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Since I haven’t really talked about how or why I went vegan, I thought I’d share the story with you today.

I’ve been vegan for 3 years now and it hasn’t been a completely smooth journey. As you may well know, I was a chef back in Mexico before I moved here to NYC about 5 years ago and had eaten and worked with animal products up until this point. I don’t see many chefs that talk about becoming vegan from a professional chef’s perspective, so I thought I’d share mine, as well as some general tips for anyone looking to go vegan or plant-based, in the hopes that it might help someone else.

When I first moved here to NYC, my first job in a seemingly high-end restaurant was at a 1-Michelin-star vegetarian restaurant called NIX (sadly, NIX had to permanently shut down due to COVID and doesn’t exist anymore). I was nowhere near vegetarian or vegan when I started working there, but it was there that I learned how to cook with vegetables in a new way than what I had been taught – treating them like the center of the plate. It was new and interesting to me but, to be honest, I still felt like I was somewhat in my comfort zone because being at a vegetarian restaurant, I still had eggs, milk, cream, and butter to make sauces, omelets, etc like I knew how. But vegan? “That’s hard!” I thought.

There is where I met Ariana, my wife. We started dating and things got pretty serious pretty quickly, and before we knew it we were living together. She had been vegan for 3 years by the time I met her, so she was the one who introduced me to vegan food. We had fun going around all the vegan restaurants in the city and I was curious and wanted to taste new things. Of course, I wanted to impress her too, so I challenged myself to make delicious vegan food (in the best way I could) for her with the knowledge that I had.

When we moved in together Ariana mentioned that she’d prefer it if there wasn’t meat in the house, but she never forced me to go vegan—just to be clear! I was open to the idea, so I decided to try it. I definitely wasn’t an overnight decision or anything like that (as I mentioned, we had been going to vegan restaurants and I’d gotten used to eating more vegan food), so the transition was slower. Before going vegan I had loved drinking milk and eating cheese (like, really loved it), so that was the hardest things for me to let go of. I remember on days when I’d get off my night shift at the restaurant, I knew I’d be eating vegan food at home so I’d pick up a piece of cheese pizza on the way to eat before I got there!

Eventually of course, I got to the point that I didn’t miss cheese so much and I dove into experimenting with and making my own vegan food. Ariana showed me books, blogs, and vegan chefs that she loved and I began to get more inspiration. Now it’s only very occasionally that I crave something with cheese and when I do, I eat the quesadilla or the slice of cheese pizza and I won’t want to eat anything with cheese for a long time. I’m a firm believer in not completely barring yourself from something because you “can never eat it again” – everyone’s on their own journey and it’s all about what you do 98% of the time. And now my body has completely changed, so when I do have some cheese it doesn’t sit well with me. Who knows, one day I might get to the point where I’ll not want another bite of cheese ever again!

The biggest struggle for me as a chef going vegan was the fact that I didn’t know how to replace the binders, thickeners, creams, etc that I was taught were crucial to getting a certain texture or flavor in food. Being French-trained, the base for everything was essentially butter and cream, so I couldn’t fathom how you’d even start to make anything without them!

But eventually, I learned that there are other ways of getting the result you want. And there are other cool properties in plants that make them act almost like butter, eggs, milk, and cheese. Like who knew that bean water could whip up into a meringue?! What I realized was that at the end of the day, it all comes down to chemistry. And if we understand the chemistry of food, we can create all sorts of incredible things with it.

So with that said, these are my top tips for anyone starting their journey to a vegan or plant-based diet:

1. Educate Yourself + Let Go of What You Think You Know

   Firstly, it’s important to let go of your idea of what a meal “should” look or taste like. All that’s going to do is cause unnecessary suffering because you’ll constantly be wanting to compare what you’re eating to the non-vegan equivalent or stressing out because you don’t know how to prepare a meal by replacing meat, eggs, or milk in a recipe and you don’t know how to.

   What I always tell people is that you have to let go of these preconceived notions of food and cooking so that you can have space to introduce new ways of thinking when it comes to your meals. When you start thinking of vegetables as a meal in themselves, all kinds of new and creative ideas will come to you and a whole new world of ingredients will start to open up to you too (many vegans will tell you they now eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits that they had no idea even existed before!).

2. Learn the Basics of Cooking

   To make a big change in the way you eat, it’s critically important to know the basics of cooking. For one thing, you don’t want to leave your meals to the mercy of others to cook them for you. You want to be able to nourish yourself first and have the confidence in knowing that you can put something together for yourself that you want to eat.

   And second, knowing how to make a sauce, or how to roast, steam, or pan-fry is such an advantage if you’re experimenting with new ingredients and getting creative with making a dish flavorful. Knowing how to cook = knowing how to create flavor, and that alone is going to determine if you like what you’re eating or if you have a bad experience because you think the food is boring and bland.

3. Go See a Plant-Based Doctor

   I wish someone had told me to do this in the beginning! When making a big diet change like this, I highly recommend you go see a plant-based doctor because then you’ll get medical support and you’ll know what works best for you. The reason I say plant-based doctors here because a conventional doctor won’t be specialized in plant-based nutrition and won’t know how to navigate and give you recommendations on your plant-based diet (can you believe nutrition isn’t taught in-depth in medical school?).

   If you have support from the beginning, it’s a lot easier to know the basics of what to eat and make sure you’re not eating too much or too little of something. A lot of people go into a vegan having no idea what to eat and that usually causes frustration and quitting. Having someone to somewhat guide you through the process is so nice!

4. Practice Consciousness

   Veganism has opened up my mind and consciousness to a whole new level. Before, I wasn’t paying any attention to what I was eating or why I was eating it. I just knew that I was hungry and I needed food. Then as a chef, I learned that you can be so creative with food and make it beautiful and delicious. But I still wasn’t thinking about where the ingredients that I was using came from, or what effect they were having on my body.

   It wasn’t until Ariana introduced me to veganism and talked about why she did or didn’t want to eat certain things that I was made conscious of how our food choices affect us and the world. As humans, we can’t pretend that our actions don’t have any effect on the world as a whole, because they do. Every choice you make as a consumer tells the market what there is demand for, and therefore, where the money goes. And knowing how to make the most out of what we do buy is also critically important because food waste is a really big problem when so much goes into getting that product to us and there are so many people in the world who don’t even have food to waste.

   All of this is to say that with a broader opening of consciousness, we can start to apply it to everything. Ask yourself “Why am I eating this? Is it the best choice for my body? Am I doing more harm than good? Am I buying from companies I want to support? Where did my vegetables come from? Where were they stored?” That’s when a broader understanding of our bodies, our health, and our impact in the world comes from.

I hope these tips have been useful or that you got something out of them. Everyone’s on their own journey and I never think that I have the right to tell you what to eat, but maybe me sharing my story might be helpful if you can relate. Feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments below, I’ll gladly answer!