Finally, the food post is here! I have been meaning to start a vegan/food section on my blog for a while now and I guess this is a good start.
So a little background on my food history. I have a vegetarian all my life. I had non-veg food for a year in between (long time back), but I have always been a preferred vegetarian. Even when I was eating non-veg food, I would never order it myself or cook it because I never craved it. It was mostly peer pressure. I still remember the day I gave up on chicken. My brother and I had gone to eat out and he ordered a chicken pizza and I took a bite but I just couldn’t swallow it. That was it! Never had it again. Other than that one year in my life, I have been a vegetarian but I am not a foodie. I don’t live for food. I eat to live and I don’t really have cravings as such. Honestly, that makes it very easy to make lifestyle changes.
Why I turned vegan? Honestly I turned vegan for health reasons. I have had a lot of stomach issues – bloating, constipation and what not! One of my friends was already a vegan and I see wonderful health changes in his life so I decided to give it a try. After trying vegan food for a week I could feel the difference, I was not bloated, gastric or anything. It was crazy. I decided I will go ahead with this. When I started it, I got to know more about the industry and realised how crazy and inhumane it is. There are tons of videos on youtube that you watch to get familiar with it which will help you in making better life choices. This will open you to a whole different side of food and fashion industry. It has really helped in making lifestyle changes and making environmentally conscious decisions.
Also, initially of course I did not go completely vegan. I was a BIG CHAI person you guys and obviously that was a huge problem. Chai is the last thing I left, everything else I left almost instantly. I wasn’t a challenge for me at all!
Ok enough of that rambling, I’ll get into my eating routine!
Morning Cocktail : Around 7 am.
This for me is a perfect start to the day. I missed a very important/ main ingredient ‘turmeric’. I like to start my day with a hot drink and this has so much goodness!! Maple syrup is a good vegan option, you can start having it with honey and switch to maple syrup later!
Coming to Black Strap Molasses [tagged the one that I use] – this is what google says and its pretty self explanatory. Blackstrap molasses is a byproduct of sugar cane’s refining process. Sugar cane is mashed to create juice, and then boiled once to create cane syrup. A second boiling creates molasses. Blackstrap molasses contains vital vitamins and minerals, such as iron, calcium, magnesium, vitamin B6, and selenium. So why I started taking BSM because of the vital minerals it has. For women it’s amazing because we loose a lot of blood every month during which also leaves a lot of women anaemic and this can help you recover really quickly. 5 tablespoons of blackstrap molasses contains 95% of your daily allowance of iron. It’s a really great natural supplement for a lot of vitamins and minerals.
Coming to breakfast – I usually eat between 9 – 9:15. Between my dinner and breakfast – I try to have a gap of at least 14 hours and 16 hours is ideal! I usually make it up to 15, so thats good to start with I guess. What I’m trying to do here is called intermittent fasting. A lot of people do this to loose weight which is not the case with me. I’ve had indigestion issues in the past and this really helps in digesting food. I’ve started this recently and I can feel the difference!
So for breakfast – I usually eat pratha or a vegan sandwich. I like to eat tofu pratha, broccolli pratha and gobi pratha. When I was not a vegan I use to consume butter but now I can’t and Im not a big fan of pickles so I eat pratha with some sort of sabzi, some fruit with almonds and walnuts (soaked overnight) and of course coffee! Honestly I miss chai but Im getting use to almond milk coffee. I think it works just fine!
Coming to my smoothie which is the most important and beneficial thing I consume in a day. I’ve listed all the ingredients I put in my smoothie. Some ingredients like seeds, microgreens, powders, aloe vera and ginger and always there and everything else keeps changing season to season. For me, smoothie is really important because I just can’t keep eating all day and divide these things in salads and stuff. So I juice everything together and consume it and trust me its tasty! If you have any questions about the ingredients or where to get them from, please leave a comment and I shall get back to you!
Lunch is usually brown rice, some sort of daal / chickpea / beans, some salad and if there is vegan pasta. I don’t consume a lot in lunch because my smoothie is pretty filling so I am not very hungry by then.
So dinner time varies a lot really. Sometimes I eat at 5:30, depends how hungry I am. Because my lunch is pretty light and I dont eat anything in between, I get hungry by 5:50ish. So if I’m home I eat dinner asap but I try and not eat it after 6:30. On Fridays and weekends I sometimes eat by 7:30 because I can then push my breakfast time to whatever I want. Dinner is pretty straight forward – usually it’s yellow daal, 2 rotis and sabzi. Sometimes I make sandwiches or just soup and bread.
So thats pretty much about it! Also, like I said I don’t have a sweet tooth so I dont really struggle with that but whenever I feel like eating something I eat gur and now Aja has some amazing bakery options which is awesome and it’s also one of my favourite places to eat!
I also dont like to eat anything in between meals, I take green tea thats it. But in case I feel like, I usually eat roasted makhana and chana or peanuts.
Except all this – I take b12 [ methylcobalamin b12] and D3 supplements [ NOW – vitamin d3 5000 IU].
That’s about it guys! I hope you guys liked it.
