Vegetables Schmegetables
I once worked at a vegan restaurant. Their menu was a health nut’s dream: oversized bowls stuffed with salads, savory steel cut oats, green smoothies, gluten free avocado toast, and almond milk adaptogenic lattes abound.☁️🥑✨
…and no one could stomach it.
Yup. Not one single person on that dedicated staff could digest our own food without crippling digestive troubles. Not only that, but if we did eat off the menu for our breaks, we’d have to supplement with meat and cheese from home, since the plants alone weren’t enough to satisfy us through the last four hours of a shift. 🤷🏻♀️ And yet, not one of us questioned whether these foods were truly the epitome of health. Why?
Everyone knows: vegetables are *the* healthiest of health foods. From the time we’re toddlers, we’re playing with veggie puzzles and trying to eat vegetable mush from baby-sized silicone spoons. And by the time we’re adults, we’re so indoctrinated into the vegetable-crazed chorus, that we rally against food companies for adding sugar to those very same vegetable purees we were raised on, charging them with the most unforgivable sin: added sugar. Never mind that we collectively turn a blind eye to the fact that babies prefer sweetness, or that human breast milk has more carbohydrates than any other mammalian milk. Why would we trust our children’s taste preferences, when we could put all our faith in vegetables?
Here’s what I’m proposing:
Contrary to our proselytizing maxim…
Vegetables are not the be-all and end-all.
There. I said it. Now here’s the why:
1. Fiber sucks in recovery.
You know how that vegan restaurant food was hard to stomach? That was for someone eating a normal amount of food. In contrast, during recovery, normal means eating upwards of 10,000 calories a day. Maybe you won’t be eating this amount your entire recovery, but the fact remains: you’re going to be eating a lot more food compared to someone who never starved themselves. And while your digestive system is learning to reboot itself, the absolute worst punishment you could put on yourself is attempting to meet those heightened needs with vegetables. I talk WAY more about this in my ebook, so you can check out more on that here.
I promise you: the bloating, distention, and slowed motility of recovery are enough to handle without the added curveball of pressuring yourself to eat more fiber. Do yourself a huge favor and eat the nutritionally denser food. Your body will be worlds happier this way, trust me.
2. Animals have vitamins, too.
Yes, really. Eating animals doesn’t just mean rewarding yourself with high quality protein and fat. Animals foods provide a cornucopia of vitamins and minerals. Think: K2, B vitamins (especially B12), carotenoids (bioavailable vitamin A), D3, iodine, and zinc. Bonus: all of the nutrients in animal foods are vastly more bioavailable (i.e. more readily absorbed and used by our bodies) than the nutrition in plants.
But not only is the nutrition from animals foods more effortlessly utilized by our bodies, but animal foods contain all the micronutrients we need to survive. Compare that with vegetables, which fail to provide us with complete nutrition. Heck, compare that with fruit, which is 1,000x more palatable than celery and gives us a higher concentration of vitamins and minerals with a lower concentration of antimetabolites.
Bottom line: Vegetables are harder on the digestive system and harder to assimilate than ‘processed’ food, fruit, and animal food. If you’re having trouble digesting food in recovery, I guarantee you, it’s not because you need to eat more vegetables. It’s because you need to let go of more rules.
3. chill out.
Vegetables aren’t here to save the world. They’re just vegetables. Shocking, I know. But seriously: stop pressuring yourself to center every meal around vegetables. Actually, just stop pressuring yourself to even include vegetables in every meal.
There are multiple tribes who do just that: the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, the Chukotka of the Russian Arctic, and the Masai, Samburu, and Rendille of Africa are all examples of entire populations that eat carnivorously. I’m not saying you have to be a carnivore; I’m just pointing out that your body can thrive on most anything that’s edible, even if you choose to live a completely vegetable-less existence.
In reality: you have the amazing gift of being an omnivore. That’s like being the ultimate off-roading, eating machine. You don’t need to sweat what you eat that much, aside from determining whether it’s edible or not.
So stop worrying so much about vegetables. I promise, if you don’t feel like eating them, you won’t keel over and die.
In the end, recovery’s like going through a forced self-development. No one goes through recovery without changing their outlook on food and life for the better. Recovering forces you to learn two very important life lessons:
Chill out.
Let IT go.
Nobody makes it through life alive. No food is here to cleanse you of the human condition, and no amount of "perfect eating” is going to alter the course of your life indefinitely (y’know, aside from crippling you with an eating disorder).
So, enjoy your food. Eat what you want, whether that means having lots of vegetables, or none at all. Because when it really comes down to it, eating is not a high stakes game. It’s just a way to survive. And, in your case:
Eating is how you recover.
XO,
Maria
