A vegan diet can be unhealthy and hard to follow if you do it the wrong way. But if you avoid the mistakes new vegans make then you will succeed and stay healthy.

Today you're going to learn nine easy steps to going vegan and what mistakes to avoid. After you watch this video, you'll know how to go vegan and stay vegan and decrease your cancer risk.So let's start.

1. Learn New Recipes

If you want to convert to a plant-based diet, it is better to go slow at first. Going cold turkey might be too hard for most people. The easiest way to go vegan is to learn some recipes and replace your animal-based meals.

Buy vegan recipe books or find recipes online. Try more and more dishes and repeat them. Find 14 recipes that you enjoy and then try to go full-time.

When you follow this process, it is much easier to get used to the diet and feel more confident.

2. Get Enough Calories And Starch

There are plenty of vegan diet mistakes to avoid. Most new vegans eat far too little calories. A calorie is a unit of energy. Your brain, muscles, and cells need it to function well.

How many calories you need depends on your activity level and other factors.When you take your car somewhere, you need a specific amount of gas to reach your destination.

If you don’t fill up the car with enough gas, then you can get stuck in the middle of the road. It is the same with our bodies. If we don’t get enough fuel every day, then we can become weak and tired.

Vegan foods contain fewer calories than animal products. Meat, cheese, milk, and fatty foods have a lot of calories. 

Carbohydrates

Plants use water, carbon dioxide, and energy from the sun to form simple sugars. There are three basic types of carbohydrates, sugar, cellulose, and starch.

Each contains carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in specific configurations. The simplest of these sugars include sucrose, fructose, and glucose.

Our digestive system doesn’t have the enzymes to break down cellulose to use it for fuel. Although we get no energy from them, they are valuable to us for their dietary fiber.

Starch

Like cellulose, starches have long-branching chains of glucose molecules. These long chains are also known as complex carbohydrates.

Starch is valuable to us because we can break it down into simple sugars. It provides us with energy during the day and keeps us satisfied. Not eating enough starches is the biggest mistake most vegans make.

That is the reason new vegans often become tired and weak.Humans thrive on starch. The more rice, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beans we eat, the healthier we become.

Non-Starchy Vegetables And Fruits

Green, yellow, orange non-starchy vegetables contain only small quantities of starch. Their primary role is to add extra nutrients to starch-based meals.

Fruits contain, for the most part, simple sugars that offer quick-burning energy. They hold little of that slow-burning, sustaining starch. As a result, fruits alone won’t satisfy our appetites for long.

Starch Should Be The Foundation Of Your Diet 

All large populations of trim, healthy people get most of their calories from starch. When you eat a vegan diet, you get much fewer calories than meat-heavy diets.

That is why starches are essential to your diet if you want to eat a plant-based diet. It’s like when you build a house.

For a home to be stable, it needs a solid foundation. Starch should be the cornerstone of your diet and vegetables added on top of that.

Add 600 to 900 calories of your choice of grains, legumes, or starchy vegetables to your meals.You can eat a diet without starches, but it is a lot harder and will cost more.

When people struggle on a vegan diet, they often eat too little calories or too many non-starchy vegetables. And when they add the meat, they hit their daily calorie intake and feel better.

They then assume that their body needs the meat to function well. But it was the lack of calories that was the problem, not the diet.

Adding more starch will often solve this problem. We need enough calories and nutrients from the food.

Here are some examples of different kinds of foods. Everything on this list has 1280 calories.

You need to eat a lot more salad to get 1280 calories compared to a beefsteak. Protein has four calories per gram and fat has nine calories per gram.

Sugar, starch, and fiber have four calories per gram. Vegetables have varying amounts of protein, fat, and carbs, so the total calories per gram vary.

To know how many calories you need per day, go to www.cronometer.com. Add a vegan recipe you want to try and see how many calories it provides.

By logging your food every day, you will learn more about the nutritional content of the food and make better choices.

3. Eat Whole Foods

There are many vegan diet benefits. But being vegan is not healthy if you eat the Standard American Diet made with vegetables, such as eating vegan burgers dripping with oil, potato chips, or refined food.

New vegans often believe that they can replace their meat with vegan alternatives and call it a day. Soy meats include soy protein isolate which is a concentrated protein.

Our bodies need much less protein than we think. Even if you replace your meat with soy protein isolate, you still get too much protein in your diet.

Processed foods also contain too much fat and additives that are not good for us. They also have empty calories. Therefore you should avoid junk foods.

Why You Crave Cakes And Sweets

Glucose is the body's primary food source. You will start to crave sugar if you don't get enough nutrients or starch from your diet.

If you want sweets all the time, then that means that your diet is not nutritious enough. Eat plenty of unrefined starches and healthy foods to make your sweet tooth disappear.

Eat A Whole Food Plant-Based Diet

The healthiest diet you can eat is a whole food low fat plant-based diet. A whole food, plant-based diet consists of whole, unrefined, or little-refined plants.

Excess fat can cause heart disease, diabetes and cancer and other problems. Our bodies can’t handle too much fat. A huge mistake many vegans do is to eat vegetable oils.

Why You Need To Avoid Vegetable Oils

Oils are nothing but fat.They supply concentrated calories but nothing else from the plants. Vegetable oil is the most calorie dense substance you can eat. Every vegetable oil is unhealthy, even coconut- and olive oil.

You don't need to eat vegetable oils or animal products to get enough fat. Almost everything we eat has fat in it. It's difficult to be deficient in fats, and many people get too much of it.

Get Fats From Whole Foods

You can get all the fats you need from whole plants. Adding vegetable oils can prevent you from succeeding on a vegan diet.

Whole plant foods like whole grains, greens, nuts, and seeds contain adequate fat. If you eat a variety of natural foods, you will not be deficient in fat.  

We do not need to take oil when we eat healthy foods. Your diet should consist of 80% carbs, 10% protein, and 10% fat or less. To maintain these proportions focus on four foods, vegetables, fruits, beans, and grains.

Fat Content In Different Food

Limit your intake of nuts, seeds, avocado, and other foods that contain a lot of fat. Even if they are whole foods, they should only be a small part of your diet.

They may contain 70% fat or more. If you have cancer, it is best to limit them or avoid them all together.

5. Why Do You Want To Become Vegan?

Another way to stick to your vegan diet is to a have a strong reason why you want to do it. Are you doing it to defeat your cancer, losing weight, getting more energy or saving the planet?

Write down your goal or reason why you want to go vegan and look at it every day. When you have a higher purpose, it is much easier to stick to the diet when things get rough.

If you have any hesitation about sticking with it, think about the rewards it will give you. Reflect on the good health and happiness you can get when you feed your body the best food.

You’re not only doing yourself a favor but also for the animals and other people. Pick a date when you will start to eat 100% plant-based and then try it for a year.

When you feel better and get more energy, you'll have an easier time sticking to the diet.

6. Throw Away Your Junk Food

If you want to succeed on a vegan diet, then you need to get rid of your animal products and junk foods. The best way to avoid unhealthy foods is to remove them from your sight.

If you give yourself a treat once in a while, then you can revert to your old eating habits. For you to be successful, you need to remove any temptations.

If you keep forbidden foods in your house, you’re going to torture yourself and have a bite. Throw away all junk foods from your fridge and pantry or give it away.

It can be hard in the beginning when you don't eat your favorite meals anymore. But when you eat a healthy diet, your cravings will disappear after a short while. Look at your goal every day to remind yourself why you're doing it.

7. Don’t Be Too Hard On Yourself

When you’re new to a plant-based diet, you may slip up and eat forbidden foods. Don't be too hard on yourself if that happens.

If you feel disappointed in yourself, it is a lot harder to get back on your feet. Remind yourself that you are changing your lifestyle and that mistakes are okay.

Eating just one plant-based meal is already doing wonders for your body. Even if you’re not 100% plant-based all the time, it is a lot better than eating a Standard American Diet.

If you eat chicken on one occasion, don’t hate yourself for it. Eating chicken only once a month is way better than eating it every day.

Try to fix the underlying cause of your craving instead of getting angry at yourself. If you crave meat and junk foods, then it means that you're not getting enough nutrients or calories from your diet.

Eat more whole foods and starchy vegetables so that you don’t need to crave junk foods anymore.

8. Supplements You Need On A Vegan Diet

If you eat a whole food plant-based diet, then there is no need to add that many supplements. Plants contain almost all the fats, protein, carbs, and nutrients you need.

Two things you can’t get on a plant-based diet is vitamin D and b12. Vitamin B12 comes from bacteria.

B12 is present in the soil or untreated water. But because we remove the bacteria in our water supply, there is no b12 left.

You can get b12 from vegan food and drinks fortified with b12. If you don't eat animal products or foods fortified with B12, then you should take a B12 supplement.

Buy B12 with cyanocobalamin. Take 100 mg of B12 per day or 1000 once a week.

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is a hormone that the body produces when we expose our skin to sunlight. Getting vitamin D from the diet is difficult.

The best way to get vitamin D is to go outside and get moderate amounts of sunshine. If you live in a place where there is minimal sunshine, then you might need to take a vitamin D supplement.

But it should only be your last resort. To learn more about this topic watch this video I did before.Try to avoid other supplements and instead get your nutrients from whole foods and herbs.

9. How To Deal With Social Pressure

You might struggle with your family and friends when you go on a plant-based diet. They can oppose your diet change and try to convince you that it is unhealthy to eat a plant-based diet.

One lie they might repeat to you is that plants don’t contain enough protein. But know that plants include all the fat, protein, and nutrients that you need.

If your family doesn’t want to go vegan, then don’t force them. Prepare vegan dishes and add the meat to their food if you do the cooking.

Serve them vegan food without being forceful, and they might enjoy it and also follow your path. The best way to not get affected by their criticism is to educate yourself about veganism.

One good source is nutritionfacts.org. They post new videos all the time about the health benefits of a plant-based diet. When you learn why a vegan diet is healthier, and you feel better, it is a lot easier to stand your ground.

If others try to question your diet, you already know how to answer them. The best thing you can do is to live by example and show them the positive results you're getting.

When they witness your improved health, they are more likely to accept it and even join in. Even if people oppose you, in the beginning, they can change their minds and let you do what you want.

Don’t let their resistance put you off track and you will succeed.