Hannemann - Plant Over Processed: 75 Simple & Delicious Plant-Based Recipes for Nourishing Your Body and Eating From the Earth

Shem Hannemann

A loha, Im Andy! I was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, but my heart has always belonged to the tropics. Growing up, I dreamed of living near the ocean, learning to surf, and spending time on the beach. In high school, I wore a puka shell necklace, painted waves on my bedroom walls, and even decorated my room with a fake palm tree and a picture of surfer Kelly Slater. I had only seen Hawaii in the movies and in magazinesuntil the day my dad announced that the family was taking a trip there!

Ill never forget landing in Honolulu and stepping off the plane. The air was warm and thick with the scent of plumeriasa stark contrast to scraping ice off the windshield of my parents car and walking in knee-deep snow the morning before! I remember begging my dad to let me go to the beach on the night we arrived, and as I walked toward the water, I was in heaven. This was the first time Id heard the sound of the ocean or felt sand under my feet. I was hooked! After that family vacation, I knew I had to get back to Hawaii, and eventually I did. At eighteen, after applying to college in Hawaii twice, I was finally accepted, and I packed my bags and moved to the North Shore of Oahu.

I moved for the beach and the weather, but little did I know that Id meet a surfer boy who would become my partner in love and life! Shem and I got engaged a week after we first locked eyes and we married shortly afterward. Fast-forward fourteen years, and today we are living on the North Shore with our three rambunctious boys: Tama, eleven, Ira, seven, and Nalu, one.

Our life is wild and simpleand I mean simple. We live in a small house across the street from the beach with an outdoor shower. Our town has one main road, with mountains on one side and the beach on the other, and roosters are our alarm clock. We spend our free time surfing, skateboarding (the boys, not me), traveling, and enjoying meals as a family and with friends. Im sure youve heard the typical Hawaiian sayings Live with Aloha and Hang Loose. These are the mantras of the Hawaiian Islands and the concepts we live by. Id translate them, roughly, as Live your life guided by love and those you love and Dont forget to smell the flowers along the way.

My health, on the other hand, wasnt always so simple. Starting in my teens, I struggled with a long list of health issues, including irritable bowel syndrome, celiac disease, irregular menstrual cycles, hypothyroidism, asthma, and skin problems. For years I spent money on specialists and experimented with various diets, supplements, and medications in hopes of alleviating my issues. Occasionally something I tried would help, but never for long, and my cycle of health problems would always return. Most days I would wake up and go to bed with a stomachache. My digestive issues were such a problem that I avoided eating during the day and only ate once I got home at night, knowing that at least I could lie down and be close to a toilet (I know, TMI!). My hormones and reproductive system were also completely out of whack. At one point I was having a full menstrual cycle every other week for seven months straight. It became impossible to lead a normal life. I put on a happy face, exercised every day, and did what I could to be an involved mother and wife. But inside I was struggling, counting down the hours just to get through the day. It was no way to live.

In January of 2015, I decided I had to make a change. One night, as I was lying awake contemplating my health issues, I had a moment of clarity: No doctor or specialist was going to solve this for me. I needed to take things into my own hands, and it was up to me to research my health issues. I would use professionals as resources, but I needed to listen to my intuition and what my body was telling me. I had discovered a number of people online who were following plant-based diets and had experienced full health transformations as a result. I had also been reading that fruits and vegetables were the gentlest foods for a sensitive digestive system. However, the idea of following a strict vegan diet seemed outlandish. I had convinced myself that eating fruits, vegetables, and starches caused me to bloat, so I avoided these foods like the plague, instead consuming what was advertised as healthyanimal protein, protein bars, and health drinks loaded with artificial sweetenerswhile also attempting to satisfy my unruly sweet tooth with candy bars. I wouldnt allow myself even a bite of a banana or a blueberry, for fear of how my digestive system would react. I thought that I was making relatively healthy choices and doing what was best for my body.

In spite of my fears, I decided to give a plant-based diet a try for thirty days. Eating 100 percent plant-based, where many of my calories would come from vegetables, fruits, and starches, seemed to fly in the face of everything Id been taught. At the same time, a little voice inside of me was asking, Why would these fruits and vegetables and grains come from the earth if they werent meant to benefit us? It was as if my heart was telling my brain, Just stop thinking and start trusting! I also decided to eliminate all processed foods from my diet during this thirty-day period, eating only foods that came from the earth.

Petrina Tinslay

I will give more detail on exactly what I ateand what you should eat if you want to do what I didin the next chapters. But in a nutshell, I made it my daily goal to eat more plants than processed foods. This is where my mantra, Plant Over Processed, was born. Specifically, I was aiming to get 80 percent of my daily calories from living plant foods, and I would use what I had learned about food combining (more on this concept later) to get the most out of these foods and my efforts. To accomplish this, I decided to eat the first two meals of my day predominantly or completely raw: breakfast was a digestion-boosting tonic followed by a nourishing green smoothie; and lunch was a big green salad with fruits, veggies, and nuts and/or another smoothie. Dinner was a cooked plant-based mealperhaps a soup or curry, a vegan stir-fry, or a roasted veggie burrito. Snacks were also 100 percent plant-based. The idea was to eat as gently and as naturally as possible, in hopes that my body could accept these foods and heal. I figured that if it takes the body approximately thirty minutes to digest a serving of fruits and vegetables, versus eighteen to twenty-four hours to digest meat, my body could use that extra energy to heal. My goal was to feel normal. I never imagined that I would feel like an entirely new, healthy, energized person at the end of this thirty-day trial!