Welcome!

Hey!  Welcome!  You managed to find me!  Aren't you just the luckiest person on the planet?  Well, I sure think so.  :)

I'd like to introduce myself - I'm Clarisse.  Yes, pronounced like Clarice in Silence of the Lambs.  I get that a lot, and no, I do not want fava beans with a nice Chianti.  I'm a wife of an awesome guy.  He is totally supportive of everything I do.  We have 5 kids.  Our oldest is 7 and our youngest is 1.  We have 3 boys, 2 girls.  We have a dog (a Newfoundland mix).  We love to go hiking, camping, and we are invovled in Cub Scouts. 

For the last 30 days, I consumed nothing but fresh fruit and vegetable juice.  Yes, I did a juice fast for 30 days.  It was the beginning of our lifestyle overhaul.  It started out as a way to lose weight, and I did drop a remarkable 20.4 lbs.  (yay for me!!)  It then morphed into changing my family's life.  I decided that my entire family would be going vegan.  That's right, no animal products.  No meat, no butter, no cheese, no milk, no refined sugar, no gelatin, nothing that came from an animal.  Can I just tell you, this blows people's minds.  It's kinda fun.  I totally get where they are coming from because if you had told me a year or two ago that my entire family of 7 would be vegan, I'd have told you that you needed to stop smoking crack, because I love my cheese, my margerine, and my chicken.  See, a year ago, I was even eating margerine.  Yuck! 

So going vegan has been a slow process.  It has been a work in progress - all of it leading to this, without me even knowing it was.  Last March I began eating healthier.  I cut out sugar, and a lot of processed foods, and I threw out margerine because it's rancid, putrid, filth.  It lasted a great 5 months and then I had a miscarriage and stopped giving a crap about my health.  I was depressed.  That continued for several months until I decided that I was tired of being unhealthy, and I was tired of being fat. 

So, I went on a juice fast, and it made me feel so incredibly amazing that I wanted my family to experience the awesome power of food.  The more I researched, the more I learned.  The more I learned about just what is put in our foods, the effects of casein, and the evidence that a plant based diet helps prevent many of the illnesses that are killing people (like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes), the more it became clear that I had to do something about it.  I learned that food could not only keep us healthy, but it could heal us.  There are studies after studies after studies out there - there's evidence that plant based foods can basically prevent cancers - breast, prostate, liver.  It's quite amazing when you start looking into it.  Is it true?  Well, if it's not - what's the harm in eating good, healthy, quality foods for our entire lives?  There isn't any.  It's a win/win.  Either way I will be healthy now and in the future. 

This is my blog - about our vegan transformation.  Going vegan when you're a single person is tough.  Convincing a carnivore at heart husband and 5 kids who adore pizza and chicken nuggets, and anything with cheese, and butter, and fish sticks is brutal.  So this is our journey to veganism.