From my personal experience I would like to tart (no I wouldn't! What a typo) I would like to start by saying how changing to a plant based diet has been an exercise in following the flow.

I switched to vegetarian about 2.5 years ago and then a few months later the vegan diet just happened. The last time I ate an egg it just didn't taste good. One day I just didn't feel like buying cheese. Before I knew it there were no animal products left. I never aimed for it or even decided to eventually move to vegan and I believe this ties in to no self judgement and especially how working on the internal energy flow will automatically cause changes in the external. Then, I did not dwell on it or placed myself in some 'I'm a vegan now' kind of box because that too will only cause anxiety.

Then there was the knowing that a vegan diet requires more specific intake to make sure the body gets what it needs, but the moment I started looking into that it felt like I was narrowing it all down, creating anxiety around what-if's and need-to's. I then decided to just trust that, if I didn't think about it, whatever I would feel like eating that day would be sufficient and if I was wrong about that, I would be very weak and sickly within a short time and that would be a clear indication that my approach was not working. In two years time, I have never felt weak or sickly, I have no loss of muscle mass or anything. I follow no recipes, just throw a lot of stuff into a pan. Seasoning and sauce follow the same principle of trust. I will not claim it has always been tasty, but by now I cannot recall the last time I made something that I really didn't like to eat.

So for anyone willing to accept the possibilty that you may get into physical discomfort, I would say: cultivate that trust that your body will know what foods to take simply by seeing and smelling them (because in many cases I don't even know what exactly are the nutritious elements of the foods in question, so there is likely some mechanism concerning the smell that allows your brain to determine whether it is needed)

I had already stopped eating fastfood before that and this is likely to be important, since listening to what your body is asking for while it is still craving sugary treats and whatnot seems very challenging. When it comes to stopping that junkfood, the same applies as mentioned above: no self-judgement, trusting that working on the interal will lead to more aligned diet. As a reflection, when I first got involved with Openhand I was still eating meat daily and visiting the local snackbar once a week, even when the knowing that this was not aligned with the path my life had taken on was there.So why did I still do that? Because it felt if I would simply say to myself: I have to stop doing this, then I would be forcing the outcome and thus bypassing whatever needed to happen internally. Gradually, these cravings just fell away and I can't even remember exactly how or why, it just stopped being a part of my life.

I am thinking about what are the challenges, there is no binge eating but there is comfort eating which I do allow myself two or three times per week. It is when the day is especially challenging and there is no felt energy to undertake fulfilling activities (or fulfilling non-acitivity; at moments just having a liedown can be very fulfilling) I can easily decide to just buy a bag of chips and eat it in one go, or some liqourice or chocolate. All of it is gone within half an hour of getting home and there is a very low bar for me to say: let's just go for it. Apparently there is still some work to do.