Unlike most folks who live in Idaho, at our place BEEF is not what's for dinner. We are vegan which means we don't eat any animal products. Yes, that means no milk, cheese, eggs, or meat.

When they hear that, a lot of folks tend to focus on what we don't eat. But having been vegan since 1994 or so, we focus on what we do eat and have pretty much forgotten about all those heavy meat dishes of our youth. (Okay sure, sometimes a particularly enticing pizza ad on TV makes us think cheese thoughts again, but in general we can't imagine eating any other way.) Amazingly enough, being a vegetarian is even becoming sort of trendy these days as more people try and figure out how to get healthy and lose weight.

After they determine what exactly we eat, the next question people usually ask us is why? How come we became vegan anyway? Are we animal rights nuts? (No actually we aren't.) And no, we also aren't out to convert the world to veganism. The most emphatic words you'll get from us are: "do what you want."

We became vegan because of a book we read called Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, which is now quite old but is easy to find in used book stores. The book actually isn't about being a vegetarian at all. It is all about eating certain foods together to lose weight. The principle of "food combining" or "natural hygiene" has been around for years, but most people find it too complicated to deal with. However, when we read the book, we realized that the principles of food combining become incredibly easy if you take animal products out of the equation. So we decided to try an experiment: we'd eat according to Fit for Life for a week.

We felt so much better that we never stopped the experiment. Over the course of about 6-8 weeks, we lost the extra weight we'd gained in our 30s and had a lot more energy. And we never looked back.

Check out our new book
Vegan Success: Scrumptious, Healthy Vegan Recipes for Busy People