A Plate Full of Knowledge

Those three items are keeping me intellectually busy:

• Two students in Nutrition & Health from the Wageningen University & Research, Eva Everloo and Ella Stephens, have produced an excellent online course on EdX – “Plant Based Diets: Food for a Sustainable Future”. I will share some of their wisdom and insights later. The course is now closed for enrollment but I reckon it will reopen one day.
• The new book “The Plant Based Athlete” finally reached my home. I’m on chapter 3, “It’s time to have the protein talk”. This book is well written, I highly recommend it already. It’s exciting as it promises to help you make a personalized choice, regardless of what your motivation and fitness levels are.
• I picked up a new hobby: reading labels on packages in the supermarket. The webinar “Food as Medicine”, in Dutch (“Voeding als Medicijn”) organized by Ivo Houben of How2BeHealthy, among other things, how to recognize healthy ingredients on food labels.

Glass Half Full: Protein Transition

Whether it’s DNA, karma or education, I have had to train myself to take a positive outlook on life. It is sometimes challenging to discover a silver lining in the flow of negative messages surrounding us. I choose to see the three aforementioned nuggets of knowledge as anecdotal evidence that the world is warming up (no, not talking about the climate) to the idea of a protein transition.

We need to eat less meat and adopt a plant-based diet. For the sake of our health, that of our planet and – yes, these are big words – the survival of the human race. Obviously I suffer, like everyone else, a condition called “confirmation bias”: I look for evidence that reinforces my convictions.

Hence my pledge to back my standpoint with objective evidence. Thanks to the sources I mentioned before I will come back to that!

Orange Dish

In the spirit of the European Football Championship (Soccer) and as the Netherlands are playing tonight I’m happy to close this piece with an orange dish. Thanks to Boerschappen for this “Oranje AVG”, it’s delicious. It is yummy and it is based on locally sourced ingredients, as always with Boerschappen.

• Just mix small potatoes with oil, pepper, salt and paprika powder and bake them in your oven for 30 minutes.
• Grill orange cauliflower (it’s extra full of vitamin A) for a few minutes in a pan and add them to the potatoes for the last 10 minutes and put a little (Dutch) cheese on top to melt.
• In a pan saute some garlic and onions and bake mushrooms and/or a vegetarian burger in a bit of butter (learned from Ivo: to bake, real butter is beter than olive oil).

Voilà: an orange potatoe-vegetable-burger dish. Full of healthy carbohydrates, proteins and fat and micronutrients. My photograph doesn’t do the dish justice. It really is delicious!

Based on a this dish, here is a reminder of what constitutes healthy foods, based on the Canadian government’s food guide.

Source: https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/

Enjoy, and stay tuned!

After this morning’s run I wanted to eat a healthy breakfast that would be ready in a few minutes. Looked in our fridge and decided to put together a healthy bread spread based on the ingredients featured in the picture above: fresh spinash leaves, grilled eggplant, tomatoes, red pepper, black olives, tabasco.

Started by chopping the spinash leaves, and proceeded to do the same for the other ingredients.

I just proceeded by mixing and, using a spoon and fork, created an ugly-looking but – as it turns out – delicious spread! Then tasted it, added tabasco, pepper, salt, a bit of oil and vinegar… done!

The result: a delicious and healthy slide of bread for breakfast!

Hope this gives you some ideas. Please share your own recipes with me!

No biggy, though. What I realized is: I initiated my health transformation longer ago than I claimed. The good thing about it is that you may learn from my experience and hopefully you’ll start to do the right thing quicker than I did.

Around 2008, halfway through my fourties, I went through a minor mid-life crisis. It may sound ridiculous but one of the reasons was my condition. My “dad bod” – my beer belly if you will – was bugging me. In part because that’s no pretty sight of course but, more importantly, belly fat is an indicator that you may be prone to vascular and heart diseases and even cancer. The cancer tidbit I learned later. Along with many more interesting facts when reading about the health consequences of one’s diet.

Luckily a checkup revealed that apart from being midly overweight I suffered no real issue. Nonetheless, I decided not to take chances and to start sporting. My choices: tennis and fitness, high intensity interval training. The group I joined at the local Basic Fit and the trainers team helped me enjoy the experience. Not to mention my friendly tennis partner. I went from no sports to training three times a week. And it felt great!

Did this improve my Body Mass Index? No. Hardly any noticeable improvement booked. BMI may not be the greatest indicator but scale and mirror don’t lie. Other the years I could see that my progress was at least very slow.

Fitness buddies and instructors kept saying that the change I was looking for was “20% sports, 80% diet”. Problem was: “what about the diet part?” You hear lots of theories, tips and tricks. Who do you believe? How do you start?

It took me a few years to decide to make a change to my life and to find how to implement it. Nowadays I am around where I want to be. Compared to the start referred above I lost about 10 kilos and I never felt better in my body and mind.

My message: if you want to lose weight and get healthier, don’t expect sports alone to make a big dent! Think about a good diet plan. If my blog posts don’t help, go to a dietitian or look for sources that you feel comfortable with.

A few suggested sources to inspire you:

Plant-Based Dietitian Julieanna Hever. Julieanna regularly posts recipes and interesting information about intermittent fasting.

No Meat Athlete. These guys’ podcast is great and their website is full of additional stuff to help you sport – even run ultra marathons – and eat plant-based food.

If you’re French-speaking listen to the BomBomCast. Unfortunately no news since a year from Yasmina and Bénédicte, the founders of BomBomLife. I completely subscribe to their ideas and enjoyed their podcast.

For my Dutch-speaking followers, one of the thought-leaders in the Netherlands as far as plant-based food is Isabel Boerdam, “the hip vegetarian” (de hippe vegetariër). She has been able to establish the annual “week without meat” here, a recurring event that is widely supported by various brands. She / her company publishes recipes on a very regular basis.

Hope this helps. Any thoughts, tips or tricks to share? Please do so!