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Greens for Good is a blog used to document my commitment to leading a healthy, vegan-based lifestyle. On here you will read about what I eat every day, how I exercise, and my daily life in general. This page is meant to help you get to know me as a blogger better so that you can jump right in and start reading and eating! Are you ready?!

My name is Ryan and I am the creator of Greens for Good, which is sometimes abbreviated as G4G. If you’d like to find out more about me personally, please visit my about me page. I created this blog after I became inspired by how my previous blog, Chase Daylight, helped me change my once unhealthy lifestyle. After graduating college, moving to a new city, and embarking on new eating habits, I decided it was time to change my blog as well. Chase Daylight got me to this point, serving as a general blog about my food and life, but I am so excited to have Greens for Good from here on out to document my new found commitment to healthy living and eating (especially greens!)!

My new eating lifestyle began in April 2009 when I launched The Vegan Challenge on my blog. My boyfriend, Evan, and I had just finished listening to the audio version of a very controversial book called Skinny Bitch. Unlike others who have read this book, we had no idea what we were about to listen to when it first started, but were quite content in the beginning when many of the book’s statements validated our own health beliefs at the time. As Skinny Bitch progressed, we realized the authors were very biased towards eating meat, and as we got even further, we realized the vegan influence that was starting to shine through. We knew the book was biased, but we couldn’t ignore the overall message of health that was being rubbed in our faces. Since reading Skinny Bitch, I’ve read other books, articles and websites about veganism and decided that this lifestyle is for me.

I was never much in the way of being a meat eater since quality meat is expensive and I never really liked cooking it much anyway. Of course I ate meat when I visited my parents or went out to dinner, but when I was cooking for myself during college it never graced my plate very often. On the day that I decided to start eating vegan, I feared that my yogurt and cheese dietary staples would be sorely missed. Milk was never an issue because I’ve always been an alternative milk drinker. Surprisingly, I’ve not missed dairy products since I started The Vegan Challenge.

For me personally, I became vegan to improve my overall health and eating habits. It’s really streamlined my ways of eating so that I can make healthy choices naturally and never feel like I can’t have something I want. I think about it as though I don’t want animal products, not that I can’t have them. If I wanted them, I’d eat them. Since I started eating vegan, a lot of stomach issues that once plagued my body after almost every meal went completely away. It’s still possible to eat poorly as a vegan though, and when I sometimes slip into that rut, my stomach issues do start up again.

I am not here to convince you to eat vegan. You may get the occasional tidbit of information or opinion if I’m reading a book or article related to veganism, but I will never try to convince you that one, single lifestyle is best for you, because, well, it’s just not! I would have never been so successful with maintaining a mostly vegan diet if someone had forced it on me. I was handed the information and I made a personal choice of what to do with that information. Trust me, making the decision on my own and feeling in my gut that it was the right thing to do is the singlemost important reason I love eating this way. I truly believe it must be like that for anyone to be successful in any big lifestyle change.

One of the most common questions I get now is, “So what do you eat anyway?” Well, I’m here to show and tell! I always tell people that eating vegan is not as hard as you might think and they often do not believe me. Greens for Good is meant to show a range of how simple to extravagant eating vegan can be (mostly sticking to the simple side of things because like most people, I’m too busy for the extravagant stuff!)  Greens for Good will also document the necessary flexibility one must have when eating this way, because eating out at a restaurant or dinner party is never as easy as it is at home. It can be hard and frustrating sometimes, but with a little knowledge of basic food preparation and some pre-planning, I can make the most out of these situations.

I consider what I eat to be very normal and something that almost any person would enjoy on a daily basis. Oftentimes when I sit down to eat a meal with Evan, we are both saying, “How could you not like this?!” I hope you’ll join me in all of my eating adventures and gain some ideas for things you’d like to make too!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them! Please visit my contact page and let me know what’s on your mind. Thanks for reading!