Will recipes cost more if you weigh more?
This is not a one-size fits all. However, as a ravenous and hungry runner training for anything from a marathon to a sprint, this food never leaves me hungry. I had one student in a cooking class I taught, a multiple myeloma patient (one of the deadliest forms of cancer) lose 120 pounds without counting a single calorie, without ever being hungry and loving the food. She loved making the sweet potato muffins for 150 people every week at her church. She said, “the whole church was eating vegan, and they didn’t even know it!” If in the unlikely event you are still hungry with any of these recipes, you can always spend another dime and add a half cup of additional beans or whole grains. The largest animals on the planets are vegans – muscle development is not an issue.
The daily dietary recommendations in this book are based on the food recommendations from the doctors and dieticians at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Their recommendations, which I followed in my menu plan includes a satisfying daily plan of 2 or more servings of beans or legumes, 5 or more servings of whole grains, 4 or more servings of vegetables and 3 or more servings of fruit. These are the minimum numbers to maintain health.
The beautiful thing is that if you are replacing meat and dairy with all this, you’ll have plenty of protein, calcium and all the other nutrients to go out and run a 26 mile marathon. You’ll also have more than 40 grams of daily fiber, compared to the average Western diet which is lucky to contain 20 grams of fiber. And you should never have to worry much about the colon diseases and problems that plague so many.
I also checked prices constantly online and had Google alerts set for anything vegan and low-cost, budget-trimming savings. Using my financial planning background, I put a price tag on everything and boiled it down to 150 of my most favorite, tastiest and least expensive recipes. These are recipes I served my children when they were small and were completely captive to what was in our garden and on our dinner table. When it was their birthday at school, they asked for fruit or carrot cake birthday cake.
I followed and still follow the consumer price index, I researched government food subsidies and in my capacity as a media consultant, did media training for the National Watermelon Promotion Board, which is at the very bottom of the government’s USDA’s check-off program. Meat and dairy are at the top. So I am intimately familiar with how this program works. Lycopene-rich watermelon gets the raw end of this deal.
