Veganism - advice please!

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  • milesvictors
    milesvictors Posts: 83 Member
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    Bake up some potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc with a little bit of garlic salt on them if you need something savory. Just cut them up like fries and go to town. Don't add much oil as that will kindof defeat the baking purpose, but do what you gotta do. I can attest to energy levels being higher and more consistent on a vegan diet, and your recovery times shorter, your mood better, etc. You should keep it up after the 30 days if you are able. I can't recommend it highly enough.
  • notdebby
    notdebby Posts: 58
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    The main thing you need to think about when building complete proteins on a vegan diet is to combine beans with grains or nuts. histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine are the amino acids which make up proteins. Animal proteins contain all of these so they are considered complete. Soy is the only vegetable source which contains all of these amino acids. I would not depend on soy too much though as there is a such thing as too much of a good thing. Generally I only have 2 servings of soy a week in the form of tempeh. I'm not vegetarian by the way. I'm flexitarian but I have to watch my proteins too since I don't eat as much animal protein as a regular diet might.

    As for those amino acids which I listed, grains like wheat, rice, corn, etc do not contain enough lysine to be considered a source of it. Meanwhile beans and legumes do not contain tryptophan, methionine or cystine. You can, however get them from grains. To build a complete protein you can combine things like beans and rice, peanut butter on whole grain bread, hummus with whole grain pita bread, corn chips with bean dip... the possibilities are literally endless.

    Edited to add: Congrats on quitting smoking.
  • lithezebra
    lithezebra Posts: 3,670 Member
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    This page has a lot of information about getting enough of particular essential amino acids in a vegan diet, including a chart, which you can input your weight to, to show how many servings of various foods it would take to meet your needs for lysine and other AAs.

    http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/protein.php
  • Girl_du_jour
    Girl_du_jour Posts: 46 Member
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    Thank you all so much! Really great range of info. It's going well so far and tonight I'll be checking through all your links and making a final shopping list. Cheers for taking the time to help!

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