Begin Vegan During the Holidays
This year was my second Thanksgiving as a whole food vegan.
If you’re vegan or plant-based, you know that holidays are generally pretty tough. Usually the vegan is the odd man out. Even if you don’t mention anything about it, inevitably it will come up and make people uncomfortable. You can either bring a dish of your own, so you know you have something to eat. Or you can simply avoid most of the food and risk many comments and questions about why you’re not eating anything. As hard as you might try to fly under the radar, it’s almost impossible for most vegans to get through the holidays without some scrutiny.
My Family and Plant-Based Eating
I am extremely fortunate to have a different situation. It still includes some struggle, but I lucked out and have been able to enjoy a totally vegan Thanksgiving the past two years.
I have a small family and always spend Thanksgiving with my parents and just 2 or 3 other close family members. I was extremely lucky that shortly after going vegan, I learned about the benefits of a whole food plant-based diet. With that knowledge, I showed some books and documentaries to my parents and they quickly decided they wanted to try it out, too.
They were just going to do a test run for a 3 or 4 weeks to see how it went. But as you might know if you’ve already discovered this lifestyle, you will quickly find your life drastically improves in so many ways. Long story short, my parents who had struggled for decades with many chronic health conditions, quickly dropped tons of weight and ditched many of their medicines. They felt so much better, and they never looked back.
The rest of our family has not adopted the lifestyle, but since my parent’s were hosting Thanksgiving, that meant I was able to have a 100% vegan and mostly whole food Thanksgiving. It was totally plant-based, but for the holiday, we indulged a little bit with some more processed plant-foods. And this year it actually ended up just being the three of us, so we got to stuff ourselves silly with all the delicious food!
What I Ate for Thanksgiving
Check out my latest Youtube video below to see what we ate!
Also, if you missed it, you can take a look at what I had last year for my first whole food vegan Thanksgiving.
