Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there, sunshine. Welcome to the Power On Plants podcast. We're your host, jared and Anita Roussell, and we're absolutely head over heels for whole plant foods and helping you navigate this incredible plant based journey. That's because our lives have been completely changed by plant based goodness. We used to struggle every day with excess pounds and low energy, vascular disease, joint pain and lack of sleep, just to name a few, and even though we're medical professionals, we still weren't getting practical answers that actually worked. So we dug into the research, we started living what we learned, and now we both have our lives back, and that's what we want for you, too. The truth is, you can do this, and it's not hard. You just need a way that will bring real and lasting change, and that path. It has to be simple and enjoyable, and it's got to be delicious too. So are you ready to live your life to the fullest? Then you're in the right place, because living without limits that's what Power On Plants is all about. So pull up your chair, grab a matchelite and let's get started. Hey there, sunshine. I know sometimes it is really hard when you're trying to lose weight and it seems like the pounds just won't come off and you can't get why. I mean, you're restricting your portions, you're counting calories, you're keeping up a point, you've tried macros. You've tried macros. Oh my word, you're about to drive yourself crazy with all the math. But you feel like it's necessary in order to lose the weight. But I want you to know that, with whole food, plant based living, there is one big thing about it that's going to help you be able to drop the pounds. Now are there more tips and tricks, other things that you can do, absolutely, but today I just want to focus in on one thing so you can make this mindset shift and understand some actionable things that you can do in your own life to start dropping the pounds naturally, in a way you actually enjoy. So you don't have to do any miserable dieting math. We're over it. We're so over it. Right, jared and I dropped 70 pounds together without even trying and we have kept it off sustainably Enjoying what we eat every day, looking forward to our meals. Just came in here he said I smell what the kids are making. He goes out there. Oh my word, I love this. I love that. I hear it every day. And they're simple meals and they don't take long to prepare and they work with our busy schedule. Yeah, we're busy too. We get what it's like. It is not going to work unless it's quick, simple and delicious. I want you to remember that. I'll say that quite often, but it's because I want you to grasp how easy this lifestyle should be. If it's taking hours in the kitchen, there's something you're doing wrong. If you feel like you need to have a meal prepping session every week to set yourself up for success, but you dread the meal prepping session so you never do it because it's going to take you hours to do that, then we're for you. We're your people, because we hate those things. We think somehow in our mind and we get all these ideas that we need to do these certain things, like this big meal prepping session. It's not necessary. There's a way to meal prep and it's super simple and it's going to work with your busy schedule. I've got some stuff coming up about that. We have a course coming up in the future where I'm going to walk you through that step by step. It's not just about meal prep. It's about how to make this doable, because if it's going to work for us, we busy women, it's got to be doable.

Speaker 2: 3:24

But to be fair, I don't want you to beat yourself up about thinking that you need to do meal prep on a Sunday to prep for the entire week because, that's what you've heard.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Right, exactly.

Speaker 2: 3:34

So what do you, friends, have done? Or maybe the latest magazine, the latest women's magazine, that says, hey, prep all day and then you have food for a week or a month. Right, I mean, this is the stuff that you're hearing, and that may be the only thing that you've heard, and you feel like this is the way it must be done, but secretly you hate it. Yeah, it's kind of like you think I want to lose weight, but the only way I know how to do it is to diet and eat a just a very small portion of food, or eat sawdust or just stuff that I hate.

Speaker 1: 4:04

And I agree with Jared A lot of these myths that we believe are because we don't know. People are telling us these things and maybe they have a business where they just teach meal prepping and so they're like you got a meal prep. Meal prep is the only way that works. It's going to work. You got to do it every week. If you have a drill sergeant about meal prepping, it's like no, I've got to have a realistic system that works with a busy schedule. Do you have four kids, you know? Are you working full time? Then talk to me about meal prep and how you make it work.

Speaker 2: 4:30

Do these systems work? Probably Are they the best way. I guess it depends on you. If you like to spend a day cooking and then putting stuff in containers to freeze it, I mean that is a way to do it. But I know for us it's not the best way.

Speaker 1: 4:45

Yeah, I'm going to work for a week or two and then I'm going to be pulling my hair out and wanting to go play in the park with the kids.

Speaker 2: 4:51

Saturday night you're going to think, oh great, tomorrow I've got to spend all day in the kitchen.

Speaker 1: 4:56

Yeah, and I could be at the beach. I could be pressing start on my Instant Pot, be at the beach, come home, dinner's already done. I mean, that's the way I like to live, and it's not always the Instant Pot. There's just so many ways you can do plant-based that works for you. If you're like me and you get it, give me a virtual high five right now. Okay, this is how we're going to do it. We're going to make this stuff work. And so today we're talking about the calories. Okay, You're worried about eating too many calories. Now, I don't want you to beat yourself up. That's not the point of this episode, or any of our episodes for that matter. I don't want you thinking, oh well, you know, I've done that and I've done that and I shouldn't have done it that way, I've done it all wrong. No, that's not what this is about. It's about going from this point forward where you are moving into the new freedom that you've been called to live in, and that's what Jared and I are all about finding the ways of freedom in your life that work. Finding food freedom so you're not tied to all those old foods. Finding freedom from the miserable dieting ways that you believed were the ways you had to live in order to be healthy, in order to drop the pounds. If I go out to eat at a restaurant with Jared and I'm sitting there trying to count up all the calories in my meal or count up all my points, so I don't go over Everybody else is sitting at the table making relationships and enjoying their time. I'm sitting here worried, stressed out and fearful that I'm going to go over points. I'm going to get to Weight Watchers meeting this week.

Speaker 2: 6:16

It's a distraction.

Speaker 1: 6:18

Whatever other meeting and just feel like I've blown it. And, yeah, absolutely Totally, 100% Distraction, stress and, again, fear-based. It's one of those fear-based things that gets me into this cycle where I'm not in a good mental space, I'm not in a good spiritual space, I'm not trusting the father, I'm not resting in the beautiful ways that he's created for me and when you open your Bible and you turn to Genesis, you're going to find the way you were originally created to eat and I promise you in any area of your life that you can get back to the garden, the better off you're going to be. Are we talking about walking and talking closely with the father all day long?

Speaker 2: 6:55

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 6:57

Are we talking about relying on Yeshua to be the one that's going to bring us back? Absolutely, you know, anything you can get to, and that's what his plan has been from the very beginning, from Genesis, right? So his plan was for us to eat whole plant foods. It's undeniable, it's right there. Am I telling you it's a sin to eat anything else? No, I am not. But what I'm telling you is exactly what I said Get to the garden, sister, because you're going to thrive there. Daniel thrived there. There's a reason why. It's not because Daniel was some super giant of eating. He ate a certain way. He knew the original design. So what did Daniel do when he needed to be his strongest? He went back to the garden. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to literally go back to the garden, and you don't need to grow one in your backyard, but you need to get more whole plant foods. And I'm going to tell you why. If you want to lose weight, this is the one big key we're going to talk about today. Property density have you ever heard of it? Do you understand it? Well, you're gonna walk away from this episode completely understanding what it is, and we're not gonna dig deep, because there's not a lot of depth here. It's a simple concept.

Speaker 2: 8:04

But it is profound knowledge.

Speaker 1: 8:06

Yeah, Jared talks about profound knowledge all the time. I heard Tony.

Speaker 2: 8:09

Robbins mentioned that and I love the term, so it's not necessarily something that's extremely hard, but it really is not comprehend right.

Speaker 1: 8:18

It's not hard to understand.

Speaker 2: 8:20

But I mean it's really not a hard concept. But what it does is it shifts your mindset, it shifts your frame of thinking in a big way. It kind of expands that and opens it so that one key element you start seeing things in a whole new light and it changes everything.

Speaker 1: 8:37

Yes, and that is exactly what calorie density does. Calorie density is the measurement of how many calories are in a certain way to food, and that's usually calories per pound. So the higher calorie density foods would have more calories and smaller amounts of food. So higher calorie density, more calories, less food. But the naturally Lower calorie density foods and guess what those are? By nature they're whole plant foods. Okay, whole plant foods are the most nutrient dense, least calorie dense. That means the lowest calorie density foods on the planet, by nature, by God's design. So what does that mean for you in real life? What does that mean? That means with a whole plant food, you're gonna be able to eat a whole lot more of it, a lot more volume, to get that same amount of calories, just by nature. You don't have to count them. You don't have to count them, so you get freedom.

Speaker 2: 9:37

Well, what does that mean from a practical standpoint? It means you can eat until you're satisfied. Absolutely you don't have to eat just a small little portion like no, I'm just gonna have a sugar packet, right?

Speaker 1: 9:48

Which we don't recommend at all. No, I mean like oh, just, just a little tiny bit.

Speaker 2: 9:52

No, you can eat until you're satisfied. And your belly is full and it's sending signals to your brain, naturally your stomach stretches and then it says hey, we're full enough, you're satisfied, you can stop eating right and these foods have fiber in them, so you actually feel full or faster.

Speaker 1: 10:08

So sometimes you think you've eaten a whole lot more and you've just eaten a little more. So you walk away from the equation with less calories than you would have eaten before and you feel like you've had a whole lot more because you've got the Fiber. Animal foods don't have the fiber, so they don't make you feel full. This is why Jare not talk about our whopper catastrophes. Because we walk into Burger King, we'd eat our whopper value meal.

Speaker 2: 10:31

We'd be a key size and then we'd be looking each other's gonna have one. No, no, that's not how you finish. The one is I'm still hungry. We still got another five hours on the road.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Yeah, I'm totally, I'll have another one.

Speaker 2: 10:42

Yeah, I don't want to be hungry and down the road and back in the day.

Speaker 1: 10:46

That's the truth. That's just the way it was. We're being honest.

Speaker 2: 10:50

I'm proud of it, though it's the truth.

Speaker 1: 10:53

We're transparent because this is real life. Look, if you want real, you've landed in the right place, because we're not about putting on a show here. This is about helping you deliver a life, and this is what our real life was like when we were eating animal products and we just didn't know the damage it was doing on the inside. And our hearts go out to you as you try to figure all these things out. But you are gonna get so much farther, so much faster, and you're gonna avoid the pitfalls we did, because you're taking this journey with us. We're taking you by the hand and showing you. These are the steps you take. This is what you need to do. If you think I don't know, I need somebody to ask my questions to directly. I don't know what to do. We're gonna be opening up the membership soon. We also have the cookbook. You don't know what to do? Well, inside the membership, you're gonna get all the recipes, not just the recipes in the cookbook all my latest and greatest.

Speaker 2: 11:42

Hot off the press.

Speaker 1: 11:43

All of my latest hot off the presses. Right, they're all gonna be there. You don't have to worry about where you're gonna cook. You don't have to worry about how am I gonna find my new favorites? Anita, I have this pasta sauce. I absolutely love it. I cannot find one without oil. I cannot. What do I do? I'm gonna tell you exactly what that is. I shop at Costco. What do I buy there? Where do I buy this? Where do I buy that? All those things, all those questions we answer. So you have somebody who can take you by the hand and do that and who can explain calorie density to you. Have you heard of it? If you have, you're doing great. But we're going even a level deeper to explain to you why it matters here. Let's say you've got a stomach and you've got this steak and this cheese going in there okay, and this loaded baked potato. It's got sour cream and it's got butter. Let me tell you if you filled that same stomach with a potato, but instead you had it loaded down with greens and salsa and chili seasoning, maybe you even put chili plant-based chili on top, a cashew cream to make it creamy. You can do all those kind of things. You can still have a much larger volume of food and still walk away losing weight.

Speaker 2: 12:54

And it is amazing what can happen, because you are getting fewer calories but you're also getting a lot more fiber. That slows down the absorption of some of those sugars, so it becomes a more sustained energy source. So your sugar's not spiking, which means your insulin's not gonna spike, which means you're not going to then store some of that sugar as fat.

Speaker 1: 13:12

Right. Or you can look at things like okay, I used to eat this brownie, it had this many calories. I'm gonna eat this plant-based brownie. It's got some less calories in it, but it still isn't. I won't call it a health food. Okay, I'm not gonna call brownies health food, but they are going to be way healthier if you my brownie than compared to another. But then let's think it doesn't always have to be a brownie. You're gonna get to the place where you'll be satisfied eating fruits and bowls of fruit and different things like that, and you start doing that. Or eating sweet vegetables in the place of the sweets, sometimes not every time, but sometimes Now. How much of that can you pack in when you compare it to the steak and the cheese and all that stuff that you were eating before? Or let's say you had a big bowl of chili fries the traditional way and you had a power-on-plant chili fries that you made at home in like 30 minutes and it's a pile plate full, but you're not getting all the oil. That's 120 calories per tablespoon. Per tablespoon, sister, can you believe that You're not gonna have to count calories, because you're not gonna be adding all those calories into your food and they're naturally just not gonna be there, isn't that great news? It just doesn't get any easier than that. These foods are so much lower calorie. I want you to look up online calorie density or like picture of a stomach showing calorie density. So I just got on here right now and I typed in Stemic Photo Calorie Density. You're gonna pull up one in your photos area. It'll show forks over knives. That's green. I want you to click on their photo of that. What 500 calories looks like. They start out with oil. 500 calories of oil. It's this little tiny petal of oil in the stomach.

Speaker 2: 14:54

Probably about four tablespoons. Think about that yeah, four tablespoons of oil is 500 calories, which is really about the fourth. If you go by just like the typical food pyramid food guide, an average adult human would take 2000 calories. That is one fourth. Four tablespoons is one fourth of what your calories should be per day.

Speaker 1: 15:14

Yeah think about that. That's craziness.

Speaker 2: 15:17

That's mind blowing.

Speaker 1: 15:18

Oh yeah, and when you start getting oil out of all these products that it's sabotaging you in, you will not believe when you have somebody by your side who can go with you and say, okay, let's go through your pantry, tell me what you got, tell me what you need to replace. One thing out, one thing back in its place. We talk about that all the time, right, and so you learn, step by step, how to do that. So the next stomach picture is cheese. So now you got some cheese. The cheese is taking up what would you say Jared? Like an eighth of the stomach, maybe Probably about an eighth yeah. Yeah, something like an eighth of the stomach, and then you move on.

Speaker 2: 15:50

The oil doesn't even register in the photo.

Speaker 1: 15:51

I don't know, the stomach looks empty.

Speaker 2: 15:53

but the cheese about an eighth of the stomach.

Speaker 1: 15:55

Yeah, and then here you see the meat. Okay, now we've got a stomach full of 500 calories of meat.

Speaker 2: 16:00

Which I say stomach full, it's still not even feeling half the stomach, maybe a third of the stomach.

Speaker 1: 16:06

Right, and then you move to potatoes, rice and beans.

Speaker 2: 16:09

Potatoes- rice and beans. That looks like it's about 75%, yeah, about three quarters of your stomach.

Speaker 1: 16:15

Yeah, and then just fruits and veggies.

Speaker 2: 16:17

Just a full plate of fruits and veggies.

Speaker 1: 16:19

So these are the lowest calorie density foods, or fruits and veggies. And now your stomach's almost completely full, physically full.

Speaker 2: 16:28

And I don't know that we necessarily need to make our stomach 90% full.

Speaker 1: 16:32

No, but this is 500 calories. I mean how much you'd have to eat of whole plant foods Exactly To get 500 calories, versus something that's laden with oil and that could be a whole plant food? You can take your whole plant food and pour oil all over it and you can end up in the same place I mean your vessel's in the same place, your weight in the same place. This is why there are unhealthy vegan options. There are some things you can eat as a vegan. There are a lot of things you can eat as a vegan that just are not healthy. So if you're a vegan and you're thinking, I don't know why I can't get this weight off, I just don't feel good. Well, maybe you need to go more whole plant foods. This is what we're talking about.

Speaker 2: 17:06

Calorie density.

Speaker 1: 17:07

Think about the calorie density of it Makes a big, big difference. Again, this is not the only thing you can do, but this is one of the huge takeaways, because this one principle alone is gonna allow you to break free from the mindset that you have to count calories and therefore your joy is stolen, your relationships are stolen, your time is stolen, you're stressed out. We are women of purpose. We're kingdom women. You are not called to be worrying and being fear Constantly, be thinking about food all the time. You don't have to be thinking about it all the time. If just this one thing was fit into play and you no longer had to worry about calories. And then you go back and listen to episode 227, okay when Jared surprised me and we ended up talking about how you can let go of your fear of not getting enough protein or calcium and things like that. That was a great episode, by the way. You did not want to miss that episode. You let one fear go, then you let another fear go. All of a sudden, you're living in what we call food freedom. Food no longer has a hold on you, but you also don't have fear around food. You just eat the way you love. It's the way your body was naturally created to eat. It is naturally the lowest calorie dense foods on the planet. They are naturally the most nutrient rich foods on the planet, and before long, you're feeling good, you're moving more, you're sleeping better and you're thinking this is amazing. It wasn't my age, it wasn't just my genes, and you have got a new lease on life, and that is what we want for you. That is why we are here. Sister, take this one thing we've taught today, one principle here, which is calorie density, and let yourself be free Free from the weighing yourself, free from the counting of numbers and keeping up with all this crazy dieting stuff. Do not diet. Okay, do not diet. We may call this a plant-based diet, but it's not a diet. By diet, we mean a way to eat. This is not some. You have to keep up with this and that and drive yourself insane and hate the way you live if you wanna be healthy Extreme restriction. No, if you wanna be healthy truly healthy that involves spiritually healthy, that involves emotionally healthy you cannot be walking around worried all the time about how many calories you're getting, and if you're eating too much, you can let that stuff go when you're filling your plate with the right foods and those are whole plant foods All right. So now all you gotta do is go back and listen to the last 200-something episodes where we tell you well, how do I get more of those in a way I'll actually enjoy? We're gonna tell you that. And then, if you're thinking, you know what you share a lot of tips and a lot of things, but I just don't know how to get started. I need to know step one, step two, step three. I need somebody to ask my questions to. You're going to want to get inside the membership, so come on over to Power On Plantscom, forward, slash membership and get your name on the wait list right now. There are so many wonderful days ahead for you, sunshine, and I can't wait to share them all with you. Jared and I are so honored to be a part of your plant-based journey and we look forward to seeing you again next time on Power On Plants. Drop a like now.