In my previous post I wrote about setting a Wellness Vision for the new year and defining the actionable goals (or resolutions) to help make this vision real.
For many of us, improving our eating habits might be one of these goals, either directly like eating more fruits and vegetables, or indirectly like having more energy or losing weight. Or maybe you just want to raise your awareness about nutrition and get educated on how to implement a balanced diet.
If that’s you, I would like to introduce you to a free resource that can help immensely: Veganuary 2025.
Veganuary is a UK based non-profit organization with worldwide presence, that encourages people to try a vegan diet in January of each year. This initiative started in 2014, and it has successfully run for 10 years since then. With veganism as their focal point, Veganuary not only provides valuable information about how to adopt a plant-based diet, but also the impact it has on protecting the environment and preventing animal suffering, besides improving individual’s health and wellness, primarily through reducing the risk of chronic health conditions.
My experience with Veganuary
For me, discovering and joining Veganuary in 2024 was a turning point in my plant-based journey. I decided to become plant based in 2023. And I made mistakes in the beginning, especially around not eating enough protein, iron and calcium. At that point, my knowledge about nutrition was limited, as this was before I became a certified Holistic Nutritionist. Like perhaps many others that decide to try a plant-based diet, I simply replaced meats by vegetable products, not necessarily high protein ones, and avoided most dairy products. I still ate eggs in the beginning.
However, even if I was feeling great and full of energy, a few blood markers showed that something was off. Sure, my cholesterol levels were lower, but ferritin was low too and I started losing hair. My doctor recommended to take an iron supplement for a couple of months and increase my protein intake – because hair is made of protein, and if your body is not getting enough, it will probably limit the protein supply to something secondary as hair growth and keep the scarce supply for priority tasks like muscle repair. I was also doing intermittent fasting at that time with a minimal late breakfast (mostly fruit), which obviously was reducing the amount of nutrients and protein I was getting in the day.
My action plan, besides taking the iron supplement, was to go back to a full breakfast with a significant amount of protein and educate myself on how to get more protein from plant-based sources, as well as calcium which I suspected I might need more of too, as I was not eating dairy. You cannot really know if you are taking enough calcium through simple blood work, as your body will remove calcium from the storage – your bones – if you are deficient and as a result blood levels will show in desired range. And we don’t want to deplete our bones from calcium!
And here is where I found Veganuary extremely helpful! I signed up for the 2024 edition (at the same time that I enrolled in the Holistic Nutritionist training), and I received daily titbits of information about vegan nutrition, including how to get enough iron, protein and calcium from plants, how to plan your menus, menu examples, recipe ideas and more. On the environmental side, I also learnt a lot about the impact of our food choices in our planet and animal wellbeing. Quite eye opening, to be honest.
How Veganuary can help you too
If improving your nutrition is one of your goals, even if you are not considering a full plant-based diet, I encourage you to join Veganuary 2025. It is free – they will ask for a donation but you can choose not to donate until the end, based on your experience (that’s what I did). Besides the daily emails, short videos and infographics, you will also get access to cookbooks, including a celebrity one, and example menus based on different criteria: budget friendly, for athletes, etc. Lots of information at your disposal! Knowledge empowers us to make the right choices when it comes to our health and wellbeing, to self-advocate, have critical thinking and stand up for our interests.
Ready to sign up? Here’s the link for the USA (if joining from somewhere else, make sure to choose your region instead): https://veganuary.com/en-us/try-vegan/
Are you familiar with Veganuary? Have you tried it? Feel free to let me know in the comments.
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