After spending more than ten years volunteering weekly in a vegetarian resource centre, I think I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on the reasons people adopt a plant based diet, and maybe more importantly, why they switch back.  Here’s the number one failure reason I’ve heard:

“I tried going vegan, but I just ended up tired all the time.”

And do you want to know the two biggest tragedies about this?  First of all, I don’t hear about it until it’s too late to do anything, because they’ve already changed back and the actual switch is the hardest part to trigger, and secondly, it wouldn’t have mattered because my first reaction was to get defensive and immediately think “they must be doing something wrong, a vegan diet is full of energy!”

After hearing it enough times and gathering enough data, and yes, swallowing my pride, I’ve come to realize that not everyone automatically succeeds on a plant-based diet, and when it comes to physical weakness and fatigue, it’s usually to do with one or two key factors:

Make sure you eat enough

Let’s suppose you’ve decided you’re going to switch from the most average diet around (which, let’s face it, isn’t terribly healthy) to not just vegan, but ubervegan!  Whole foods, no frying, etc.  You’re not a nutritionist, but you just know that a lot of colourful foods is going to be better for you than that hunk of dead animal with fries on the side.  And the range of flavours!  Incredible!

The problem here is that steamed broccoli simply doesn’t have as many calories as feast of roast beast, at least if you fill your plate the same way you’re used to.  You basically have two options, either dramatically increase your portion sizes or consciously add some more calorie-dense foods to your meal (the typically lower fat content of plant-based foods is usually the culprit in the calorie differential.)

Over time, you’ll have no trouble meeting (and then exceeding, possibly by far) your calorie needs on a plant based diet, but a lot of beginners make the mistake of judging nutritional content by how much of their plate is covered.

This problem is often compounded by one of the side effects of not getting enough calories: you lose weight.  For a lot of us, that’s a good thing, and we’re wired up to keep doing the things that give us rewards, so we’ll continue to eat the way we do, lose weight, and somehow manage to not associate the fatigue with the weight loss.  I know it sounds silly, but when you think you’re eating enough (and the majority of people have no idea how many calories they consume a day, vegan or otherwise,) it’s easy to attribute the weight loss to some magic property of plant-based foods, and not the obvious fact that you’re not consuming enough.

The solution to feeling weak as a new vegan is pretty easy: weigh yourself every day.  If it’s going down, eat more.  As long as you’re eating actual food, which I’ll talk about in a moment, and not, say, potato chips/crisps to meet the deficit, your energy levels will take care of themselves.

Eat well

The other trap that new vegans sometimes run into with weakness is due to an over reliance on processed vegan-friendly transition foods.  This is usually less of a problem than the simple calorie count above, but it’s worth a quick discussion.

While mock meats, cheeses, etc are handy, if you approach veganism by simply replacing animal products with their analogues and keeping everything else the same, you might be doing your body a disservice.  Don’t get me wrong; these foods are really useful, and we still consume them fairly often ourselves, but they’re heavily processed, typically high in sodium, and while I’m not a nutritionist, I can’t recommend them as a significant part of your diet.

Looking at it another way, if you ate nothing but hot dogs all day, you probably wouldn’t expect to feel great.  Why would a diet of primarily veggie dogs be any better?

Try to get yourself on whole foods as soon as possible.  As I suggested in 3 quick tips for getting started as a vegan, you only really need four good recipes to get things going, and you’ll find yourself feeling a lot better right away.

Next steps

Being vegan doesn’t have to mean counting every calorie.  I rarely track my nutrition on a daily basis, but it’s a useful exercise for everyone to do one or two weeks of each year to see where they’re at.  I always find it funny that people will ask me how I get my protein but they don’t have any idea how many grams they themselves consume on any given day.

One free tool I’ve found handy is the nutrition log on Daily Burn.  They’ve got tons of foods in their database, and it’s one of the easiest interfaces I’ve seen.  As I’ve said, you probably don’t need to do this obsessively, but if you’re just getting started on a brand new diet, something like this can be a huge benefit towards making sure you’ve got your bases covered.

And most importantly, if you’re encountering problems with a vegan diet, ask for advice!  There are millions of vegans in North America alone, and they’re probably not all misguided fools surviving on sheer willpower  Leverage any vegans you know along with the internet, including sites like ours, and set yourself up for success by asking for help before and after you run into problems – I don’t want to run into you a year from now and hear another “I tried it but…” story!

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For the past two newsletters, we’ve been going through a concept I call “Your ideal life starts with breakfast.”  You can read part one here and part two here, but basically the idea is that if we can get our meals to be as awesome as we can imagine, a lot of the rest of our lives will automagically fall into place.

As I discovered last week, it’s not as easy as it might sound.  After three weeks, I only just managed to (intentionally) have my ideal breakfast for the first time yesterday morning.  But you know what?  I had it again today.  Here’s what an ideal breakfast looks like to me:

That’s fresh pineapple (cut earlier, as per my thoughts on how to eat more raw fruits and vegetables,) with some blueberries.  I eat it on a white plate at the kitchen counter (we got rid of our dining room table when we built the new kitchen) while reading blog postings and planning out my day.

What’s interesting about this meal is that it’s about as much food as my eyes can take in first thing in the morning (I have a healthy appetite but I’m usually excited to start the day so I don’t want to spend too long eating,) but it’s actually not that many calories and I seem to be finding myself hungry about 90 minutes later.  That actually turns into a benefit for me, because I really want to move from three meals a day up to six or so (working from home means I don’t have a lot of excuses not to, really, but it’s still a challenge for some reason.)

As I mentioned, it took me several weeks to get into this groove.  What I thought was really cool, though, was some of the feedback from newsletter subscribers and the Facebook page.  A lot of you are already eating your ideal breakfast, and I found that inspiring.

Let’s share that inspiration: post a photo of your ideal meal (doesn’t have to be breakfast, but I recommend you start there) somewhere and send me a note so we can build a page of ideas for people – be sure to include the link to the photo and a brief description, both of the food and some info on how you eat it, who you eat it with, etc.  If you’re using Flickr or Twitter, tag your picture with “idealmeal” so more people can find it in between updates here.

The internet means we’re not alone.  Let’s leverage that and eat better than any community ever has.

Here’s Barbi’s ideal meal:

As she puts it:

Bean and spinach enchilada topped with hot sauce.

Why my ideal meal?
#1 and most important: It’s DELICIOUS. I can’t get enough of the mushy texture of the refried beans combined with the warm spinach and the slightly crunchy peppers. and every meal needs a bit of spice.
#2 it’s filling and satisfying while also being super nutritious. it covers all four food groups!

• whole grains (whole wheat tortilla)
• veggies (spinach and peppers)
• legumes (refried beans)
• and even fruit if you count the avocado!

How do I eat it? As you can see from the photo, this is kind of a fork and knife required meal, so typically at the kitchen table. With my partner Robby. And me unable to stop saying “This is so delicious!” “Why does this taste so good!” “I want another one! Can I have another one!?”

Elena sent this one in:

As she says: here’s my explanation: we should always avoid foods that slow us down mentally or physically (easier said than done, of course) and especially in the morning. Fruits are the foods most easily digested by the human body so the energy they provide is most readily available. So when I’m being my best, I’d have 2-3 pieces/servings of (only fresh, only raw) fruit and some raw nuts, preferably spread out over the first 2 or so hours of the morning. This was: a banana sliced, topped w/about a half cup of WholeSoy & Co vanilla yogurt and about a teaspoon of ground flax on top. Also an orange and about a quarter cup of raw almonds. Schedule allowing it’d be spread out a bit, with an hour or so in between. When I consistently do this in the mornings (easier in summer) I have much more energy throughout the day…so that’s what I think of as ideal…

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Linda signed up to the newsletter this week, and she said that the very best tip I could give her would be “getting started” ideas for brand new vegans.  We’ve got a growing set of recipes and cooking tips on Eazy Vegan, so I’m not going to pick out some simple recipes.  Instead, here are three basic principles to keep in mind that I think can help new and experienced vegans alike:

Figure out your biggest problem

A complete overhaul of your diet is a massive change on a zillion levels of your life.  Your body may react differently, your social interactions may change, your finances might get into trouble if you stick to too many processed vegan foods, and other issues might erupt that’ll challenge your decision to go vegan.

Ask yourself, in a year’s time, if it all goes bad, what’s the most likely way you’ll finish this phrase: “yeah, I was vegan for a while but I had to stop because of…”

Fix that right now.

I don’t know what your hypothetical dealbreaker is, but it’s probably not unique.  If you’d like help brainstorming, feel free to get in touch, but work on the biggest challenge first.  Once that’s under control, repeat the exercise (nobody likes to admit this for some reason, but massive change is hard and usually presents multiple obstacles!)

If you try to fix everything at once, your brain’s going to be all over the place, and you probably won’t even realize what most of the problems are.  Fixing the biggest problem first will clear more room for you right away, and you’ll probably find that this fix will automatically fix a few other issues that you didn’t even know were related.

Ignore the fine print

In a perfect world we’d eat nothing but whole fruits and vegetables and everything would have an ingredients list of one.  Actually, scratch that, that’d be a pretty boring world.  I like the fact that there are a lot of items in the grocery store that some company has taken the time to prepare for me so I don’t have to, for instance, make my own tofu.

Lots of these items have weird ingredients in them that I can’t even spell, let alone recognize without practice.  You can burn up a lot of energy as a new vegan poring through each list, comparing each item to the entry in a list of food ingredients, and agonizing over simple mistakes you made just a few days before when you misread a label.

When you’re just starting out, focus on the easy 80%.  Consider the rest a transition process.  You’ll learn how to scan ingredients as you learn everything else (and the good news is that it’s getting easier and easier as products start to actually identify themselves as vegan.)

I’m not trying to tell you to ignore trace amounts of animal products, but you need to recognize that you probably don’t have a chemistry degree and this stuff can be hard to figure out, and animal ingredients hide in lots of places you don’t expect.  For example, every week I hear from a longtime vegan who just found out that beer is often filtered with fish guts (thankfully, it’s usually the same week they discovered Barnivore.)  Does that make them less vegan up to that point?  Personally, I don’t think so.

Focus on the big ingredients when you’re starting out.  Avoid bacon, for example.  Things like L-Cysteine will get sorted out later on in your journey.

Learn four recipes

OK, I said I wasn’t going to pick out recipes, and I’ll stick to that, mostly, but I want to call out a behaviour that I see in a lot of new vegans: they want to try absolutely everything, right away.

And this is exciting!  I remember when I decided to adopt a plant-based diet, and it was like a light went off in my head, and suddenly I had permission to explore entire aisles of the grocery store that I’d previously ignored.  I don’t know why, as an omnivore, I felt that I didn’t need to know what cous cous, falafels, millet, and, say, black eyed peas were, let alone how to use them, but there’s a tendency to think of a new vegan diet as “new everything” as opposed to “less of this stuff, more of this stuff.”

Unfortunately, this makes things a lot harder than it has to be when you’re starting out, and if something’s difficult, it’s more likely that you’ll give up.  Your body is going to be trying to get used to a new type of cuisine with different amounts of fat and fibre among other things, and if you change things up dramatically with every meal, you might have some difficulties there.  Your budget might suffer with the wider range of staple foods you’ll be buying to create each new meal (see our post on the three spices you need to get started for some help there.) And then there’s the matter of simply trying to remember everything!

Trying new things is something I always encourage, but if you’re just starting out, I recommend learning maybe four solid recipes that you can use as your home base.  Most people I know, omnivore or vegan, tend to eat pretty much the same stuff over a given period of time, so don’t worry about being in a rut.  I’d just hate for you to stop enjoying veganism simply because you can’t find the time, energy, and resources to keep the food supply moving into your belly.

I said I wouldn’t supply recipes, but here are some guidelines: learn a good bean dish, a good tofu dish (tofu scramble is super easy to figure out,) something as simple as a sandwich or wrap you can make for lunches, and finally some kind of cake or cookie recipe that’ll get you started with baking (it’s not as stereotypically vegan as my other suggestions, and you can take the desserts to work to win more people over!)

Think of these as your “home base” recipes.  You can try new things, but if you get the hang of four solid choices you’ll have something to fall back on when you’re having a rough day, or your body is craving something familiar.

What else?

These are three tips that popped into my head this morning, but there are a bunch more I could have gone with, so I’m turning it over to the other vegan readers: what one tip do you wish someone had told you when you were starting as a vegan?  Let us know in the comments so we all can learn!

Update: lots of great suggestion from fans over on the Facebook posting, check ‘em out!

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I can’t remember the last time I talked with another vegan about this and they didn’t admit to playing the grocery game.  It’s one of those instinctive things that we just do, maybe as humans, maybe just as vegans, but hey, it’s a fun way to pass the time.

What’s the grocery game?  Simple: when you’re waiting in line at the cashier, look at the purchases of the person in front of you.  If everything on the belt is vegan, it’s a win!

For me, it doesn’t really matter if they’re just buying a bottle of soda; I like to win so I make the rules easy.  Some people have higher standards, so they’ll work out elaborate bonus point scoring systems incorporating raw foods, unprocessed items, etc.  You probably have your own guidelines, and today’s post isn’t about how to play the grocery game, it’s how to really win.

“Winning” the grocery game is a missed opportunity

Nobody likes to talk about this, but there aren’t a lot of vegans out there.  I hear from lots of you (via replies to the newsletter, mostly) that you don’t even know a single other vegan in your city or town.  And yet, I’m sure some of you have “won” the grocery game and then went on with your lives wondering why you can’t meet more vegans.

It’d be awesome if we could turn those chance victories into lasting friendships, wouldn’t it?

There are lots of reasons why this doesn’t happen.  Starting a conversation with a stranger is outside of a lot of our comfort zones.  We worry that it can come off a bit stalker-y.  The other person might not even be vegan.  The other person might be insane.  Maybe it’d make veganism look bad. And so on.

For those reasons, this isn’t a post about how to talk to strangers (in all honesty, pickup guides are probably the best resource for that – as I’ve said before, I recommend The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (affiliate link); it’s not a how-to guide but it’s an entertaining story and I got a lot of outreach ideas from it, believe it or not.)

Instead, I’m recommending that you be open to being approached when you’re shopping. Remember, the person behind you might be playing the grocery game too!  Here are a few ways to create opportunities:

If you’re with someone else, mention veganism in your conversation while you’re waiting.  Position yourself as best as you can (I know, it’s a narrow aisle, but be aware of your surroundings) so the person behind you can interrupt your conversation.  Try talking specifically about a particular product, and how you’re wondering what it’ll be like, or how you like to serve it.

If you’re by yourself, please don’t talk to yourself in lieu of option one  Instead, try standing sideways, facing the belt, so your back isn’t to the person behind or in front of you.  Relax.  Smile a little.  Now’s not the time to check your email or read one of the magazines or any of those things that means someone will have to interrupt you to start a conversation.

If you decide you want to start the conversation, try asking about a product the other person is buying.  It’s easy, relevant, and gives the other person a chance to decide if they want to talk to you.  If they’re a grocery game player too, they’ll be able to scan your purchases at this point and then you’ll have done them a favour of creating the opening.

This is the kind of thing that might come up in your lives once or twice in a year, or maybe a decade, but it’d be a shame to miss out on.  It’s a simple thing to be aware of, so next time you’re shopping and you’re playing the grocery game, remember that the people around you might be doing the same thing.

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Amazingly, there's more than cereal for vegans beyond the produce section

This week we’re going to look at vegan grocery shopping with some practical tips and fun things you can do to make the most of your shopping experience – the majority of you don’t have access to an all-vegan grocery store, which means you’re stuck in a shop with the usual dairy, egg, fish and butcher sections.  Here’s the first installment of your survival guide:

Be brave; assume nothing

I don’t know about you, but have a hard time going near the rows of refrigerated and frozen animal parts in the butcher section.  Most of the time the animal’s been cut up well beyond recognition, which is usually a little better than looking at a severed head, for instance, but sometimes it can get disturbing.

The interesting thing is that sometimes grocery stockers get… creative.  There are often hidden gems (or just basic supplies) in the store that you’d never see if you stick entirely to the produce, bread, and canned foods sections.

The 3 “secret spots” most vegans don’t look

Here are some sections of the store that you might be avoiding, but there can be some gems in there, either through misunderstandings from the stockers or simple happenstance:

The meat department. I’ve found Tofurkey sausages in the bacon section, and sometimes there’s a weird ethnic section with interesting vegan-friendly options. (It could be any type of food, and I don’t mean the ethnicity is weird, just that the assortment of foods that are associated together paint a strange picture of a style of cuisine, is all.)

The fish counter. Often this is next to the deli, and some strange shelf capacity overrun issues can push Actually Tasty Food into this area.  In my regular store, the sushi section tends to be here, which is mostly takeout, and while it does include some veg options there are also the supplies to make rolls at home.

Frozen meats. In a lot of stores vegetarian frozen products will have their own section (isn’t it amazing that there are enough of them now?) but even then, things can slip.  I’ve recently found veggie chicken strips sitting right next to frozen (real) chicken breasts, and sometimes we’ll discover a brand new “just happens to be vegan but not marketed that way” product from a new company that only has one SKU in the store, so it gets put in the “we have room for this here” spot, far from anything else you as a vegan would associate it with.

Do a quarterly audit

Despite the promise of vegan riches, the sad fact is that you have to wade (not literally, thank goodness) through a lot of dead animals to find things, and this can be disturbing and depressing if done on a regular basis.  I recommend you conduct an “audit” of your store every three months or so (do it when the seasons change, for example.)  Pay attention to the three “secret spots” I mentioned earlier, but really, check out every foot of shelving – you might be pleasantly surprised at what you’ll find!

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As I said in the last segment, cooking at home is (usually) much cheaper than eating takeout or convenience food, but the startup costs can be a little scary: stocking up on the individual ingredients that recipes assume everybody “just has” can be an expensive proposition.

In this part of our cheap vegan series, I want to help with that by talking about spices. Spice racks are cheap. Filling them might not be. If you’re not careful, you can spend $3 to $5 per spice, and that can add up when your spice rack becomes a spice drawer becomes a spice shelf:

Yeah, it’s worse than condiments, isn’t it?  Sometimes I count them just to make myself feel crazy.  We’re up to around 50.

Still, when you consider that just a few hundred years ago fortunes were made by chartering risky boat trips to far off lands to secure new flavours, we live in a pretty awesome world, and the price of spice is pretty low in comparison to the old days. You don’t even need a boat! Still, I think we can save a bit more.

There are two big ways to save money here, and today we’ll cover how and what to buy when you’re stocking your spices.

How to buy spice

To some of you this will be as obvious as “garbage goes in the garbage can,” but when you’re first starting out, it’s not always even obvious that, say, garam masala is found in the spice section and not at the, I don’t know, make up counter, for instance.

When you go to your local grocery store, you’ll see a spice section that looks like this:

See those pretty little tins and bottles? They run around $3 to $5 each. It’s not hard to pick out a week’s worth of recipes that use 15 different spices (hint: pick recipes for spices that you actually have!), so that’s, say, $60 just to get some flavour into your meals, which probably kills out any savings you might have been expecting from the whole cooking thing. Sure, the spices will last more than a week, but this is one of those mental block things that keeps people from even starting.

You’ve got two alternatives:

Most stores also sell spice in plastic pouches, some of which even have little zip lock closures at the top now, which is pretty gour-frigging-met, if you ask me. These packs average a buck or so each, saving you around 75% without leaving that grocery aisle.

The next choice, which I prefer, is to buy in bulk, where you can measure the cost of spices with nickels and dimes. Now, when you do this, pay attention to the bin you’re buying from – sometimes the spices don’t sell very fast, and you’ll even see two different colours from when new stock was poured on top of old stuff. Buy from small bins (the stock will rotate faster) from a busy bulk section (if your grocery store doesn’t have one, your health or bulk foods store will, though I guess that’s obvious from the name “bulk foods store.”)

When buying in bulk, avoid buying in bulk: yes, bulk without bulk: small quantities will last a long time. When you get home, you can keep them in the little baggies, transfer them to that spice rack you got as a gift, or put them in little jars (either from the dollar store or reused from other grocery purchases: we use artichoke heart jars a lot for this.)

Lastly, no matter how you buy your spices, mark the date of purchase on the container somewhere. My palate isn’t so advanced as to be able to notice a six month age difference in spices, but ideally you want to balance freshness with the convenience of having enough on hand. It’ll also give you a better idea of how much of each spice you actually use.

What spices to buy

Even with the bulk trick, it’s a good idea to not spend money until you have to, and with spices, there’s a learning curve to deal with, especially if you’re “winging it” without a recipe.

Don’t get me wrong; a quarter teaspoon of something something in addition to the other 6 spices in your dish will make a subtle difference, but I don’t know that it’s a make it or break it kind of thing, particularly when you’re still learning how to broil, steam, and saute.

I talked about this with Angela last night and we came up with this “desert island” list of spices:

Ground black pepper. I swear, my first four years of vegan cooking relied almost entirely on a big (massive!) jar of ground pepper. It was my curry, my turmeric, my cayenne, and my chipotle all in one. Did you know they sell lemon pepper? Did you know that adding ground pepper and lemon juice (from the bottle, natch) is pretty much the same thing and you can vary the balance between the two as you like it? It’s not fancy, but there’s a reason you find black pepper on the table of just about every restaurant.

Sage. And if you’re feeling splurgy, rosemary, but I said this would be a list of three spices, so call it extra credit. There’s no nice way to put this: they add the flavour we remember from KFC to a meal.

Oregano. Alternate: “italian seasoning,” which will blend in some other stuff. Technically this isn’t even a spice, being a herb and all, but we work with the vocabulary of the average chef, and there you go. This fills in the non-spicy, non-savoury category for things like pasta.

Later on, I’d add cumin, cayenne, basil, thyme, garlic and onion powder, and other good stuff to the mix, but you’re going to develop your own list of preferences based on the recipes you decide to work with.

Oh, and as a bonus, remember that you can cheat a bit by buying pre-seasoned foods, which are often the same price as the “natural” stuff. I’m talking about pasta sauce, herbed tofu, and other stuff like that.

What about you? What’s your desert island spice list, assuming, you know, there’s a full kitchen and a grocery store on the island that stocks everything but spice?

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It seems like we’ve got a lot of people searching the interwebs for tips on being vegan on a budget.  Isn’t that a little messed up when you think about it?  For years, meat’s been seen as a status symbol intended for those who can afford it, delegating beans and rice to “poor people,” and yet the growing abundance of packaged vegan convenience food has made it way too easy to top the grocery bill of just about any omnivore.

With that in mind, I felt a little guilty with the latest round of vegan cooking videos we’ve got going on the just-relaunched Eazy Vegan Cooking Show.  Our first video is all about how to use a pressure cooker, which can run you around $100 for a good one, and next week I’ll be using close to a thousand dollars in equipment (which is mostly optional, and we got our dehydrator for free, but still!)

By way of explanation, I thought it’d be good to talk a little bit about food budgets and how sometimes “spending to save” can make a lot of sense.

First of all, if you actually use your kitchen instead of eating takeout or relying heavily on “assemble and reheat” convenience foods (I’m looking at you with a mix of love and regret, Tofurky,) you’re going to save a significant amount of money.  From there, it’s a matter of working to lower your average cost per meal.

I love using beans to fill out a meal.  OK, mostly I just love to eat hummous straight out of a bowl, yes, with a spoon, don’t you judge me, but the point is, beans are an incredibly healthful addition to any meal and they make it hard to add much else in the way of bulk.

Canned beans are the most convenient way to cook with beans, but the dry beans are significantly cheaper, and as a bonus they store easily and weigh less than cans, which can make them better choices for both you and the environment.  The only challenge is that they’re a pain to cook, in my opinion, without a pressure cooker.

I spent some time looking up prices for canned versus dry beans, but it seemed to vary by location a fair bit, so do your own math.  My main point today is that if you’re willing to commit to regular additions of beans in your diet, it doesn’t take very long (under a year, easily) for the savings to add up to the price of a pressure cooker.  (and yes, they do a lot more than cook beans…)

Of course, you have to be careful with this kind of logic!  I often find myself rationalizing far too many “money savers” at a time, which can result in racking up a lot of up-front costs for many items that I won’t end up using (just ask Angela!) – as with everything else I talk about, be sure to make one change in your routine at a time so you can easily figure out what’s working for you and what’s not without being too disruptive to everything else that’s going on with your life.

If I was more opportunistic, I’d salt this post with affiliate links to various pressure cookers available online, but honestly they’re the kind of thing that you can often find used on Craigslist or Kijiji – I think they’re like the home exercise equipment of cooking gear or something.

So over to you – what’s the one kitchen upgrade you’ve bought that’s saved you the most money?  And going the other way, what’s the one you thought would be “the one” but turned out to be a waste?  Let me know in the comments!

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Hi all, sorry for the mixup today but we’re having some computer issues at Thrust Labs today and it looks like it’s going to mean pushing today’s post and the newsletter out a day.  I’d ask you to “pretend tomorrow’s Monday” but that would mean I’m subjecting you to two Mondays in a row, and nobody likes that, but on the other hand if you really don’t like Tuesdays then, erm, you’re welcome.

Sorry for the delay, and I’ll see you tomorrow – lots of fun lined up this week, assuming the hard drives are willing!

Update: No newsletter this week, sorry! I’m going to focus on developing some of the new ideas forming in my head instead so we can grow together.  Posts will show up in a little while, check back soon…

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Today at 2PM Eastern (Toronto/NYC time) we’ll be digging into this week’s newsletter content in even greater detail with a live video session.  Missed the newsletter or want a refresher?  Here’s a 9 minute video version:

“The Heist” is a great technique to get past the cynical, doubting mental blocks that people put up even before they ask you why you’re vegan so you can deliver a quick message that’ll actually reach their brain.  It’s the basis of a lot of my work online (especially on Vegan Porn) and I hope you enjoy this walkthrough!

RSVP (and watch) here! If you’ve never attended office hours before, please join up 5 minutes early so you can set up your account (it’s free) that’ll let you participate in the live chat portion – it’s getting to be more entertaining than watching me!

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See you at 2!  And hey, while you’re waiting, here are some recordings of past sessions!

Update: Here’s this week’s recording! Lots of fun in the live chat, thanks so much to everyone who was able to join, and we’re going to work on some different hours real soon!

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I’ve been having a hard time getting Derek Siver’s Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy talk out of my head.  Here’s something to fill 3 whole minutes of your day:

If you prefer to read, Derek posted the full transcript here, but I’ll excerpt the Big Idea for you:

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.

There is no movement without the first follower.

We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

Leadership is hard, and it requires going out of your comfort zone. Way out, at least more than you feel comfortable doing. Hence the term “comfort zone.”

The thing is, we’re not the leaders in most things we do. Someone else, or generally thousands if not millions of someone elses, have done this stuff before, we’re probably modelling one or more of these people, and there’s a good chance that people you talk to have heard of those other people well before they ever found out that you’re into veganism, conscious living, raw foods, nude gardening, or whatever passion it is that floats your particular boat.

It’s OK that we’re not the leaders. We’re more likely the first or second follower, at least in our geography. I think that’s a little easier to deal with – certainly more comfortable, don’t you agree?

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