Why I Choose to "Lean" Vegan/Plant-Based

Chia Seed Pudding from Republique in Los Angeles

It is now my job to look good. I officially acknowledge and accept this reality ever since I’ve chosen to pursue a career in acting. I’m currently manifesting seeing myself on the covers of those magazines right now promoting the latest in my impressive string of accomplishments…ahhh, feels good! It’s comforting to know that I’m thinking positively about such an uncertain future, especially on such a national medium. But it also doesn’t surprise me that I do feel positively about this reality for myself. I suppose due to some amazing twist of spiritual and existential DNA design, I’ve never been one of those people who pick up magazines, look through the glossy pages and berate their own bodies for not looking how those models/actors look. There was always a part of me that understood how unfair to myself it would be to compare what I had to what I was seeing on those pages. I always thought that if anyone had the money or the time these people had, they too would look like a million bucks as well! However, young me (#slay) recognized not everyone had the time or the money to be able to achieve looks equal to those on the pages of those magazines. It have me a sense of comfort to think this way. More importantly, it allowed me to disconnect how I felt about my body with what I was seeing in these magazines and enjoy the content that was being presented. Maybe it was my mother’s incessant stream of love and declarations of my beauty (thanks Mom!) or the simple fact we were too poor to even have magazines to look at, but my self-esteem in terms of body comparisons was very healthy. So healthy in fact, that I was looked at in disbelief by a high school teacher and classmates when I declared I wouldn’t change anything on my body through plastic surgery because I like and am pleased with the way I look! It honestly made me sad to realize that I was the only one who felt this way.

Now, all this doesn’t mean I didn’t have times when I was not viewing my body with the love she deserved. Ups and downs have been had, for sure. The “Freshman 15” was more of a “Freshman 30” for me, which thankfully distributed itself between my breasts and my behind. Many people would not believe me when I would tell them my actual weight wondering “where it all was?!” I credit my mother for this. She was and still is a total fox. I also credit my mother for a healthy number of instances in which I would question and judge my body because really, what are moms for??? I have a clear and fond memory of this delightful woman reminding me that I have small/dainty hands and feet/ankles and if I kept eating as I was I would end up looking disproportionate with so much weight on a body with such small hands and feet...I was not pleased and she still laughs about it. Her statement did, however, allow me a perspective that made me pause and look at what I was eating.

Real change didn’t happen until I moved to LA with my sister. Seeing as I had just moved out and had no job, I had to eat what my sister ate. She was vegan at the time (a vegan in California?? Shocking!). Needless to say, my introduction to the vegan lifestyle was what you could call a crash course. Thankfully I’m an adaptable eater and my sister is a bomb ass cook so I took to it fairly quickly! Because a majority of my diet was plant-based, when I did start making money, I was able to buy less meat and experiment with plant-based recipes. My exposure made me feel comfortable enough with my vegan vocabulary that those things felt more familiar to me than for most I observed around me also trying to make better decisions. I started following more vegan chefs, researching more recipes, and being more adventurous when ordering at restaurants. Through my research and experimentation, I started recognizing what works and what doesn’t work for my body. I was finally noticing what foods had what effects on my body and my systems. For as long as I can remember, I suffered from gas and bloating. I believe it was in grade school that my mom introduced me to soy milk in order to lessen the amount of bloat I was experiencing. It helped somewhat, but I would still feel uncomfortable sometimes. Experimenting with vegan food and dairy alternatives had me feeling better in my own skin.

The turning point where I decided to commit to taking a break from eating red meat as well as dairy was after a barbecue for a friend’s birthday. Given that I had been experimenting and changing my diet, my body had naturally gotten used to less red meat in my system. I’m not crazy though because once I saw that grilled meat, I said “Sign me up!!!” A short time later, I was sitting in my car with some of the worst gas I could remember having in a long time. I knew exactly where it was coming from and I decided that day I would cut out red meat, as well as dairy, from my diet officially. I threw in chicken as well but have since introduced it back into my diet in small doses (I accepted that I can’t say no to a crunchy, juicy piece of fried chicken mmm!). I didn’t know how long the decision would last. I am human after all. I was, however, determined to dedicate some time to distance myself from red meat and dairy specifically in order to study the effects my body would undergo. I also knew that it had to be done if I wanted to feel better overall.

Full disclosure, the REAL real reason I gave up red meat, dairy, and chicken was to manage and regulate my acne. I had, until this point, been suffering from cystic acne. For those who aren’t aware, this is when the root of your pimple is so deep in your skin that they cause irritation and swelling that can’t be easily extracted. Ever since being on a more plant-based diet, I noticed changed and certain areas of my skin feeling smoother underneath the surface. I didn’t get to the point of “I’ll try anything” just yet. Reading the horror stories of Accutane showed me that I was not yet prepared to delve that deeply or act that decisively about trying a heavy duty treatment to treat my acne. All that being said, I had come to the conclusion that the thing I could control and act on at the time and in that moment, was to change my diet.

Now, in my humble opinion, diets are hella wack. I had never liked the idea of a diet nor had I ever gone on one. As I mentioned before, my weight centered itself around my breasts and ass. When I would find myself feeling “not healthy” I would lay off the good stuff and make better choices for a while but never for any extended amount of time. I knew I could never thrive in a state of deprivation, which is what a “diet” in the modern societal sense requires. Every diet you read about, something is being taken away that you can’t have. Whether they are aware or not, people do strange things when they are in a state of deprivation. The statistics of drug use and underage drinking clearly illustrates this fact. You try telling someone they can’t do something and see how fast they do it. No, I’m not a scientist, but that shit is blatant AF. So when it came time for me to make a choice, I knew I couldn’t just “go on a diet”. I needed to completely change my relationship to food. My entire mentality about how I related to food needed to go through a complete transformation. At that barbecue I realized that food controlled me. I knew what was causing both my acne and my gas. It was now up to me to take the data my body was giving me and finally pay attention.

To tell you this change was easy would underestimate and undervalue all of the work I had done leading up to that point and through the process. I did, however, finally feel like I had a say in what I ate and it felt interesting and powerful. I had never been super definitive about what I would cut out from my diet. In fact, I would find myself often wishing that I were either a really picky eater or really allergic to certain foods so that I wouldn’t eat as much. Yes, ridiculous I know. But I honestly felt like I had zero control over what I would put in my mouth sometimes. Diets and I may be oil and water, but I needed some rules. Thus was born the “lean vegan/plant-based” mentality. I wanted to give myself the space to make better choices and because I had decided to diets are not for me, some fundamental shifts within my psyche had to take place in terms of how I viewed food and my part in how I viewed food. I realized what I was really looking for was a change in my lifestyle with food. My path finally made its way known to me a week and a half later when I started waking up feeling lighter than I ever had before. Even better than all those times I would make halfway decent attempts at creating real change in my diet. I started to realize the the amount of gas I was usually carrying around in my gut was extremely depleted, if not gone. The closest I can describe the new sensations I was feeling in my body is to imagine a brick constantly sitting and applying pressure on your stomach just above your pelvis and feeling the constant need to fart and having to hold it in. Well, that brick was officially gone!!! I could walk freely in this world knowing that something as simple as literal walking wouldn’t make me explode at the most inopportune moment. You don’t know what kind of pressure that puts on a person who suffers from high anxiety.

Once this feeling started becoming my new reality, my entire perspective and intention behind my eating habits changed. Improving my skin’s health was now no longer the only thing I felt could benefit from my making this change, feeling light was. Making choices, wherever I found myself, became infinitely easier within the new parameters I’d clued in on from what my body was telling me. I was finally listening! I found it easier and less stressful zeroing in on only certain parts of the menu instead of an entire plethora of choices when you’ve got no guidelines for yourself. It’s interesting, the more rules/guidelines I made for myself, the more free I felt about my choices. Consequently, the more free I felt, the more confident I was becoming. I knew, and more importantly only I could know how healthy the choices I was making for myself made me feel.That in and of itself gave me the confidence I didn’t know I was lacking. I started having imaginary conversations in my head saying things like “How you gon’ tell ME how I’m feeling??” Little did I know that these would be practice sessions I would need to keep in mind for actual conversations I would later (and still do to be honest) have, defending my choices. People, although well-meaning (most of the time), can be annoying. I’d flirted with the vegan lifestyle long before making the final choice to cut off red meat, dairy, and chicken (I still ate/eat fish and seafood although I’m working on reducing my intake) enough that I’d been bombarded with questions and judgments from said people. Two things I’ve learned about “people” from this change in my lifestyle is that they have a LOT of opinions and that food is a MAJORLY personal issue.

Although my new “diet” transformed into something deeper and more internal in nature, I continued using my skin as the marker for any consistency in my habits. In the beginning days of making changes, my skin was acting all crazy. I would make a change, wait for the results, and then adjust accordingly when necessary. My overarching mandate on the daily for the food I ate now was if it didn’t A) make me feel like farts AND B) didn’t break me out, then it was fair game. Following some time with this new mandate, my skin started to regulate itself. Cut to about two years into my new eating habits and I started realizing more and more how close I was to naturally clearing my skin. Success!

What I failed to notice, was the weight loss. Keep in mind that I love my mother more than I can say, however, I will always have the memory of her pleading for my dainty hands and feet while the rest of me got too large for them to handle a la “You’re turning violet, Violet!” It was enough to keep me in check all the years leading up to my decision to change my diet. Following my decision, keeping myself in check ceased to be necessary seeing as I was always in check! Feeling comfortable in my skin and body became my everyday norm and I HERE and LIVING for it. You might be wondering how I failed to notice my weight loss and thinking me a liar, or what have you. The thing is, feeling comfortable about my skin and body make me no longer look at/think about/invest any energy in the “optics” of my body. My only concern ever was “Do I feel good?” after eating anything. I actually started buying more skirts and flowy silhouettes when I felt my heaviest and didn’t want to wear any of my tight pants. In size large! I kid you not, I was 100% comfortable buying that size. It took me a while to get there, but I really was ok and accepting about the size of my body which was flirting around a size 10. At my heaviest I weighed 165lbs. I’m happy to report that my ass has not stepped on a scale more than a handful of times over the past few years. Firstly because I didn’t need a scale to tell me how bloated I felt (trust me that the bloat made itself known), and secondly/more importantly, the way I felt had nothing to do with numbers. My first clue into my weight loss was my old boss seeing me in the office one day and exclaiming “You’re wasting away! I mean, you look good, but what are you doing??” I’d had a slight inkling but it wasn’t until that statement that I started paying more attention.

These days I’m pleased to say that I have very little worries when it comes to food. My relationship with food is now one of my favorite things in life. The kitchen has a renewed aura around it providing me with comfort, familiarity, and inspiration to try new things. As previously stated, I’m not picky. But I waste no more time in wishing I wasn’t because it’s a part of my personality I thoroughly enjoy and make use of to open my experience to a plethora of flavors! I now view food as a friend that nourishes me and as a tool to achieve the stasis my body craves. None of it would have been accomplished without my initial shift in perspective. My decision to lean vegan/plant-based is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, guaranteed. I credit it with kickstarting the necessary work and energy (key) I needed to improve my health and life. The beauty of my mindset is that I’ve removed all negative thought obstacles in my way. I take full ownership of eliminating whatever does make me feel like farts so I can be more open and free to fully indulge and enjoy all the things that don’t along with the added bonus of weight loss! Who wouldn’t want to live like this?!