Week One as a Vegan

I decided to go vegan and this last week I made a start.  I made some mistakes and I learned some things as I continue to educate myself.

When I was in my 30's I went vegetarian for a year.  At the end of the year I didn't feel any healthier and I walked away from it.  What I realize now is that I really had no idea what a healthy vegetarian diet looked like.

I started out my return making some of the same mistakes as I had before.  I bought lots of processed foods in an attempt to replace what I had been eating before.  It was all good and I really enjoyed what I ate, but it's not where I want to be in attempt to be healthier and loose weight.

A vegan whole foods diet is where I'm trying to get.  I did loose weight last week, but I feel like that's mostly due to my portion control and intermittent fasting.

Here are some of the things I ate:

 Several mornings I had this sandwich - nut bread (processed), soy cheese and "turkey" (processed) and lettuce, tomato and onion.  This was a delicious sandwich but it's almost totally processed foods; not the best choice.

 This was a much better breakfast choice - All bran cereal, almonds and dried fruit....but the nuts are high in fat and the dried fruit is very high in sugar.  Still very good, but I think I still missed the goal of eating whole foods.

 I took salads every day and this is the one I took on Friday.  The soy "pepperoni" was so good.  I was really just trying to use us the soy products I had bought and it did make a great tasting salad.

 I had this "pepperoni, cheese" open faced sandwich on Friday morning.  SO Good!  Really tasted like pizza.  Again, these are all processed foods and not the best choice for a whole foods diet.  But I did really enjoy it.

 In the afternoons I had soy yogurt with blueberries and granola.  Again, really good but processed food instead of whole foods.

So, that's pretty much what I ate last week.  I did loose weight and I did really enjoy all those soy processed foods.  But, for the coming week I've done a much better job of buying whole foods.  I'll post about that next.

I don't think there's anything wrong with consuming soy products and if I were at a healthy weight I would include them in my vegetarian diet.  I still have a lot of weight to loose, so I'm being very strict.  Once I reach my goal weight I'll probably add a few soy products and nuts/seeds back, but for only occasional use because of the calories and fat content.