BOSH! Healthy Vegan. Henry Firth
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may well not be vegan, but this book is still for you! The more plants you eat, the better. Maybe a totally plant-based diet is just not for you. Maybe later. Maybe never. This book is written for everyone, however many plant-based meals you choose to eat each day or week.
‘Not only does it help me on the court, but I feel like I’m doing the right thing for me. It definitely changed my whole life. It changed everything.’
Serena Williams – World Class Tennis Player – on adopting a plant-based diet
THE BOSH! STORY.
The worst of times.
In 2014, we were both in a bad place. Henry had just celebrated his thirtieth birthday. He woke up with ‘the fear’, having forgotten everything about the night before, and tried to work out what had happened. Luckily, save for embarrassing himself, no real damage was done. But he was also a work-hard-play-hard kind of guy, and food and alcohol were taking a toll on his life. That was the wake-up call he needed.
Around a similar time, Ian was looking and feeling under the weather, and had been for a while. Carrying a little more weight than he wanted, and inbetween jobs, he had lost all motivation. He denied that anything was wrong, but he was spending far too much time eating junk food and drinking, and not enough time looking after his body. And he was doing absolutely zero exercise. No running, no stretching, no cycling, no weights, not much walking. Nothing.
Both of us were making bad life choices. And these poor choices were making us unhealthy, unfit and unhappy.
As January approached, Ian decided to give up alcohol as a personal challenge. He found it easier than he expected, so decided to up the ante and give up meat, too. As part of that process, he started reading up on meat production, and watching veggie and vegan YouTube videos. And he decided to go vegan.
We lived together (and still do) and shortly after Ian decided to go vegan, we watched the film Cowspiracy. On discovering the environmental, health and ethical impact of animal agriculture, Henry joined Ian and went vegan overnight too.
Almost instantly, we both felt amazing. We lost a bit of weight. Our energy levels improved. We felt generally lighter, as our digestive systems were less strained. Our hair got thicker and we slept better. Henry’s hayfever pretty much disappeared. We felt fitter and healthier than ever. Despite the fact that it was harder to find food (in 2014 there wasn’t as much choice for vegans), we felt more satisfied and more fulfilled by our choices. The overall positivity of the vegan experience was intoxicating, and so we set up BOSH! to share our love of vegan food with the world.
The rest is vegan history. Within months we had millions of views of our videos. Within a year, billions.
However, there was a downside. While we were eating plant-based foods – which are, inherently, healthy – the sheer amount of food we were cooking and testing was causing us problems. We’re incredibly proud of the food in our BOSH! books, but, put simply, we were eating too much! Particularly for Henry, those repeated tests to make the perfect lasagne or burger resulted in him piling on the pounds he had initially lost.
When you immerse yourself in the vegan world, you realise just how easy it is to make vegan versions of almost anything. This is a great thing, as it shows that vegan food doesn’t need to be about abstinence. But, as any dietician, or medium- to long-term vegan or vegetarian will tell you, it’s easy to be an unhealthy vegan, or to just be eating the wrong things. After all, salad is vegan – but so are chips!
We found that cutting meat out of our diet was a great thing to do – it helped us eat less saturated fat, and encouraged us to bring more fibre and nutrients into our diet. A plant-based diet reduces your impact on the planet and you know that what you eat doesn’t contribute to poor animal welfare – but if you’re not careful, you can easily end up low in key nutrients.
As well as the over-eating, our increasingly busy lives negatively affected our work-life balance. We had no time for exercise. Our hectic video production schedule meant we often didn’t leave the house for days on end. When we did leave, we filled our faces with vegan burgers, vegan fish and chips and brownies at vegan food events. Gradually we became unhealthier versions of our vegan selves, living on ‘junk food vegan’ diets. At home, there were far too many takeaways. Our meals were less ‘eat-the-rainbow’ and more ‘50 shades of beige’.
Time to change.
At the start of 2018, we decided to get healthy.
It wasn’t a big change. More a re-steering of the ship. We changed our course by a couple of degrees, watched our ship right itself, and found a completely new destination.
The best of times.
We sought advice everywhere we could, reading dozens of books, watching videos and documentaries, following courses and speaking to doctors and nutritionists. We sought out mentors. We started working with a dietician.
Our new way of eating and living focused on colourful plants, and getting the right balance of nutrients. This, as well as a small amount of careful supplementation, ensured we were getting exactly the right nutrition for our bodies.
Following our new meal plan felt great. We felt light and lean. We had successfully navigated ourselves to a place where we felt fantastic all week long, saved money, saved time on cooking, and were still able to eat the kind of meals we wanted (allowing ourselves to indulge in a vegan junk food session from time to time). We went to the gym regularly, and were better at getting up early. Our work has improved, our happiness has increased and we are healthier than we have ever been.
This is the toolkit we wish we’d read when we were starting out on our vegan journey. We wish we’d known that by following just a few simple steps and basic rules we could ensure we achieved optimum nutrition from a plant-based diet.
A new you.
Our goal is to help everyone in the world eat more plants. That’s what we’re about. It’s what we’ve always been about. It’s why we started BOSH! and why we’ve written our cookbooks.
We’ve updated our mission a little bit from where we started. As well as helping everyone eat more plants, we also want our recipes to inspire, entertain and nourish, and we want to improve the health of the planet and all its inhabitants. If everyone adopted a plant-based diet, we could make a big contribution to reducing climate change.
That’s why we’re here, and it’s why we created the recipes in this book. We’re here to show the why and the how of living healthily on a plant-based diet.
A healthy lifestyle means different things to different people. But all of us will benefit from focusing on these six pillars:
sleep, move, relax, love yourself, love others, live with purpose
A long, healthy, happy life has all these bases covered. Don’t compare yourself to others, but think about how well you feel when you follow the principles of each in your own life. We’d like to share with you some simple, meaningful changes you can make to live better.
SLEEP.