Transitioning to a whole-food-plant-based lifestyle can be surprisingly difficult. Cravings for our old foods can be mighty. Eating mostly whole plant foods can take a lot more time than less healthy foods. We are surrounded by social pressures to eat poorly. If you’ve tried some of the more common strategies—transition gradually, plan ahead, make some meals (soups, stews, sauces) in bulk—and they’ve not been quite enough, here are 5 less-common tactics that might help.
1) Start with a vision. In his classic book, Creating, author Robert Fritz says that we should think about moving into any new lifestyle as a creative act. Almost like a work of art. In switching to a whole plant food lifestyle, it’s easy to be motivated by negatives, the things we want to avoid—obesity, fatigue, diseases, and premature aging. But Fritz points out that it’s hard to “create” a negative. It’s hard to build sustainable inspiration around a “don’t want.” Imagine if Mozart composed his music to “get rid of the silence.”
Instead, to shift into a whole-food-plant-based lifestyle, start by creating an inspirational vision of how you want to feel and look. Include as many sensual details as you can. What will it feel like to breathe? How will your joints feel? How about your energy? Touch in on this vision daily. Keep it fresh by modifying and updating it frequently. You could also include visions of you feeling like a boss at the grocery store, knowing exactly what to get, and effortlessly tossing whole plant food meals together like it’s nothing.
2) The secret of displacement. It’s natural enough to want to get unhealthy foods off our plates—refined, ultra-processed, and other inflammatory foods, for example. But starting out by “getting rid of” a bunch of our old, unhealthy foods often plunges us into deprivation feelings. Instead, consider going on a kind of “culinary treasure hunt,” gradually finding 10 or 12 whole plant food meals that you really love—before you try to let go of any of your old foods. You may find that the whole plant food meals naturally “push your old foods” out the door—that the new foods simply displace the old ones—without much effort on your part.
This can be a challenging approach because we’re all eager for results. But holding off on eliminating our less-healthy foods—until we’ve first found a significant number of new delicious whole plant food dishes—can be a wiser long-term strategy. Think the tortoise and the hare.
3) Stay motivated through a new habit of regularly absorbing inspiring information. For most of us, our motivation to move into a new eating lifestyle comes in waves. We get enthusiastic about a new, healthier way of life, but then “life happens” and our enthusiasm fades into the background. One lesser-known remedy that most veteran healthy eaters use is to build a habit into your life of regularly absorbing inspiring nutritional information. Try to do this daily or almost daily.
Listen to audiobooks or podcasts while you drive or do housework. Watch documentaries or YouTubers while you work in the kitchen. For audiobooks, some good options might include Genius Foods, by Max Lugavere and Paul Gruel MD, Eat to Beat Disease, by William W Li, MD, or How Not to Die, by Michael Greger, MD. For plant-based podcasts, try Green Medicine Radio, The Plant Proof Podcast, and Nutrition Facts with Dr. Greger. For popular documentaries, you might choose Forks Over Knives, What the Health, or The Game Changers. Inspiring and science-heavy YouTubers include Viva Longevity!, Mic the Vegan, and Plant-Based Nutrition Support Group.
4) Trick your body into craving more whole plant foods. Nobody seems to know why, but many people have found—and many natural healthcare clinicians claim—that after eating a significant amount of whole plant foods, especially raw, dark, leafy greens, people actually find themselves craving more fresh whole plant foods. Back in the day, they used to say, “an alkaline body (one that’s consumed lots of fresh whole plants) craves alkaline foods; an acid body craves acid foods.” It has been hypothesized that the microbiome could be the mechanism for this change, because the make-up of the microbiome has been shown to create specific cravings, and we also know that the microbiome changes significantlywhen we eat an abundance of whole plant foods with lots of variety.
Whatever the mechanism, it might be worth a try. To do the experiment, after you’ve found your new whole plant food dishes—the ones that are going to displace many of your old foods—set aside 4 or 6 weeks to significantly increase the fresh whole plant foods in your diet. The simplest way to do this is to try to consume one big green smoothie and one big salad, both packed with dark leafy greens, every day or almost every day.
5) Learn tools to deal with uncomfortable emotions. We often have perfect opportunites to eat fresh, whole plants, but emotions drive us toward the pizza and ice cream. Many of us need some therapy to help us heal these emotions. But simple DIY tools for dealing with stress and difficult emotions can often prove very effective in getting past cravings for unhealthy foods.
* Try breathing practices, such as Buteyko or those from yoga or Buddhism. Renowned psychologist and neuroscientist, known for developing the Polyvagal Theory, Dr. Stephen Porges, says that simply making your exhalations longer than your inhalations for a while (which also happens when we simply sing, chant, or play a woodwind instrument) will down-regulate an over-activated nervous system.
* Experiment with any of the tapping “energy medicine” techniques, such as EFT or TFT. You simply tap lightly on various energy meridian points on your body while saying certain supportive statements.
* Explore a mindfulness approach in which you learn to simply “be present” with your painful emotions, which can give them room to move, shift, dissolve, or be integrated. Check out a system called Internal Family Systems, or Eckhart Tolle’s teachings on what he calls “the pain body.”
Sam Hart is a certified Counselor of Natural Health with a BA in Wholistic Health from the University of Minnesota. He has been coaching people to eat a fresh, whole-food, plant-based lifestyle since 2000. Sam’s newly released book is called, Wildly Regenerative Eating: The ultimate guide to get yourself to eat absurd amounts of whole plants for vibrant health, tigery leanness, and shocking longevity.
