The 30 Day Great American Vegan Challenge – Half Way Report

by Dec 17, 2019

The Saturday evening after Thanksgiving, while feeling repulsed with all the turkey and stuffing I gobbled down days earlier, I accidentally watched The Game Changers, a documentary now on Netflix that explores the sports performance benefits of eating a plant-based diet.

I was convinced. Immediately hooked. While the film has its critics, it hit all the right notes for me. So, I decided to embark on an experiment. I’d try a plant-based diet – no meat, dairy, eggs, or honey – for 30 days. I’ve humbly called it The 30 Day Great American Vegan Challenge, and I’m smack in the middle of it.

Here’s an update on:

  • How it’s going
  • How I’m feeling
  • The climate Benefits
  • What happens come January 1st

But first, a quick aside. Today, my childhood friend Lou wrote from Ireland to tell me he enjoyed the podcast in which I talked about the decision to go plant-based. But he felt I did our listeners a disservice by failing to mention that I was a star athlete in high school. So here it is:

I was the quarterback of our Byram Hills Bobcats high school football team, a three-sport captain, and an All-section athlete (that’s Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, and Dutchess counties) in football, basketball, and lacrosse. My 99-yard touchdown run against Hackley my senior year still stands as a New York State record. I was also an All-County strong safety on defense with eight interceptions my senior year. That year our defense recorded seven shutouts. In my junior, I played free safety and split time at wide receiver and quarterback. That team recorded eight shutouts. Our football team’s combined record, my junior and senior year, was 19-1. We finished #2 in New York State my junior year and #4 my senior year. Glory days? Big time. Lou, our friend Stenz, and I were co-captains. Being named the captain of that football team by my friends and coaches is still, to this day, the greatest honor I have ever received.

Okay, so I love sports. All of them except hockey, which is not a sport because there’s no ball. But even that’s a contradiction because I now live in the South and have only my 9-year old son Shep to blame for my newfound love of NASCAR (also no ball), which of course, is problematic for an avowed climate activist. There’s just something unbelievably electric about the night race at Bristol when the sun sets against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the roar of the engines fills the air.

One more aside, if you’re a Democratic politician reading this and you want to understand America, I highly recommend attending The Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte on Memorial Day. I’ve never felt my Americanism more powerfully than on the field that day, except perhaps when I visited the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Both experiences are deeply moving and profound.

To the update on The 30 Day Great American Vegan Challenge

1. How It’s Going

Eating a plant-based diet is easy. That doesn’t mean I necessarily want to keep doing it, but I find it very simple to execute. The easiness of it, though, could have something to do with life circumstances. I have three young kids. Shep is my oldest. Dash is 7. Fini is 4. So what do we eat?

A. Blaze Pizza probably four times a week. I now get the cauliflower crust and vegan cheese (you can also add vegan chorizo), and I find the pizza tastes better this way.

B. Chipotle. Lots and lots of it. You can get a ginormous, tasty burrito that will fill you up. No meat necessary. Though you can also add Chipotle’s spicy plant-based meat if you like.

C. Burger King. Okay, this is just me in my family, but I take a lot of pleasure in eating Impossible Whoppers. It just tickles me that the Whopper now comes in a plant-based meat version. To me, the Impossible Whopper symbolizes the changing times we get to live in.

D. We eat a lot of cereal. Like all day. For me, it’s the multigrain O’s from Trader Joe’s. I toss in a handful of walnuts, a few raisins, a banana and some blueberries. That’s some vegan gold right there.

E. I’ve only felt vegan buyer’s remorse once. That was this past Sunday at a holiday brunch buffet. The spread had everything I love: lox and bagels, fresh omelets, french toast, and all kinds of gooey things with cheese. It looked incredible. I ate carrot sticks and cantaloupe. So that sucked. But I wasn’t going to cave in to my cravings. Not yet.  No, not yet.

2. How I’m Feeling

Honestly, I feel the same. My energy levels are the same. I want to say I’m literally sleeping better at night (I certainly am figuratively), but I’m also limiting my afternoon coffee intake, and I’d probably attribute better sleep to less caffeine.

I take this sameness as good news. Feeling the same means I’m not feeling worse, and I suspect that if I focus on optimizing a plant-based diet, I might start feeling more energized and focused. However, for now, I’m examining how a plant-based diet fits into my life’s daily patterns and routines. Feeling the same feels like a victory.

3. The Climate Benefits

I did a lot of research for my podcast last week to find out how much better a plant-based diet is for the planet than the typical meat-based diet. I also wanted to understand whether switching our diet is the climate change panacea some assert.

To the first question, a plant-based diet is undoubtedly the climate champion. While figures will slightly vary when comparing different analyses, in general, the conclusions presented in this well-researched article from Shrink That Footprint shows how a plant-based diet is the most climate-friendly. According to Shrink That Footprint, the typical American diet creates about 2500 pounds of carbon emissions per year. A meat lover’s diet comes in at about 3300 pounds of carbon. The vegan, 1500 pounds. Definitely a lighter footprint.

But how big a deal is shaving 1000 – 2000 pounds of carbon from your lifestyle? This analysis from NPR shows that our food consumption accounts for about 16% of our overall carbon footprint. Just staying with this percentage, switching to a plant-based diet would cut about 8% of your lifestyle’s total carbon emissions. That’s awesome, but it’s not the end all be all climate change solution.

4. What Happens Come January Once The Challenge is Complete

I’m not sure yet. I feel good about eating a plant-based diet. It’s a choice I can make multiple times a day to live according to my environmental beliefs. To the degree that it remains easy, affordable, convenient, and delicious, I’m inclined to keep doing it.

I also heard an excellent quote by author Jonathan Safran Foer on the Climate One podcast. He said:

“If you were to ask me, in ten years will half of Americans be vegetarian, I would say I think that’s pretty unlikely. If you were to say in ten years will half of the meals eaten in America be vegetarian, I would say I feel that will happen. It’s the same outcome with regard to the environment and with regard to animal welfare, but it’s a perspectival shift away from claiming an identity to claiming the choices that are in front of you.”

I love that perspective because it ratchets down the pressure. We can still enjoy beef, chicken, fish, eggs, etc. in moderation. And if we’re also increasingly reaching for tasty plant-based options, and this becomes a cultural norm, then we may arrive at the same climate solution destination without having to carry all the guilt, judgment, negative self-talk, and shaming and blaming baggage so-often associated with claiming an identity like “vegetarian” or “vegan.”

It enables us to be more inclusive in how we talk about climate solutions and encourage people to participate in them.

But, and this is a super cool but, if what I’m after is peak sports performance, then I might stick with the plant-based diet even longer to see what it can do for me. Isn’t that a remarkable thought? That the diet championed by climate activists may also be the best diet for achieving peak sports performance? If our sports-crazed culture latched onto this idea, it would be transformative.

RESOURCES I FOUND HELPFUL

Here’s a list of resources I found helpful when investigating the climate benefits of a plant-based diet.