Read an Excerpt

Introduction



I’ve been telling the VB6 story for seven years now, sometimes ten times in a day. I never tire of it. If anything, the passage of time makes the punch line even more powerful: Eating Vegan Before Six has turned my life around. For good.

I seem to have created a way of eating that has allowed me—a person who makes his living writing about eating and cooking—to lose weight quickly and easily, and it has now allowed me to keep it off for the better part of a decade. Over the years I’ve heard from many, many others that they’ve made similar transformations.

That’s not how fad diets work.

I started VB6 on my own and on a hunch. There I was, middle aged, over- weight but physically active, and sitting in my doctor’s office going over the numbers. High cholesterol, check. Pre-diabetes, check. Overweight, check. Perhaps some of this will sound familiar to you too. My doctor—a man I’ve known and trusted for 30 years—gave me two choices: Either start taking what amounts to a lifetime of drugs to counteract the effects of obesity-related diseases, or drastically change my diet. He suggested that becoming a vegan might do the trick.

Honestly, neither sounded good. I’m against taking drugs for preventable diseases and, given the importance and variety of food in my life, veganism wasn’t an option. So after planting that seed, my doctor sent me away to think of something more suitable. Instead I struck a compromise: I’d eat like an ultra-strict vegan from the time I woke up until dinnertime, and then I’d eat whatever I wanted to. And that, essentially, is VB6.

The next chapters outline exactly how you’ll be eating, but ultimately there are just two rules to remember: Rule number one is that from the time you wake until 6 p.m. (or dusk, or dinnertime—any of those is fine) you eat as a strict, mindful, well-nourished vegan would: no animal products, no junk food, no highly processed food. Your daytime diet comprises only minimally processed fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. (All of this can be “negotiated,” as you’ll see.) Rule number two is that you do whatever you want for dinner. Including, yes, wine, beer, dessert, cheese-burgers, whatever (though, within reason) and just until dinner is over, not until midnight.

There’s an obvious and important reason why the impact of VB6 is immediate and profound: It ensures that you eat more plants and less of everything else. And if there are unifying, credible points in the trustworthy research of the last 20 years, they are these: We eat too much meat; we eat too much sugar; we eat too much highly processed food (mostly grains that are metabolized as sugar); and we don’t eat enough minimally processed fruits and vegetables.

After seven years of VB6 I can say with assurance that there is no downside. When I first started, it was obvious that VB6 could be in no way harmful, and therefore there was no reason not to try it. In fact the only surprises were (a) how easy it was and (b) how well it worked.

Now I look back and it seems an almost seamless transition, a move from eating an entirely undisciplined form of the Standard American Diet (yes, it is indeed SAD) to a malleable but determined pattern that took some thought during the course of the day but that paid off in both short- term pleasure—dinner every night continues to be a source of joy, and now it feels like a reward as well—and long-term health.

VB6 provides a different, more modern approach to improving the way you eat, and this book demonstrates just how flexible it can be. If your standard fare is typically American, these recipes and strategies will change that. In no time—and with little effort—you’ll be consuming fewer hyper-processed foods, less industrial meat and dairy products, less sugar, and fewer chemically extracted oils; and you’ll be consuming more natural antioxidants, micronutrients, phytochemicals, and fiber.

And all of that means you’re likely to be healthier, lighter, more energetic, and in better spirits. It’s difficult—no, make that impossible—to predict how a change in diet will affect any individual. That’s true even for a doctor who’s seen you and all your blood work. But among all the confusion and gobbledygook about health and diet that’s out there, there’s enough evidence to state these three things:

1 The more plants you eat, in a state as close as possible to natural, the better off you’ll be.

2 The fewer highly processed foods you eat—especially highly processed grains, but other foods as well—the better off you’ll be.

3 It might be presumptuous to say “the fewer animal products you eat the better off you’ll be.” But if you’re like most Americans (and we average something like 600 pounds of animal products per person per year), you could stand to cut back, as we now know that too many animal products can be bad for your health.

VB6 will take care of all three of those things for you: increase your intake of plants and decrease your intake of highly processed foods and animal products. If you now eat a standard American diet, you will be healthier. How that “healthier-ness” will manifest itself is impossible to predict, but you may lose weight, feel better, see your blood numbers go in the right direction, sleep better, walk better, all of the above, and more. At the very least, you will probably significantly reduce your risk of chronic disease. Not bad—in fact, very good.

It’s likely that you’ll see those kinds of changes in two months, perhaps even sooner. But I’m not going to guarantee specific results in a set period of time because VB6 is not a conventional diet or a plan with a slew of false promises.

That’s all you need to know to get started. There’s no reason to continue reading if you don’t want to know anything else; just dive into the recipes. This is, after all, a cookbook. (If you want to know more about why shifting the balance of your diet more toward plants and away from animals and processed foods, a great deal more detail is available in the original VB6.)

How long do you “stay on” VB6? For the rest of your life. It’s not a “lose 21 pounds in 21 days”
diet plan, but a diet in the old-fashioned sense of the word: a way of eating. The way you will eat. Period. You’re not looking for a short-term quick fix, and you won’t have to suffer on a restrictive and unnatural regimen for long. You are changing the way you eat for better health forever.

VB6 is a permanent commitment to a life that includes the enjoyment of good food and drink while teaching you the give-and-take necessary to either improve or maintain well-being. And when you’re healthy, chances are your weight will also be okay; you may not wear the same size you did as a college freshman, but you will likely strike a weight with which you’ll be comfortable. Good health, after all, is not about pounds on a scale; rather, appropriate weight is an indicator of good health. And VB6 will give you that.