An Open Letter to Anyone Who Wants to Feel Like a Million Bucks

Those jalapeño poppers you have on rare occasions aren’t going to seal the fate of your health.
The French fries you have a few times a year aren’t a big deal when you zoom out over the span of decades.
The big fluffy delicious piece of cake you eat on your birthday each year isn’t a problem. 

Also, the salad you ate two weeks ago isn’t doing anything for you right now. 
The green smoothie you drank last month is no longer giving you that glow.
The plant based meal plan you batched earlier this year with all the quinoa, kale, lentils, and beets was awesome, but it’s not helping your body today. 

It’s what you eat on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis that has the most impact on your health—positive or negative. 

It’s not complicated to eat healthy. When you get hungry, eat plants that haven’t been fucked with too much. And repeat. 

It’s not that people don’t want to be healthy. Who doesn’t want to be energetic, free of lifestyle-related illnesses, and the healthiest patient their doctor sees every year? Even my neighbor, Naked Tom, wants to be healthy, and he spends his days chain-smoking, barbecuing “wieners,” and drinking Bud Light in nothing but tie-dye Crocs. And I mean NOTHING but Crocs. 

But here’s why Naked Tom, and a whole lot of other people, don’t eat mostly whole plant foods—even though they want to be healthy:

Because plants don’t magically cook themselves, and there are too many convenient alternatives. 

Eating whole plant foods requires time spent in the grocery store and then more time spent in the kitchen. And if you don’t want to spend time gathering and cooking those ingredients, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other options that require little to no time at all. Those options might not send you to the hospital today, but eventually, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, they will take their toll. But because they don’t cause life-threatening damage TODAY, there isn’t enough reason for most people to make healthy long-term changes. 

Until the cumulative effect of daily unhealthy food choices adds up, say in the form of a heart attack, most people will continue to eat whatever’s easiest. And eating a whole-food plant-based diet is not the easiest. Cooking wieners on a grill in nothing but Crocs is way easier. Bless you, Naked Tom, bless you. 

I wish everyone who doesn’t eat plant based (over 99% of the global population) could experience what it feels like to be nourished from the inside out.
I wish everyone could get a taste of what it is to wake up energized and refreshed.
I wish we all could live in a body free of inflammation, with a balanced and healthy gut, optimal insulin sensitivity, a kick-ass immune system, and an appetite for life and super healthy food.

I wonder if that would inspire people to say, “I’m done with easy alternatives. Please teach me how to grocery shop and cook healthy plant based food. I wish I’d done this decades ago.”

You don’t know how you’re going to feel when you fuel with plants on a regular basis until you do it. And it is never too late to find out. 

Join Clean Food Dirty Girl, and I’ll teach you how. 

Then you’ll know. 
Once you experience life in a plant fueled body, it changes everything. 
Yes, it takes some time.
Yes, you will have to become friends with your kitchen.
Yes, it sucks sometimes. 
But it’s incredibly rewarding and sucks way less than the cumulative effect of processed, convenient, easy foods.

Tell me in the comments below what you can eat today that’s plant based. It can be as simple as an apple or as involved as a Vegan Carrot Dog that even Naked Tom would love. 

Xo

Molly