Meeting Brendan Brazier, author of Thrive

Do you remember this summer when I was a part of the Vega Smoothie – Where Will Your Smoothie Take You Photo Contest? I won lots of Vega Smoothie. It was a life saver on some of the trips I have taken this year where not so much vegan food, or not so much healthy food was available.

The creator of this smoothie product is Brendan Brazier, but he is also a vegan, a triathlete (superstahhh!), and author. I was so excited to find out he was going to be visiting my local Planet Organic store to give a talk this past Thanksgiving weekend (Canada’s Thanksgiving is in October by the way). After cancelling Thanksgiving plans to be there, I almost didn’t get in to the talk, because I had thought that there was no reserving seats (but there was). There was a lengthy wait-list, but I got there early, and stubbornly insisted on waiting just outside the door instead of wondering around until the start when they would find out if there were no-shows. I got in, but got standing room at the back of the tiny room. The downer part was that the room was quite hot and crowded and so there was a portion in the middle of the talk where I thought I was pretty close to passing out, but I made it through. There were also a couple people in chairs that were complaining that they were claustrophobic and that the people standing were making them uncomfortable. That got a few people upset on both sides.

However, the important part – the talk from Brendan Brazier, was great and I also got a picture with him and a signed copy of his book. His talk was mostly a summary of his book, which was fine with me, as I hadn’t read the expanded version of the book yet, just the tiny version that was out when he first published the book. The part that was really interesting for me was the question period. People asked about so many different types of things that it was like skimming ten different books in half an hour – more than enough information if you are not so interested in the topic, but just enough to whet the appetite if something is brought up that you didn’t know about before. Someone brought something up about Chinese beliefs and food either heating or cooling your body. There is a desirable “temperature” to be at to keep your body balanced. Don’t know anything about that topic – so forgive me if I massacred the description, but I definitely plan on learning more and sharing about that.

Thrive (with a plant-based diet)

Planet Organic is our local organic food store. I was shopping there a couple weeks ago and they had samples available of Vega Shake and Go Smoothie, created by Brendan Brazier. One serving is supposed to be 2 tbsp, and all you need to do is add some water, shake, and drink. That little serving has 3g of dietary fibre, 11g protein, 4% of your daily calcium, 30% of your daily iron, 2500 mg of omega 3-6-9 and 1 billion probiotic cultures. Nice.

I have been adding it to my blender smoothies instead of mixing it with water. it takes some of the pressure off to come up with foods to eat that will give me all that this smoothie does.

Brendan Brazier is a heavy-duty marathon runner and developed his vega drinks over a period of about 15 years while trying to reach peak body performance as an athlete, while maintaining a plant-based diet.

I am currently reading his book, Thrive, which I first heard about in Alicia Silverstone's book, The Kind Diet. I am really intrigued by the fact that Brendan began eating a plant based diet at the age of 15. My main thoughts at age 15 involved boys, more boys, a few more boys, maybe some alcohol, and scattered with thoughts of music. I long to have been a deep and mature teen who knew where they were going and had their priorities straight. I cannot even imagine being in that frame of mind back then, and so I am always interested in stories of people who accomplish things at young ages.

I am only about a third of the way through Thrive, but I loved this analogy of coffee drinkers so much that I must share it here.

I view coffee drinking as a form of credit, similar to shopping with a credit card. You get energy now that you don't actually have, then you pay for it later. When the 'bill' comes it might keep you down for a few days (unless you drink more coffee to put off the inevitable - kind of like paying off one credit card with another). You'll most likely pay a high interest rate as well, needing more time to recover than if energy were not 'borrowed'.(Thrive, Brendan Brazier, page 29)

A Newer Leaf

There I was, happily browsing through a chapter of a book here and there on healthier eating, gleaning a few tidbits as I went, but was unable to put very many into practice because of my busy-ness. Although, being busy hasn't changed, something has. A while back I watched a small bit of an Oprah show that had Alicia Silverstone on it promoting her new book. I just acquired it about 2 weeks ago.

I had been trying to "shock" myself with other books, tv and other that would slap me with info about the terrible things that are happening to our food and what is happening to our bodies because of what we are eating. I was hoping if I had some strong emotion from something I read or watched, I would have enough strength to take the time needed to change my habits and learn some new tricks. So far, nothing had clicked. However, what Alicia said in this book seemed to click with me. I could relate to some of her experiences and I think that was a big part of it. She talked about how she had gone off the pill and suffered from terrible acne because of it. Eliminating dairy completely cleared this up for her. I am currently on my second attempt at discontinuing the birth control pill. I developed horrible acne the first time and finally gave up after 8 months when I realized my face was becoming scarred from the acne. When I discovered this book, I had been off the pill for 2 months and my acne was just starting to flare up. I am definitely a dairy girl and had never thought of giving up dairy, but I decided to do an "experiment" and eliminate as much as I could and see if it made any difference. I was completely surprised at how relatively easy it was to toss the dairy out of my diet. I think it would be much harder if I didn't live in a larger centre where there are amazing stores that have a good number of substitutes for almost anything dairy you can think of.
I have now been mostly dairy free for about ten days. It is really hard to make a judgement at this point, but already the acne seems to have improved. There has been no new blemishes and the part of my forehead that was looking "bumpy" seems to have smoothed out.
The big secret is that, like Alicia, I have also been living mostly vegan for those ten days as well. It has been quite a bit of fun scouting out my local organic supermarket for things that I have read about over the past year and taking a little extra time in the care and feeding of myself. I don't know if this is a permanent thing, but so far it feels good and hasn't been terribly hard.
I mentioned yesterday about how I don't cook and don't know much about cooking. Sometimes I can't follow a recipe because I don't know what a term that is used means (ie. blanch, braise, mince, poach - although nowadays you can just look these things up on the internet!). I was a little afraid to take things out of my diet too quickly without knowing how to feed myself properly without those things. I have been very pleased with myself so far. Yesterday I took all the veggies that were in the fridge, chopped them up and plopped them into a pan with some olive oil and sauteed them. I had asparagus, carrots, jalapenos, pea pods, green onions, and daikon ( a new veggie that I had just bought for the first time because of being mentioned in The Kind Diet). I scooped them onto a whole wheat wrap and it was really yummy.
Today, my husband wanted to go to the grocery store on the way home. I saw some pineapple at a good price and decided to make a fresh fruit salsa even though I have never made one before and I am not even sure that I have ever even tasted one! I am completely unsure where the inspiration or the knowledge for this came from, but I did it and it was not bad. I chopped up pineapple, mango, red onion and a bit of jalapeno and parsley. I added a little lime juice when my husband pulled up a fruit salsa recipe with an app on his new iPad and we saw that it had some lime juice in it. Otherwise the recipe was very similar to what I was doing - I still want to know how on earth I knew how to do this.
I am planning on making my veggie wrap again tonight, but with the addition of some new veggies that I picked up at the grocery store and some black beans that I soaked overnight and cooked today, which is another new thing for me.