Plant Yourself - Embracing A Plant-based Lifestyle

Ron Tibbs is a wellness coach, plant-based advocate, and all-around great guy. He's part of the core team at WellStart Health, where he coaches, guides, and cheerleads clients to make significant positive changes in their lives. Ron is perfectly situated to do this, because he's created his own massive changes in the face of very strong opposing forces. The post Healing the Warrior Spirit with Ron Tibbs: PYP 352 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

How can we advocate for human health, environmental sanity, and ethical treatment of animals without wrecking our relationships with family members, friends, partners, and coworkers? Melanie Joy joins the podcast to talk about her book Beyond Beliefs - essentially a merging of the political and relational. The post Can My Relationships Survive My Veganism? with Melanie Joy, PhD: PYP 351 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Brittany Sade is a vegan entrepreneur and health coach. Her company, Prosperiteez Clothing, devotes part of its profits to combatting food insecurity in impoverished communities. Brittany wasn't always a paragon of healthy living. Thanks to meat three times a day, along with a serious cheese addiction, she suffered from skin problems, arterial blockages, and overweight.  It took the suffering and death of close family members to wake her to the realization that life didn't have to be an inexorable descent into disability and disease and painful premature death.  The post Getting Healthy and Giving Back with Brittany Sade: PYP 350 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Karen Smith is a plant-based registered dietitian, runner (sub-3 hours in the Boston Marathon, baby!), and all around good person. The post Thriving on Plants, Kindness, and Connection with Karen Smith, RD: PYP 349 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Kim Campbell is the culinary force behind PlantPure Nation and PlantPure Foods. She kindly agreed to visit the Plant Yourself test kitchen (which is just the kitchen in my home, cleaned up sufficiently for video) and make some delicious food for me, my wife, and my sister who was visiting from NYC. The post PlantPure Cooking with Kim Campbell: PYP 348 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Margot Freitag is a coach who helps people transition to a plant-based diet successfully and sustainably. Growing up in Northwest Ontario (cue "Helpless" by Neil Young), she suffered from asthma, and made constant trips to the ER throughout her childhood. As a teen, she became a yoyo dieter, trying every variation she stumbled across in an attempt to lose weight: the apple-only diet, the "don't eat for a week" diet, low carb, etc. One plan she tried allowed her to eat cheese but not carrots, because sugar. (Sigh...) As luck would have it, her nutrition instructor in massage school was none other than superstar dietitian Brenda Davis (who kindly appeared on this podcast's 18th episode to talk about defeating diabetes and debunking paleo). From Brenda, Margot learned that dairy was not her friend. The post Healing Asthma with a Plant-Based Diet with Margot Freitag: PYP 347 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Danny and Katherine Dreyer are the co-authors of three of the most valuable books ever on human bipedal locomotion: Chi Running, Chi Walking, and Chi Marathon. The promise of their methodology is that you can walk or run a lot farther and faster, without pain or injury. The post Mindful and Pain-free Walking and Running with Danny and Katherine Dreyer: PYP 346 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

This week's episode is an accident. I interviewed Elizabeth Bell in order to record a testimonial for WellStart Health, and ended up having a conversation so compelling and instructive and inspiring that I decided - with Elizabeth's blessing - to share the whole thing. The post The Magic of Walking to the Mailbox with Elizabeth Bell: PYP 345 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Caroline Webb is the author of the wonderfully entertaining and useful How to Have a Good Day, which is basically a cookbook of how to be an effective human in the world. She is an executive coach, economist, and speaker, and the book comes out of her extensive knowledge of behavioral science and its application in the real world. How to Have a Good Day has influenced my own health coaching so much, I wanted to talk with Caroline specifically about applying her tools and "recipes" to the challenges around improving diet and lifestyle. The post How to Have a Good (and Healthy) Day with Caroline Webb: PYP 344 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Carly Asse is a fitness trainer and documentarian. His first film, Unsupersize Me, has been seen over 3 million times, and has inspired and guided countless people to embark on their own journeys of healthy weight loss. The post Documenting the Possibilities of Health with Carly Asse: PYP 343 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Benjamin Alter, ND, treats his patients as if they actually have the power to heal themselves. This power introduces a wonderful and frustrating messiness into the scientific pursuit of truth. It's hard to control for. It's hard to randomize for. And it's hard to replicate. In fact, science has dealt with this messiness by, at best, pretending it doesn't exist, and at worst, actively denigrating people's subjective experiences of illness and healing. In our conversation, Ben and I talk about his definition of health, and how it connects to freedom. The post We are Our Own Healers with Benjamin Alter, ND: PYP 342 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Gwyn Whittaker is a change-maker, and for the past several years she's deployed her considerable "get-it-done" skills to the plant-based movement. Whittaker is CEO of Greenfare Cafe in Herndon, Virginia, which is the only 100% whole-food, plant-based (WFPB), organic restaurant either of us has ever heard of. (If you know of one, please let me know in the comments section so I can give it a shout-out!) The post Normalizing Plant-Based Eating with Gwyn Whittaker: PYP 341 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

For my money, Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory has done more to improve our ability to heal and grow and thrive as a civilization than any other scientific breakthrough of the past 50 years. Its advances over prior understandings of the human nervous system, psychology, and experiences of states like well-being, happiness, and love - are profound. Paradigm-shifting. And, unlike a lot of theory, incredible practical and applicable to our everyday lives. The post Stephen Porges, PhD, on Safety as the Most Important Thing: PYP 340 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Ray Martin, aka "Old Man Skin and Bones," is on a mission to save others from what he went through: heart disease, expensive and unnecessary and potentially harmful medical care, and a bad case of the "If only I'd knowns." The post Bouncing Back from Heart Disease with Ray Martin: PYP 339 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Amber Antonelli and Anthony Esposito run the Awaken Your Soul iboga retreat center in Costa Rica. Iboga is the name of a plant native to Gabon and neighboring West African countries that acts as a psychedelic, or as Amber and Anthony put it, a "teacher plant." The post Learning from Sacred Plants with Amber Antonelli and Anthony Esposito: PYP 338 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Jud Brewer is Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University, and a second-time guest on Plant Yourself. I wanted to catch up with Jud to find out how his academic research and public writing had migrated into the world. What is the state of mindfulness-based health improvement? Does he have data on how his approach compares to current best practices, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for smoking and other addictions.  The post “It Turns Out Willpower Doesn’t Exist” with Jud Brewer, MD PhD: PYP 337 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Yeah, them's fighting words in the title of today's episode. And Garth David, MD, my lead author of Proteinaholic and co-conspirator in a mission to tell the world that chronic disease and obesity are preventable and reversible, is a fighter. The post Battling Bullshit with Garth Davis, MD: PYP 336 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Jody Esselstyn is a registered nurse, and docent at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. An unusual combo, perhaps, but Jody combines her two interests - medicine and art - in some innovative and lifesaving ways. She leads programs that help medicine students make better diagnoses, display more empathy at the bedside, and collaborate more generously with their medical peers through visits to art museums. The post The heART of Medicine with Jody Esselstyn, RN: PYP 335 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

Joe Cross was, in the words of his first film, "Fat, Sick, & Nearly Dead" when he embarked on a 60-day experiment to escape the pain and discomfort of a lifestyle-induced auto-immune disease. His transformation story, chronicled in that 2010 documentary, has inspired millions of people to start juicing, and to add more plants to their diets. In our conversation, we catch up on the decade since he became a famous wellness advocate. How has he weathered that kind of public scrutiny? The post Reconnecting with the Healing Power of Plants with Joe Cross: PYP 334 appeared first on Plant Yourself.

adrienne maree brown is author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is a writer, social justice facilitator, pleasure activist, healer and doula living in Detroit. brown has been facilitating professionally for over fifteen years, and has worked with hundreds of organizations at all levels of scale including informal collectives, foundations, national networks and more. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World podcast. The post Pleasure Activism with adrienne maree brown: PYP 333 appeared first on Plant Yourself.