Vegan to Pescatarian
For those of you who have been following my Facebook posts on Ask Dr. King, you know that about 2-months ago, Natasha and I, decided to eat like some of our Vegan friends.
Results? We both felt AMAZING! Downfall? We both started losing hair, and lots of it.
Why the hair loss? I firmly believe it was due to a lack of good fats, even though we were both taking EFAs. So, we switched brands, which gave us a lot more good fats, while we added fish back into our eating lifestyle.
The crazy thing, neither one of us miss eating beef, bison, turkey or chicken…BUT, we really, really, really missed eating fish. So, we are now Pescatarian!
Sunday night, Natasha’s mother came over for dinner (which she has Hashimoto’s Disease, Crohn’s Disease, and suffers from Stubbornness Disease) and we always try to feed her super healthy food because she will not do it herself. So, we decided to have some of our favorite fish on the grill: trout and branzino!!!
For those that are unfamiliar with cooking fish, it is extremely easy to do (as long as you get the fish gutted from the market).
Here is how we prepared our dinner:
2 Trout and 1 Branzino…
- Tons of olive oil inside/outside of the skin of the fish
- Stuffed the fish with basil, rosemary, Thai basil, cilantro and sliced lemon.
- Lots of Pink Salt and black pepper on the skin.
We cooked the fish on the grill, bringing the grill to almost 600 degrees. Make sure, make sure you coat the grill with a LOT of olive oil.
We cooked the trout for 4-minutes on each side, and the branzino for 6-minutes on each side.
Easy peasy!
We served with cauliflower mashed potatoes and asparagus.
Is Eating Vegan Bad?
I don’t think so, at all. As long as you can get adequate amounts of protein, EFAs/Omegas, and B Vitamins in you, you should be just fine. Variety can be tough, and sometimes eating the same foods becomes rather monotonous. However, the benefits of eating plant based were noticeable for me within the first 2-weeks.
I had been off my bike (for those that don’t know, I am a huge cycling enthusiast: road, mountain…anything with two wheels) for almost 6-months. If any of you are cyclists, you know your cycling fitness goes down dramatically within a time frame such as 6-months, heck…even two weeks!
I started eating Vegan at the same time I was getting back to cycling. OMGoodness…my fitness levels were coming back VERY, VERY quickly. I recovered faster, even on the bike. What that means is when you are pushing yourself to the max, you can only do that for so long (30-45 seconds for some, and 1-5 minutes for others) before you must drop back in the group and recover before pushing again.
I noticed that I was able to recover a lot faster than I did in the past, and then was able to move back to the front of the group and “do work”. This is very much welcomed. Even the cyclists that saw me on my first couple of group rides started to take notice.
My breathing cleared up, as I have always been congested on one side of my nose! I would like to say I got better looking…LOLOL…but, that would be wishful thinking. I did lose a couple of pounds, but that was to be expected. Eating vegetables was actually a lot of fun. We had to learn how to prepare them in different ways; i.e. cooking squash and zucchini using the Vegetable Spiralizer vs. grilling them. I swear, cooking vegetables on the grill vs. on the stove, vs. baking them, will change the way you perceive that vegetable.
We jumped on Google and researched different recipes to help us during the 30 (50)-day challenge.
Feeling Tired
There were days where I would feel tired and run down. However, those were also the days I was not good about taking my B-vitamins!!! Make sure, make sure, make sure…that you are getting enough B vitamins and EFAs/Omegas if you decide to eat Vegan.
I firmly believe we could have kept eating that way, if it wasn’t for ME freaking out about losing hair. I have NEVER had a hair loss problem, and no one in my family has either. So, that was scaring the crap out of me. We recently added in the fish, and I will provide an update in a couple weeks after our hair has stopped falling out! HA
There ya have it…my take on being Vegan.
