No Whey!

Today's post is dedicated to my ritual breakfast. For years now, I have been having a shake for breakfast. No, not Tommy Lasorda, and the shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and a sensible dinner thing. But Jane would argue with you. It is a sensible dinner, and generally a sensible lunch too since I'm a 'brown-bagger' bringing my lunch to work most days.

Anyway, that breakfast I mentioned consisted of a cup of milk, a scoop of whey protein powder, a banana and a tablespoon of almond butter. Yum! However, do you see any problems there? I was very concerned that my favorite breakfast was now going to be off limits or at least, not so palatable with the milk/whey substitutions I was required to make. But thankfully, that was not the case.

I've used soy milk, plain and vanilla, sweetened and unsweetened, almond milk (same variations) and rice milk... All were equally palatable, but I've decided on the unsweetened vanilla almond milk as my liquid of choice. As for protein powder, I'm using the soy powder available at my local Trader Joe's. It's relatively inexpensive, but not as tasty as the whey powder.

Overall, there's almost no difference in taste. No whey!

Lane

How it all Vegan

As I mentioned in my last post. My wife is making us over as vegans. She's got every disease known to mankind in her gene pool and we're hitting our middle-aged stride. There's breast cancer, colon cancer, brain cancer, bone cancer and now liver cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, etc. So, even though we're both relatively healthy, if sedentary and a bit overweight, she wants to ensure she doesn't hit the genetic jackpot if she can avoid it.

We're both doing OK ourselves, but with this last bout of relative cancer, she freaked out, and so now we're vegan. To be quite frank, I'm kind of surprised. Her biggest joy in the epicurean world has been ice cream, followed closely by chocolate. And we both enjoy the out-of-home dining experience. But, in the division of labor in our household, she is the cook, which makes her the pack leader. Where she goes, I follow...

Lately Jane, my wife, has taken to borrowing books on various health topics from our local library. The latest book, "Dr. Neal Barnard's Program to Reverse Diabetes Now" was her main inspiration for veganism, diabetes being one of the more prevalent diseases in her family tree. Dr. Barnard proposes a low-fat vegan diet to help prevent diabetes, and his anecdotal evidence was quite compelling.



Couple that with her increasing distress at how meat products get to our table, it was a sure bet that we'd be vegetarians at the least. I mean, this woman practices the catch and release program with any insect that makes its way into our home! No matter what stage of sleep I might be in, if there's a spider in our house, I have to escort him out.

Hopefully all this healthy eating will pay off. As I mentioned yesterday, I've already dropped 8 pounds without an ounce of effort on my part. I sure can't complain about that!

Lane

Gone Vegan

Hello World

I'm a 40-something married man. Up until one month ago, I was a carnivore. At that point, my wife decided that we are going vegan. And since my wife does the cooking, I agreed.

Do I miss meat? No. Am I hungry? No. Am I getting enough protein? Yes. Oh and by the way, in the past 4 weeks, I've lost 8 pounds..... and I haven't done any exercise. She tells me that's next.... I Love My Wife!

The only difficulty that we've encountered thus far has been eating at restaurants. We love to go out to eat. We still can, but our choices have been dramatically limited. For instance, we went to one of our favorite salad restaurants. We thought salad, vegan? No problem, right? Wrong! We weren't able to order off of the menu! Every salad contained some sort of animal product -- meat, cheese, etc. Not to mention their famous, wonderful zucchini bread is now completely off limits (eggs, milk, butter) However, we have have found several options that are working well for us.

My wife also found several great vegan cookbooks at the library. In future posts, I'll let you know my favorite meals.

Lane