between lunch and dinner. And so I’ll talk about those two together.

Now, for those of you who work outside of the home, it is wisest to think about your lunch needs the night before when you are making your dinner. This way, you are not stuck with no food, perhaps at your workplace and tempted to go and eat out, especially if those are less than ideal food options.

One way that you can help your metabolism to both keep an optimal weight or lose weight is to make sure that you get a regular supply of nutrients.

Cooking Techniques for Delicious Plant-Based Meals

And usually if we come unprepared to our work or school place or other area, we may feel hunger hit us and then run for the first possible food option, which usually leaves us reaching for options that. Are far from ideal for health and weight, and so a little preparation goes a long way. The easiest way to incorporate a healthy, wholesome lunch is to make at least double for dinner the night before and then take a portion of that dinner as your lunch the next day.

This ensures you have the healthiest wholesome food ready with you whenever it is lunchtime or hunger strikes.

And if you don’t work the typical nine to five or day shift, the same thing applies for any night shift. Workers simply make doubles, whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner, so that you can take the other portion with you outside of the home.

Overcoming Common Challenges in Plant-Based Living

This will make your life so much easier and optimize your health as well. One of my first and highest recommendations is once a day to consume a whole meal salad. This means that you are using a rich, leafy green along with at least three other types of vegetables and adding to that, a proper serving of beans and or adding to it some nuts or some seeds and some spices and herbs.

And this is what’s going to make sure that your salad is deliciously mouthwatering. You may recall from our lesson on beans and legumes that I recommended that we cook a big batch of beans at least once, if not twice a week.

And this way, when it’s time to put together a salad, you’re simply scooping out some of those beans and adding them to your salad to make it a whole meal option. The average salad to chop and prepare all of your ingredients will take about 10 to 15 minutes, depending, of course, on how many people you are serving.

Another easy whole food plant based meal that should be eaten on a daily basis in any of its numerous forms is something that I call a star meal and it makes a great lunch or dinner meal. This is simply a meal based on a healthy starch, such as a start to vegetable or cooked whole grain that is always accompanied by an abundance of lightly cooked vegetables. And it may include some mushrooms and or some legumes, whether it is a fresh or dried cooked bean or tofu or tempeh.

To make this the health and nutrition superstar meal that it is, you can enrich the flavors using various herb and spice combinations or creamy nut or seed based sauces to prepare such a meal. Start by choosing a starchy vegetable or green lake with dry beans. It is recommended that you batch cook a large part of some grain once or twice a week for quick and easy meal preparation.

Then pick several vegetables that you can steam or gently cook whether you are cooking vegetables, mushrooms or warming up a previously cooked star meal. All you need is a stainless steel pan with a lid and a thin layer of water.

You do not need to nor want to use any oil or even any risky nonstick pent. This cooking method is so simple and takes only five to 10 minutes to cook your vegetables and mushrooms with minimal water, minimal time and minimal heat as you are using only low to medium heat. And thus it provides one of the healthiest cooking methods that causes least nutrient destruction to your food.

I explain and demonstrate this one penne steam cook method in detail with various whole plant food examples in the follow up course to this one Cook Real Food, which I mentioned to you in the introduction section of this course to eat the star meal.

Sustaining a Whole Food Plant-Based Lifestyle Long-Term

You can mix the vegetables together with the grain or layer them separately on your plate. In the beginning, you may just want to keep your star meal simple by using a few herbs and spices that you enjoy and are comfortable using. However, if you have a high powered blender, then I recommend making those delicious, creamy NetWare seed sauces, which will add a whole other element of richness and satisfaction to your star meals. You can drizzle these creamy sauces on the food or stir them in and mix everything together with them.

In total, a star meal will take you about fifteen to thirty minutes to put together. Depending on your choice of ingredients, you can make potato based our meals, sweet potato based our meals, brown rice, star meals, buckwheat star meals, quinoa star meals and so many others. With practice, you can even make various ethnic curries into healthy star meals by using coconut milk curry base or a tomato puree curry base to enjoy so many different combinations of whole plant foods and of course, health, nutrition and weight benefits. Another option for our lunch or dinner is the famous soup and homemade soups are so easy to make, much easier again than most of us imagine, and we often don’t even need any vegetable or similar stock. My recommendation here is definitely to try and base all of your soups on water and.

Then bring out their flavors with the different herbs and spices so you can make vegetable soups, you can make grain and vegetable soups, bean and vegetable soups, you can make soups that have textures. You can make soups that are very runny. You can also make amazing pureed soups specifically here. I recommend using the fall and winter season when winter squashes or some summer squashes are abundant. We simply need to steam some of them and then put them into our blender or food processor, which will do the rest. The most important thing is that this is not meant to be hard. It is easy to steam our vegetables. It is easy to cook a grain, perhaps experiment with new meal ideas thanks to some new recipes. On days when you have more time, such as the weekend, you can make a diverse array of veggie burgers and vegetable lasagna, as well as healthy homemade pizzas. And the list goes on and on. So I know that sometimes when people think about eating whole food plant based, they think,

Oh, but what will I eat if I take out all these other foods processed mostly in animal foods? What’s left? But the truth of the matter is, hopefully, as you’ve seen through our specific lessons, that there is so much love and so much variety that even if you were to use the same template of ideas as I just shared with you over and over, just by changing up your ingredients, continually using a new variety of vegetables and or beans and or grains and nuts and seeds and herbs and spices, you can create so many wonderful, diverse meals. Finally, when it comes to our snacks or desserts, the best practice here is to make sure that we are reserving our desserts really for in between meals, not right after meal. This will really do wonders for your digestive system.

And so for your snacks or desserts, you can go with something as simple as grabbing a handful of raw nuts or grabbing and washing or simply peeling a fresh fruit for those days or times when you want to get a little more creative, make a fruit based or not based snack, or treat the idea while you can experiment with making some traditional healthy homemade versions of various baked goods. I recommend going for their raw food equivalents because you will get so much nutrients out of them, do your body and health so much more good.

Embracing a Healthier and Sustainable Lifestyle

And the best part is you’re going to save so much time both in preparation and cooking. The average, not based delicacy takes about five minutes to put together. You can also make outstanding pies, cakes, ones even that mimic cheesecake, other ones that mimic most cakes, other ones that mimic ice cream cake.

Truly, the potential is unlimited. And so if you like your desserts, you can have them and enjoy actually the best of treats, treats that actually treat your body, not just your taste buds when you’re eating a healthy whole food plant based diet.