The Plant-Based Journey will take you on the awesome passage to healthy, sustainable choices
Lani Muelrath Guides You on a Well-Lit Path to Plant-Based Success
You’ve heard the success stories, seen the before-and-after pictures of what a whole foods, plant-based diet can accomplish for your health, appearance, and budget. Perhaps you set out to achieve those rewards for yourself, but got sidetracked wandering around the supermarket with an empty cart, with no idea what to buy for dinner. Or you got a stomach ache from an abrupt change in your habits and decided that plant-based was not for you. Maybe your interest in healthier choices simply got put on a future to-do list as you sped through one rushed day after another.
Now you don’t have to figure out this lifestyle on your own. The Plant-Based Journey is an encouraging, practical, and highly readable trail map for turning your healthy intentions into reality. This book is rich with information, ideas, and simple, inexpensive, and yummy recipes.
Author Lani Muelrath is an experienced teacher and health coach. Her background gives her a unique, fresh perspective on the process of transitioning to a plant-based
Author Lani Muelrath uses all the skills she learned in decades as a teacher and health coach is designing her program
diet. Lani makes you feel safe – she respects your needs and daily realities, and does not try to talk you into doing anything you don’t want to do. Instead, she builds your
skills and self-confidence by showing you small steps that, one at a time, lead you to clarify and realize your own goals. She starts with familiar foods and meal plans to keep your taste buds happy as they transition to preferring whole plant foods.
The Plant-Based Journey describes five steps to happily adopting the healthiest diet:
• Awakening
• Scout
• Rookie
• Rockstar
• Champion
Everyone who transitions to a plant-based diet goes through these steps. The passage is eased once you understand that you are not the first person to wonder “what do I do when my boss is taking me to a steak house for a business meeting?” Every challenge has a workable solution, and Lani shows you how to figure these out. She looks at the passage to plant-based eating realistically, without downplaying questions that might come up.
One of my favorite tools in the book is Lani’s recipe templates. These are simple
The Plant-Based Journey includes an easy, healthy recipe for mandarin chocolate “ice cream”
enough for Rookies, although everyone will enjoy them. Her templates for whole grain breakfasts, savory vegetables, tasty sauces, bean spreads, color and crunch salads, plant burgers, and more ensure that you will never run out of convenient, easy meals that are customized to your own flavor preferences and offer plenty of variety.
I was glad to have a chance to talk with Lani and find out more about how she wrote this remarkable book. I wondered about her own journey to becoming a health coach. “I’m a teacher at heart and have been working with people to help them succeed most of my life. In college I started teaching yoga, and became vegetarian about the same time,” Lani shared. “I taught in the Peace Corps, and then got a masters degree in physical education and began teaching fitness and kinesiology. Then I earned my teaching credentials and began teaching a broad core curriculum to sixth graders. A teaching background is invaluable for working with people now who are struggling with change. To be effective as both a teacher and a health coach, you have to know how to develop a curriculum in which knowledge builds on itself. Just as much as you know the content of learning, you have to understand the process of learning, so that information can be assimilated and people feel good about themselves. As a teacher and a coach, it’s not my job to be strict or point a finger. Instead, I need to show solutions.”
I asked Lani how her career in teaching and coaching translated into being an author. “After I retired from teaching, I started a private coaching group built on the same three pillars as the program in my book. These are food, exercise, and mental mastery. I built modules to achieve each pillar. That coaching group was the seed for The Plant-Based Journey.”
How did the idea for five steps to successful transition originate? Lani continued “As
Lani and her husband thrive on a whole foods, plant-based diet as they travel the world. Here Lani thrills at elephants in Africa
a teacher, I understand you build a knowledge base step by step. I had to think through what that first step needs to be. As I developed a deeper understanding of the process, I noticed that the more people paid attention to each step, the more sustainable their change was. Sustainability is huge. For example, if someone tells me they lost 50 pounds, I don’t get too excited until I hear that a year later they are maintaining the weight loss. If someone gets stuck in the change process, it usually means they have to go back to an earlier step and retool it. Or they might need to pull in another pillar of change to move ahead, since all the elements of the program are related. If you don’t move your body, your brain gets stuck in cement. And nothing happens without inspiration and intention.”
If you are struggling with optimizing your diet, stalled part way to the goal of composing your plate with whole plant foods, I strongly recommend The Plant-Based Journey. You’ll feel great once you move forward, and your health and taste buds will be transformed for good.
If you enjoyed this post, you may want to check out this link to Lani’s recipes for irresistible chili and corn bread.
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Blog posting written by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet: How to Lose Weight and Get Healthy Now With Six Kinds of Whole Foods. This book shares the surprising science of why a whole foods, plant-based diet is so powerful in preventing and reversing chronic illness.
Tags: Lani Muelrath, The Plant-Based Journey, weight loss, whole foods plant-based diet, whole foods plant-based recipes
