Almost everybody who gives up on eating plant-based gives up somewhere in the first month.
They rarely say that they were hungry.
They say they did not have the time for it, or that it got complicated, or that they missed cheese too much.
Quite often they say that they simply lacked the discipline.
We do not think discipline had very much to do with it.
When we first changed how we ate, we had exactly the problem every beginner has. We did not know what to eat.
So we searched the internet, bought a stack of cookbooks and spent our days in the kitchen. Many of those recipes were complicated and took a long time to make.
Worse than that, they left us hungry again an hour later.
We genuinely thought we were going to starve!
The plate that looks right
Picture what a beginner puts together on the first evening.
A large salad, some steamed vegetables, and a piece of fruit afterwards. It looks like health and it photographs beautifully.
It is also almost entirely water and fibre.
A pound of vegetables carries about a hundred calories, and a pound of fruit carries two to three hundred.
So that generous-looking plate might come to three or four hundred calories in total. A grown adult needs somewhere between two and three thousand of them a day.
Two hours later you are hungry again, and you quietly decide that this way of eating is not for you.
You did not fail at anything. You ate about a third of a meal.
Hunger is not a mood
Hunger is a signal that your body is built to make impossible to ignore.
It has to be. An animal that could shrug off hunger did not survive long enough to leave descendants.
So when you are properly hungry, your attention narrows and the nearest available calories begin to look extremely reasonable.
At that point you are not choosing between your values and a pastry.
You are choosing between food and no food, and nobody wins that argument with willpower.
This is the part that so often gets read as weakness. Somebody eats well for nine days, gets truly hungry on the tenth, eats something else, and concludes that the whole business is beyond them.
Nine days of eating well is not a failure.
It is nine days of eating well, followed by an entirely predictable biological event.
What the healthiest eaters do
The people we know who have eaten this way for years are not more disciplined than anybody else.
They simply eat differently.
Their plates are built around potatoes, beans, rice, oats and lentils, with the vegetables arranged around them rather than instead of them.
Those foods carry five to six hundred calories a pound. That is five times what the vegetables carry!
The same salad, with a cup of beans stirred into it, stops being a side dish and becomes dinner.
Nothing else about it has to change. Not the ingredients you buy, not the time you spend, not how healthy it is.
You simply stop being hungry at nine in the evening.
Why we begin here
There is a great deal of advice about staying motivated on a plant-based diet.
Almost none of it helped us, because motivation was never the thing that broke.
Satiety was.
If your meals leave you full, you will carry on eating this way without having to think about it much at all.
If they leave you hungry, no amount of resolve will hold, and you will spend the next year believing that the problem was you.
Fix the hunger and a surprising amount of the rest looks after itself. We had to learn this slowly, over several months in the kitchen, mostly by getting it wrong.
In the end it comes down to four numbers, and we will go through them next.
And, always, seek health consciously.
