14 Plant-Based Principles to Live By
1. Base your dietary decisions on a long-term philosophy for improved and sustainable health, respect for other living creatures, and the environmental benefit that a plant-based diet can give, even at the expense of short-term gratification, social norms, ideals, mores and acceptance, or life-long and ingrained eating habits.
2. Continually think about and question what you eat to uncover problems with your diet that are harming you or could harm you in the future.
3. Eat what you need, when you need it to avoid harming your health. Pull, but don’t push your consumption. (ie. Don’t eat a food because everyone else is eating it, or because it is a food that you are used to eating at particular time or certain meal of the day, or just because it is something you have always done.) Think, act, and eat with a plant-based consciousness.
4. Don’t binge and then deny yourself to compensate. Find the right amount of intake for your energy needs and level of activity. Keep your intake steady to balance the needs of your metabolism, and avoid overeating.
5. Take time to figure out what you are doing wrong in your diet, establishing ways to stop unhealthy patterns, and forming healthy dietary habits that have the least chance of causing short-term or long-term problems.
6. Establish standardized plant-based dietary and consumption patterns, and continually improve on them. Challenge yourself and don’t be afraid to try new things, or to change your consumption frequency, or even to change the composition of your dietary intake. Empower yourself and others to eat a healthier diet by allowing them to see that they have a choice. Set an example.
7. Find ways to expose problems that are hidden in your dietary process flow. Consider each individual step in your food cycle, from origin to intake, how it all fits or doesn’t fit into a healthy consumption pattern, and what you can do to improve upon it.
8. Consider supporting your plant-based dietary choices with technology after they have been established, but don’t rely on or expect technology to establish them for you.
9. Look to notable, trustworthy, and respected plant-based, dietary leaders who have your best health interests at heart, and who thoroughly understand the implications, live the philosophy, and thoughtfully, intelligently, and compassionately teach it to others.
10. Give people the information, tools, and support they need to help them change their dietary habits and ways of thinking. Facilitate their transformation to a plant-based diet, and encourage groups to carry the long-term philosophy and set an example for others. In general, adopt the axiom of think “food-as-medicine” first, and then think “standard medical treatment,” not the other way around. Use common sense on when to apply this.
11. Respect growers, producers, distributors, and retailers of plant-based edible and inedible products and services, and find ways to support them and contribute to their continued success. Support individuals involved with providing information, education, or other activities that promote a plant-based lifestyle. Take an active role to help them grow and improve by asking relevant and well-founded questions, providing feedback, making suggestions, encouraging, and purchasing from them.
12. Take an active role in improving your diet. Continuously re-examine your current dietary habits to generate insight and motivation for changing anything that is unhealthy, and always move toward the goal of consuming a 100% plant-based diet.
13. Look to other like-minded individuals or groups who can support one another in their plant-based dietary and lifestyle decisions, and who can provide objectivity and insight that is critical to implementing a change, and to helping establish and maintain long-term, healthy eating habits.
14. Become informed through reading about the plant-based dietary choice, by listening to noted plant-based experts, by attending plant-based lectures or receiving further education, by participating in other plant-based related group activities, and learn all that is available about eating a plant-based diet and living a plant-based lifestyle. Relentlessly reflect on applicable insights of healthy dietary choices, such as how these have changed or influenced your thinking, acting, and feeling. Seek to continuously improve upon whatever stage you are at now in your diet with the goal of adopting and maintaining a plant-based lifestyle pattern for the rest of your life.
Happy plant-based living and eating!
