This is going to be our family’s first Plant-Based Thanksgiving so I have had some fun gathering together ideas for a whole new menu plan.
Who would have thought the men in our family would ever consider a meal without meat? I am still amazed my husband has embraced the Plant-Based lifestyle after over 30 years of him insisting that meat be a part of every meal.
Why We Are Having Our First Plant-Based Thanksgiving
Over the past several years as we have been learning more about natural solutions for improving our health and wellbeing, we realized that the cornerstone of our health centers on a good healthy diet rich in nutrients provided from plant-based foods.
We initially cleaned up our diet by eliminating processed food, and sugar. We also began to only eat organic, non-GMO, whole food that were as fresh and unaltered as possible.
After following the Food Revolution Summits for a couple of years and hearing all the doctors and food experts talk about how eating a more plant-based diet is transforming people’s health and reversing disease, we tried to eat more and more plant-based meals.
Then I went to an educational event where I heard a nutrition expert talk about the benefits of a plant-based diet and she had a slide with a picture of a bar chart where it shows that in countries of the world where they eat more plants, they have less disease and in countries that eat more meat, have more disease. She said the studies have shown that people who eat at least a 90% plant-based diet are living longer, healthier lives and in many cases changing to this diet can even reverse disease.
That is when I decided to challenge myself to eat at least a 90% plant-based diet.
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My husband jumped on board and he says he feels better than ever. When he occasionally does eat meat, he doesn’t like how he feels afterward. So now he rarely eats meat.
Most of our family live in New Zealand so when we first visited after changing to a plant-based diet, our family boldly claimed that they ate a meat-based diet. Hey, it’s New Zealand. Everyone seems to either have their own livestock for future food or they have a freezer full of meat they have purchased from a neighbors animal.
So, when we were here last we just flexed and embraced our “Flexitarian” lifestyle.
However, in the last six months, my daughter has had a growing interest in learning how to eat a more plant-based diet. At first, her husband gave a lot of pushback and had some major concerns, especially since she was nursing their second baby. But after watching the movie, Game Changers, her husband has become much more open-minded to the whole thing.
So here we are again, in New Zealand, this time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. My daughters were born and raised in the United States so Thanksgiving is a big deal to them. It isn’t a holiday celebrated in New Zealand and the season is opposite to ours in America. It is the end of Spring, the beginning of Summer, so the produce available is more of what we would see in the United States in warmer weather months.
So I wanted to share here the recipes we are planning to make for our Thanksgiving celebration here in New Zealand.
Whether you are new to following a plant-based diet, or you are just curious about it, I hope this post and these recipes give you the confidence to challenge yourself to increase your plant-based diet, even during the holiday season.
We are finding that it has been so much fun to learn new ways of cooking that don’t center meals around the main course of meat. It has become a new adventure in eating. It doesn’t feel like a diet or that we are being deprived in any way. We are finding it more creative and almost exotic tasting new foods and food combinations we never would have even considered before.
The word “Vegan” always turned me off before and made me almost cringe to think what that may have tasted like but now I know how delicious vegan food can actually be. If you have never tried vegan food, you might want to give it a try. You will be pleasantly surprised by how good it is.
If you haven’t already planned your Thanksgiving meal, maybe some of these recipes can help you.
If you want to make it easy on yourself and just use this entire meal plan, start to finish, you can find a shopping list in our FREE password protected Resource Library full of over 40 printable resources to help you with your natural health journey. Learn how to gain access at the bottom of this post.
Our First Plant-Based Thanksgiving Menu
Roasted Brussels Sprouts Salad with Maple Butternut Squash, Pumpkin Seeds, and Cranberries
Cranberry Fruit Salad - Monkey and Me Kitchen Adventures
Wishing you a blessed holiday season!
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