229. Plant Power: How One Meal a Week Makes Big Health Impact With Ali Essig

A mother of six, Ali Essig found herself in the emergency room with her husband. He’d suffered a stroke at 37. After multiple tests, the doctors found no clear answers, and they encouraged her family to avoid saturated fats, trans fats, and cholesterol and to eat more fiber.  Ali dived deep into the research and found that eating a plant predominant diet would not only decrease her husband's risk of another stroke, but also decrease all types of chronic disease. You know I love to bring you women who have done something extraordinary with their own life experiences. They've taken their talent and their expertise, and they turn it into a business -- today's podcast interview will show you how true that actually is. Ali is a plant-based nutritionist and Founder of PlantWhys, where she offers busy women simple solutions to lose weight and overcome emotional eating and food addictions through positive psychology and a plant-based diet. She is also my first cousin! After her husband’s stroke, she took the piece of paper from the hospital outlining what to eat and what to avoid; it felt like a foreign language. “I was this insatiable person, just reading every single book; I read all of them,” says Ali. “I read anti-vegetarian; pro-plant based. I read all of them. I want to find the truth. I don't care what the truth is.” She found most books focused on three to six months, but she wanted to go beyond that. She wanted to see the long-term studies that would reduce heart disease. “Everything pointed to eat more plants,” says Ali. “We're not eating enough fiber, and reducing our animal consumption. And what I found too is you don't have to be perfect.” With six children, Ali needed flexibility. When it came to figuring out how to make a plant-based diet work in her home, she chose not to buy meat and dairy from the grocery store.  “I can control what I can control in my in my house. And after that it's like, whatever,” says Ali. Ali said she didn’t intend to start a business from her experience, but people started asking her questions. And that led to her earning a nutritionist certification and starting a course. She says for some people, it was a great fit because they had a major life event like hers. Others wanted to lose weight. There's a lot of emotional weight that we carry. There's a lot of food addictions. There's a lot of emotional reasons we eat.  Over time, Ali says her business transformed into looking at what do people need to change and let go of for an emotional reset. Ali says her favorite statistic is that if you were to switch out 3% of your animal protein with plant protein, that’s one meatless meal a week, it will decrease your risk of dying from all causes by 10%. That small little change can decrease so many things from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, you name it.  Ali says what breaks her heart is when people say they went vegan for three months, and it was too hard, and they gave up. She says, why did you give up? Why can't you just keep it two meals a week? It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Ali is offering a free 30-day trial to the PlantWhys membership: https://www.plantwhys.com/offers/jYZNxfAq  Connect with Ali Essig : https://www.plantwhys.com/  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGrQa7v7G9e2m61DAT6UKKA  Other GoG episodes you might want to check out: What is Emotional Eating and How Can You Stop https://sarahwalton.com/emotional-eating/  Liberate Yourself from Weight Loss Conversations https://sarahwalton.com/functional-medicine-weight-loss/  You can check out our podcast interviews on YouTube, too! http://bit.ly/YouTubeSWalton   Thank you so much for listening. I’m so honored that you’re here and would be so grateful if you could leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts by clicking here, scrolling to the bottom, and clicking “Write a review.” Then we’ll get to inspire even more people! (If you’re not sure how to leave a review, you can watch this quick tutorial.) #PlantBasedDiet #PlantBased #Vegan #VeganDiet #AskExpert #NutritionCoach  #IntuitiveBusinessCoach #WomenInBusiness #EntrepreneurLifestyle