Switching to a Vegan Diet: 5 Things You Should Know Beforehand

You have probably heard of the mass exodus of people moving away from a diet heavy in meat and dairy products towards a vegan diet that has become increasingly popular in recent years. Not only is veganism commonplace among celebrities, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Pamela Anderson, but the dietary philosophy of veganism has also resonated with individuals who do not spend their lives in the spotlight as well.

While it is true that the vegan lifestyle bestows many health benefits on those who adhere to its strict guidelines, this does not mean a person should jump in with both feet without first having some idea of what is involved in eating like a vegan.

Success with this kind of diet involves the proper awareness to maximize your own health and well-being. This is the part of becoming a vegan that many people skip over. With this in mind, here are five successful tips you need to be completely aware of before adopting the vegan way of eating.

1. Variety Matters

A major reason for eating vegan is to improve the condition of your health and well-being. Unfortunately, many people who attempt to go vegan will sabotage their own personal health goals by tending towards a highly restrictive set of food choices.

The human body is actually a dynamic machine that depends heavily on a wide variety of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. So, to get the most out of a vegan type diet, you must be willing to eat a wide variety of foods to ensure that your body is getting a vast array of nutrients from numerous sources.

The truth is that success with any diet depends on making food choices that increase variety to ensure higher volumes of nutrient density being consumed.

2. Stomach PH Matters

It does not matter how organic and nutrient-dense the food you consume is, if your body cannot break down, extract, and ultimately absorb these nutrients.

When this occurs, you will not be able to obtain all the benefits of eating vegan. While many people mistakenly think that the goal is to constantly eat an overly alkaline diet, it is relatively easy to demonstrate scientifically that insufficient stomach acid will significantly impair protein digestion and vitamin B12 absorption.

In fact, the more alkaline the pH of the stomach tends to become, the more difficult it becomes to extract and utilize the other nutrients of the foods you consume as well. This is why many vegans find it easier to digest food when they also consume acids like vinegar or lemon juice which enzymatically help the stomach to promote and complete digestion.

3. Excess Sugar Is Still Bad for You

If you go through the trouble of giving up milk, eggs, meat, cheese, and honey, but continue to eat massive amounts of sugar and drink sugary drinks, you will find that this will erode away any health benefits you might hope to obtain from eating vegan.

To avoid this pitfall, you must come to an understanding of what constitutes healthy food, versus what constitutes overly sweet, sugary junk food. Eating like a vegan does not magically mean that your food choices will not be calorie-dense; hence, this is not a license to consume high volumes of sugar.

Also, vegans who consume excessively high volumes of sugar in their diet are just as prone to weight gain, heart disease, and type two diabetes as any other segment of the population who chooses to abuse their health in this fashion.

For this reason, seasoned vegans tend to recommend against consuming too many sweets, noting that fruits are sufficiently sweet and nutrient-dense enough. Thus, sweets can be easily replaced with fruit smoothies. Using a top-notch smoothie maker, your drink will be ready in no time so that you can kick-start your mornings.

4. The Important Role of Saturated Fats

One of the misconceptions of a vegan approach to eating is that some people think that vegans should not consume saturated fats. This misconception leads to a couple of obvious problems that tend to sabotage sustaining eating like a vegan long term.

The first of these problems is that you need to consume sufficient amounts of saturated fats to help your body obtain and utilize proper amounts of fat-soluble vitamins like vitamins D, E, A, and K.

Secondly, if you avoid all saturated fats, then a vegan’s body’s energy depends mostly on burning plant sugars as fuel for the cells of your body. Since sugar burns faster as a fuel than saturated fats, it is easy to see why vegans often find they need to eat many more times a day than a person who consumes high amounts of saturated fats and lower amounts of refined carbohydrates.

To obtain the benefits of saturated fats from a vegan source, you will want to get healthy quantities of coconut oil and avocados regularly.

5. Research for Your Health

Once you start eating like a vegan more regularly, this is not the time to stop researching about how to improve your health and well-being. Quite to the contrary, your success as a vegan depends on continually educating yourself on the best food choices to optimize your body’s performance.

In other words, you must become an informed vegan to ensure that you are giving your body the nutrients it needs in the quantity it needs them. Additionally, further research into the health aspects and recipes of vegan meals will extend your ability to ensure that your nutrients come from a wide variety of sources. 

Conclusion

If you want to be successful while eating vegan, then you must pay attention to how your body is responding to your vegan diet. No matter what a person claims or says is healthy, you will find that the most strenuous argument raised about healthy eating comes from how your body responds to you over what you put in it.

When you eat foods that satisfy all your body’s health needs, your body responds by functioning properly, healing quickly, digesting well, and providing you with boundless energy. When your diet is not correctly meeting your body’s needs, it will waste no time in letting you know something is wrong. At this point, you should reevaluate if your vegan diet is serving you well or needs some tweaking to help you obtain the great health-promoting benefits you have heard so much about from other successful vegans.