Let’s Be Nice To Ourselves + Maple Tangerine Cashew Cream

Can we make a pact right here, right now, with the first fuckery of 2016 as our witness to release ourselves from self-judgement, self-scolding and feeling guilty when we’re not perfect?

That shit needs to go. There’s enough hatred and judgment in the world already.

Having high standards for yourself is awesome. Beating yourself up when you’re not perfect sucks.

And spoiler alert, no one is perfect.

I was at a dinner the other night that lasted 5 hours. It was my girlfriend’s mom’s 75th birthday celebration and a fancy 10 course Chinese dinner for 50 people was how she wanted to party.

Do you know how much one person can consume when there’s a constant stream of food being served for 5 fucking hours?

• So much that people had to exit the restaurant in the middle of dinner to take a brief walk.
• So much that the private bathroom where the dinner was being served made total sense about two hours into dinner.
• So much that I used that bathroom over a half dozen times during dinner, mostly so I could fart.
• So much that after dinner I didn’t fit into the pants that I had arrived in 5 hours earlier.

And get this – the day before the marathon dinner, I ate a huge piece of Banoffee pie. It wasn’t so much pie as it was heroin in pie form. It had bananas, cream, chocolate, toffee and a graham cracker crust. Nothing about this was plant based. Nothing about this was vegan.

It was made by my girlfriend’s mom who made it specifically for us, so you can bet your ass that I ate it.

I haven’t had a green juice or a green smoothie in over a week.

Green salads haven’t been an option, and eating is now a pastime as opposed to a function.

And that’s just how it is when I travel, especially when I travel to Malaysia, which is where I’m writing today’s fuckery from.

But there’s no way I wouldn’t travel just because I can’t partake in my normal bird food routine – no way.

During my 4 weeks here I understand and accept that eating totally plant based is off the table.

I’ll try my best to eat as vegan and plant based as possible, and when that’s not possible, I will be okay.

I will gain some weight, my skin won’t be as clear, and I won’t feel as refreshed, energized and awesome as I usually feel.

And that’s okay, because as soon as I get home, I’ll plant my ass in my kitchen and go back to my routine of eating unprocessed whole plant foods, with little exception.

Here’s the thing. If I didn’t make the choice to let go of guilt and giving myself shit when I don’t eat 100% plant based, 100% of the time, I’d be bandaged up in a coma right now because of self inflicted berating.

But scolding ourselves and feeling guilty for not being perfect doesn’t change anything. It isn’t a motivating factor in making different choices. It makes us feel like shit, and it will carry over into other areas of our life.

Being mean to ourselves is a waste of time and the only way to stop being mean to ourselves is to make the choice to release it and let it go.

When you’re ready to get back on track with healthy eating, you will find your way.

Getting back on track is always harder than getting off track, that’s for damn sure.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m diligent about my plant based eating when I’m back home in my normal routine.

I like to make things as easy for myself as possible and for the most part, eating a healthy plant-based diet all the time makes it ridiculously easy to stay on track and not get swayed by heroin in pie form.

But I wouldn’t have been able to come to this resolve had I not gone back and forth between eating really healthy and not so healthy in the beginning of my plant based journey.

Going back and forth between plant based and not plant based (or even vegan) is normal when transiting to a plant-based diet. It’s just part of the process.

It’s like sex – we all had fumbles in the beginning, but we kept at it until we nailed it. (as a side note, I’m extremely pleased with that sentence)

The bottom line is this – be nice to yourself. Be gentle with yourself. Enjoy your process and learn from it. And the next time you give yourself shit, pretend you’re talking to your best friend and check yourself.

If you wouldn’t talk to your bestie the way you talk to yourself, shut that shit down and lovingly move on.

There’s no need to make the process of changing a huge part of your life (how and what you eat) any harder than it has to be.

Are we good?

Welcome to 2016 – it’s going to be an awesome fucking year.

Today’s recipe is damn good. It’s simple to make and you can use it lots of different ways.

Drizzle it over fresh fruit, put it on toast, add it to your morning oatmeal, pour it over pancakes – you get the idea.

Maple Tangerine Cashew Cream

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Author: Molly Patrick of Clean Food Dirty Girl

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Ingredients

• ▢ ½ cup raw cashews soaked for 10 minutes in water 60g, up to overnight.
• ▢ ½ cup fresh squeezed tangerine juice 120ml // use oranges if you can’t find tangerines
• ▢ 1 teaspoon 100% maple syrup

Instructions

• Drain the cashews and place them in the blender along with the tangerine juice and the maple syrup.
• Blend on high for several minutes until the mixture is extremely creamy and smooth.
• If you use a blender with wide base, like a Vitamix, you may want to double the recipe because it takes more ingredients for the blades to catch it and blend it.

I hope that you have a happy week. May it be filled with talking nicely to yourself.