I'll be vegetarian, but I am NOT giving up cheese.

I was raised on a diet of typical American comfort food. Family dinners at home were the norm, and burgers, chicken, spaghetti with meat sauce and Sunday pot roast were on regular rotation at our house.

For most of my life, I was firmly set in my picky Standard American Diet ways: it was my happy place. And there were cookies.

• I rarely, if ever, ventured out of my culinary comfort zone.

• I insisted I hated foods I had never even tried well into adulthood. 

• I lied about being allergic to things 🍄 to avoid being forced to eat them.

• I ate entirely too much processed junk. Goldfish crackers were life.

• I ate canned pears in light syrup as my serving of fruit and french fries as my serving of vegetables far longer than I care to admit… because if the USDA includes them on their Food Buying Guide for Child Nutrition Programs (Fruits and Vegetables), it absolutely counted.

• I was never without emergency chocolate. 

• I literally never drank water. Ever. Coffee. Coke. Wine. Repeat.

Even a cholesterol level of over 200 in my mid-20s didn’t sway me. I’m pretty sure I left that appointment and hit the drive-thru on my way home. I was young and healthy and didn’t struggle with my weight so obviously I was fine!

Fast forward 25 years. 

My tastes had somewhat evolved, and we had started to incorporate more fresh fruits and veggies into our meals, but overall our diet hadn’t changed all that much. My husband Jeff loved to grill (at one point we owned 3 different grills and a smoker) and while we cut back on red meat, we still ate chicken a couple times a week and there were always chips and cookies in the pantry. We tried to make healthier changes from time to time but we always seemed to fall back into old habits. 

And then our world got turned upside down.

In June of 2019, Jeff’s identical twin brother was diagnosed with late stage pancreatic cancer. Despite some of the best possible care and access to one of the country’s top cancer centers, he ultimately lost his battle six months later. He was 48.

Jeff was devastated. And scared. Not only had he lost his twin brother and best friend, there was now the added worry of knowing they shared the same genetics. Was his health in jeopardy too?

Unbeknownst to me, he had watched the documentary The Game Changers, thanks to a suggestion from a colleague. Out of the blue one day, he told me he was going vegan. 

I’m sorry, what now? Did you say VEGAN?

This man voluntarily set his alarm for 3:00am on a Saturday to throw a pork butt on the smoker and would have happily eaten steak three times a week. He chose eggs and bacon over coffee cake and donuts nine times out of ten, and I could count on one hand how many times I’d seen him eat fruit.

My immediate response?

“Fine, I’ll be vegetarian, but I am NOT giving up cheese.”

I was the one who could take or leave meat and had convinced myself that it did not come from animals… It came off the shelf at the grocery store. As I’d gotten older I’d been eating less and less of it anyway and had tossed around the idea of going vegetarian before.

But vegan? That seemed extreme.

Knowing whatever he learned from that documentary must have been pretty compelling, I decided to watch it myself. I pushed play, firm in my conviction to keep eating cheese. When it was over, I turned to him and said:

“Oh my God, we’re changing EVERYTHING.”

The original plan (at least in my mind) was to slowly use up the non-vegan things we already had while we started incorporating more plant-based options, but I couldn’t suddenly un-know everything I’d just learned.

We were all in.

We bought a bunch of vegan cookbooks and made drastic changes overnight. God bless my kids for trying that first batch of vegan mac & “cheese”. The texture was awful and while it was edible, it was not good. And it certainly didn’t taste anything like cheese. 

There was a lot of trial and error as we figured out how to make this work for us. We tried tweaking a few old favorites to make them vegan. We found a few new recipes we really liked. At the beginning, we also planned “cheat” days where we could eat whatever we wanted because it helped us stay on track the rest of the time. 

A few months after we went plant-based, I decided I had earned a “day of cheese.”

🥯 A bagel and cream cheese for breakfast

🧀 A cheese quesadilla with extra cheese for lunch

🍕 The greasiest, most delicious New York-style cheese pizza for dinner

I enjoyed Every.Single.Bite. My digestive tract, however, had something else to say about it and I spent two hours in the bathroom. 💩

Not too many cheese cravings after that little experiment. 😂

The longer we ate this way, the more I learned, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know. 

I read tons of scientific research and books about whole food plant-based nutrition.

I watched more documentaries.

I devoured blog post after blog post so I could learn from other peoples’ experiences. 

I found and joined an amazing online community and meal planning service that provided the support and structure we were looking for to make this lifestyle change sustainable.

I earned a certificate in Plant-based Nutrition.

I earned another certification in Holistic Nutrition.

So, is this just who we are now?

Yep!

We’ve been eating a whole food, plant-based diet since February 2020 and we’ll never go back. 

• We’ve lost weight.

• We’ve lowered our cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure and A1C. 

• We’ve eliminated heartburn, acid reflux and after-meal bloating and discomfort. 

• My cycles regulated and became less painful and my perimenopause symptoms have been almost non-existent. 

• My chronic constipation improved drastically. 

• Jeff is successfully managing cardiovascular disease through diet and lifestyle. He did start taking a statin after his heart disease diagnosis, but was able to avoid a stent. The symptoms that led him to the doctor in the first place have disappeared completely and he just completed his first half marathon.

And the best part? We eat as much as we want! 

When everything you're putting in your body comes from whole foods, you don’t need to count calories or restrict portion size.

When we’re hungry, we eat. If we’re still hungry, we eat more. 

And we are far from perfect.

🍟 We still eat out, and sometimes I order the fries. 

🤷‍♀️ We don’t beat ourselves up if we eat something that isn’t plant-based. 

🥞 I still put (vegan) chocolate chips in my banana bread and entirely too much maple syrup on my pancakes. 

🍪I will eat my mom’s not-even-remotely-plant-based sugar cookies and zucchini bread every single time.

But at the end of the day, I now crave the healthy foods I used to turn my nose up at and I almost never think about the ultra-processed junk I lived on for years. On the rare occasion I do eat it, it doesn’t taste all that good and I usually feel crappy afterwards.

I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that I used to feel like that all the time… and I thought it was normal!

Following a whole food plant-based lifestyle is not about restriction. Yes, we’ve removed animal products from our meals, but I eat so much more variety than I ever did before. I never feel deprived and our meals are full of flavor.

My tastes have changed to the point that I now crave cauliflower and tofu rather than Goldfish crackers and chicken tenders. I try new things all the time, fuel my body with delicious, nutritious foods and am happier and healthier overall. 

What’s not to love about that?