The Plant Based Dietician: Hacks and Tips to Fight Heart Disease With Nature’s Medicine

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Podcast, that was a podcast. We did a facebook watch show called Home Sweet Home I co hosted and yeah, that’s a fun experiences along

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Dr. Oz and the Steve Harvey show and a lot of other Marie Osmond show you were on that too, wow, that’s so cool. You must know a lot of celebrities and stuff in the east, l you’ve been, I guess in L. A. You’ve been a lot of you had a lot of exposure to the to the media and getting a lot of great message out to affect people to make positive change in their life. That’s really right.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Yeah. I’m trying, it’s just there’s so much to say. And there’s so many different, you know, media to to share on nowadays. So it’s been kind of exciting.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

So what kind of like response and feedback and or resistance? Have you had to trying to teach people to live so healthfully and go totally plant based? Have you had any pushback or resistance with your message?

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Well, I had a ton of pushback when I first started because I was really just trying to encourage everyone to eat this way and I was so convinced and I saw what happened with me, what was happening with my clients. I try to encourage everyone around me. You gotta look at this study, you got to do it because of this and try it because, you know, I had a million reasons, but I realized after, I don’t know, maybe a decade or so, that it didn’t matter what I said, that the person had to be receptive and they had to want to want to make that change. And so I’ve kind of changed my approach a long time ago. I realized I was just banging my head against the wall trying to convince people. 

And once I decided, you know what, I’m not going to try to convince anyone anymore, but I will take anyone who has any curiosity or interest and I will love them all the way through the process. I will share whatever knowledge and information and tips that I can, but you know, I always go back to, you can lead a human to healthy, but you can’t make them eat. They have to want it. And I always kind of say, you know, be a lighthouse, not a tugboat because the more you pull, the more more frustrated it is for everyone. So I stopped with the resistance kind of went away when I stopped, you know, approaching it and I don’t wanna argue, I don’t want to debate. Like another thing is going to unseat me now from the benefits of a whole food plant based diet or neutral terrian diet. That thing’s going to unseat me from all of the things that I’ve seen and learned over the years. But there’s a lot of people that still aren’t ready for that message and that’s okay.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

What how do you deal with people who like accept the message? They appreciate the message in your work. But then they have trouble applying it or they have these the devil, this illicit relationship they have with wanting to eat unhealthy foods. They’re kind of self destructive behaviors even though they know that they shouldn’t do it and it sets them back or they have some fallback, you know, How do you, you know, how do you help motivate them through that,

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Right? Well, if they really want it and they reach out to me, I kind of assess where they’re at and you know, I have some questions that are kind of provocative to just kind of assess where their their mental spaces, why are they here now? Why here? Why now? And if they want it badly enough as you know, it’s anything is possible. You just have to want it. And you know, we’ve done this so many, many times with so many people throughout so many years that we know its effectiveness and we know how to strategize. But what I do is in fact, what the choosing our diet is is a confluence of three variable three concepts. One is the whole food plant based diet. The other is I use time restricted eating and because of all the health benefits I’ve seen with that starting with your book, you’re one of the first inspirations for my journey and that, that whole realm about fasting, intermittent fasting and all that. And then the third part is mindfulness and approaching it from this. If you want this here are some strategies to put into place that will help you achieve these goals. So I use all the objective data. I calculate their actual goals based on formulas and everything that like we’re trying to reduce your cholesterol, we’re trying to get off high blood pressure meds, whatever it is, we kind of pinpoint exactly what the goals are and then I try to strategize with them, like I won’t give them a meal plan, I realize that it doesn’t help, like everyone wants a meal plan, they just want a diet and I just don’t think that’s effective. 

I’d rather strategize with, you know, as a team, what’s gonna work for them, what works with their family and their job and their day to day life, and how do we achieve those goals in a practical, sustainable way? And we work together to come up with something and then we work through it. You know, stuff comes up because stuff is going to come up and just kind of work through all those things. But I basically my, what I do is I put a system in place, here’s the system, here’s how we deal with our biology and our psycho, social situations and here’s how to make it effective for you. And that’s it. And it’s like if they want it, if someone wants it, there’s ways to do it. And the results are just always, the results are typical, people really do have these extraordinary results,

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Right? I always say there’s no excuses, No excuse because an excuse is just the primitive addictive mind, the negative rationalizations why it’s okay to self abuse yourself. And there’s always there just fake phony, they don’t hold up to scrutiny and there and there’s no reason you should not take great care of yourself. So explain more about your version of time restricted eating. What do you advise in that part of that part of your book advice and part of your advice you’re giving people.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

So I’m sure you’ve seen the data is very interesting. The data on all that just less eating less and less frequently and having a window of fasting is so healthy for health span and for all sorts of wonderful things. But what I notice is, you know, there’s that newer data that shows like, because I do a lot of weight loss, I take a lot of people through a weight loss transformation. They lose point forward £2.8 a day, like predictably. So I can always identify why not if the food journal, if not. So it’s amazing how predictable that can be now, if I think so. The research recently has shown that if you take it like a caloric diet and you take it in a time restricted window versus just spread throughout the day. There’s no added benefit to the weight loss. But what I’ve learned just from working with my clients is there are some behavioral components that are really well managed by just eating less frequently. 

So there’s this one concept called breaking the seal, Like every time you have your first bite and then it’s hard for you to stop. You know, a lot of people like if you don’t, they don’t have the first bite because they’re not hungry or it’s not on their plan, then they’re gonna be okay. So this limits that because we’re choosing how many times a day we’re gonna eat ahead of time and then the stopping, a lot of people don’t have, you know, they’re not able to stop eating once they start. This is a common thing that I see with a lot of my clients and so you don’t have to do that as many times a day. If you just pick two a couple meals a day or three meals a day or one meal day, some people like to do one meal a day and then they don’t have to. So the behavioral stuff that comes into play because of these decisions are so efficacious that it doesn’t even matter about the calories or anything like that. It’s just about like honing your body into a certain window of time or certain cup periods of eating opportunities that make all the difference for them.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Cool. When you do the time restricted eating, is there a preference for the time of day at which people eat? Like, you know, having more calories earlier day less later in the day? Or is it doesn’t matter to you? What, you know, in other words, how do you make that time restricted window shifted in the cycle of the night and dark or the day and night cycle,

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Right? So everything about food is habit, every, and the thing about, you know, some of the research shows that shifting your more calories earlier in the day is better just in terms of our circadian clocks, but most people aren’t hungry first thing in the morning. So there’s still benefits to eating less frequently into having more time in the fasted state, that it’s worth it to just pick what works for you. So most of my clients say, when are you really hungry? You know, And most people like, oh, I just, because I’m supposed to and then, so then if they’re, if they’re like that, I have them start a little later in the day, so maybe they have their first meal 11 or 12. 

But again, I work with what they get used to and then they usually, most people pick a second meal, they do two meals a day. So definitely it might be a little bit better to start it earlier in the day. But if you’re overeating and you’re chronically over nourished and you’re eating all throughout the day, it’s still better to shift it a little bit later in the day and just have a little later of a window. So I work with what my client schedules are like, you know, I have clients that are shift workers and we have to work around that too. But everything about his habits. So it always, you know, if you do with something consistently enough, the results definitely ensue,

Joel Fuhrman, MD

That’s good. So even though you might prefer them to eat an earlier dinner, if it’s later dinner is going to make them overall stick with the diet and eat less calories and be more satisfied you’ll do what works yeah,

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Exactly.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

So talk about how this element of mindfulness interacts and intertwines with your whole food plant based recommendations. How does that fit in to make people more happy joyous and satisfied what they’re doing?

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Well, I don’t know if those are two connected. I use the whole plant based diet just because I really believe it’s the health, most health promoting way to eat that we know of. And so that’s just one element. Like I just I can’t shift on that. Like I won’t tell someone you can’t eat an animal product, you have to be vegan and I don’t ever have that message but based on your diet on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, mushrooms, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices, an infinite tasty combinations is a really wholesome way to set up your diet. The most health promoting way to eat. The mindfulness component comes in more of the behaviors and more of the, you know, going back to all these principles of being in the moment and really enjoying your food eating when you’re hungry and stop when you’re satiated. You know those are things that we don’t really listen to anymore. We use all of these external cues like we’re supposed to eat breakfast, it’s the most important meal of the day or we have to eat every two hours to keep our metabolism stoked or all these messages because we thought were inundated with messages more protein, more this more that there’s all these different things that we hear all the time. 

So I’m trying to get my clients back into the space of listening to their bodies and tuning in. When are you hungry? When are you satisfying how which which foods feel best in you? There is inter individual variability on how people tolerate different foods. You know, some people have a hard time digesting grains or that go slower through their gi track. Some people prefer eating more salads. So there’s a lot of those little little tidbits that would kind of like hone in on what works for each person. But the mindfulness components are extremely helpful. You know, I do like I have a mindfulness of podcasts like on body and diet and like how you can just set the mood and you know, shut your screens and sit still instead of standing and walking and eating while you’re driving and actually tasting your food and putting the fork down. 

Like those kind of behavioral components are extremely helpful for people just tuning into what they’re eating and not just getting to the bottom of the bag of popcorn without even knowing how that happened, you know, because they’re watching tv at the same time. So practices like that, just putting systems into place where their behaviors around them are, you know, helping them achieve their goals, helping them really eat for nourishment and pleasure because if you’re eating and you’re not enjoying it, then that’s not gonna work long term either. So I want people to find recipes they love to eat and prepare and there’s just so many other things that come into play when it comes to food. It’s not just the food itself.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

For sure. There’s kind of like a, you know, we kind of appreciate and are passionate for the magic, the beauty, the internal structure of natural healthy plant foods that can change our health trajectory and protect us in reverse disease. There’s magic in those foods. So there’s some it enhances not just our gratitude, our connection with nature, but it enhances our enjoyment of the food because we’re not eating for taste, but we also is married together with our intellectual and emotional satisfaction for doing the right thing for our body and the beauty and the magic of the food. And I think there’s some relation with what you’re saying here with mindfulness and doing is just putting food in your mouth for the calories, into the you know, to to meet our desire for sweets or for or calories and getting hit, you know,

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

I think it’s magical Indeed, like if you think about it the way we are connected to nature, you know every day like food is what goes into our bodies like we take food from the earth and put it into our mouth and it becomes literally part of our bodies. We are quite literally what we eat, right ourselves turnover and where we can get rid of what we don’t need, but we keep what we do need and we construct our entire bodies based on what we put through our G. I. Tracts. So there’s something beautifully, you know, I just at the some of the being symbiotic and synergistic and this beautiful connection to the world we live in so that you know, and then we see you see like eat to live and you see what happens in manifesting people switch to a more mindful conscientious help promoting diet. It just changes everything.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

So is there a transition period when you start with people that you expect them to have some difficulties that would that they’re going to work through with your assistance that and then it gets better or their things improve where their taste gets better or they’re they’re feeling better. Do you notice that temporarily difficultieswhen they first start?

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Absolutely. And it depends on where they’re coming from, right? Some people come to me, they’ve been eating a very healthy diet and they just need some fine tuning and they’re just trying to lose a few pounds. Those are literally probably the easiest transitions. But then I also have people that are over £400 that are eating fast food 345 times the day. And I, the first question I asked them after, why do they want this? And why now is, how do you want to do this? Do you want to just dive in or do you want to dip your toe in? 

And I think that some people personality has to do a lot with that, but that most people want to dive in and when they dive in, I warn them to take a few days or it’s not gonna be, you know, a lot going on in their life where they can just kind of, you know, deal with the, they’re going to have some kind of detoxification, kind of symptoms more more often than not, but it’s usually like three or four or five days and after that it just gets better and better and better. And, and then the palette shifts also, I think that takes maybe depending on where they’re coming from up to maybe a week or three weeks and it just gets better and better. Like I have my clients, like if they just had some like hyper palatable meal. So I say, okay, give it a week, but so I have them prepare like one recipe, one soup or whatever and it’s like, you know, all whole foods and not a lot of salt, not a lot of, you know, no oils, no added sugars, all that. And I say, eat that a couple of times a day for a few days and see how the taste changes over just in the next few days. And it does because it’s like you’re just, you know, your palate just starts shifting if you stick to it and it gets, everything starts tasting better and better. The nuances taste better and better, celery becomes salty, right? Fruit becomes very sweet. It’s it’s amazing to watch that happen and to feel that happen,

Joel Fuhrman, MD

It’s like going to the gym and building muscle, you’re building like your taste muscle almost, you know, like building back to strengthen your taste.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

But I love that, I always used to think of it the opposite where like, you know when we’re babies and we have these fresh palates and breast milk tastes like sugar and everything so perfect and amazing. And I always feel like we need to kind of shed everything, all this other stuff that we built up on top of those taste buds, all that high hits of sugars and those high doses of salt that just blunt everything else. And it’s like the shedding to get down back to like the real flavors and the real bare bone taste buds.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

So do you have any like, let’s say your favorite like sauce or dressing or dip like to make vegetables or salads or things taste better. Do you have like a couple of go to recipes to make like to add to flavor plain vegetables, let’s say

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

A million percent. I teach a class saying that dressings and sauces the secret to eating more vegetables because basically food is a delivery system for sauce and it’s all about a great sauce and I love your system, your, what do you call it? The Flash Flash. Is that what you call a Flash where you have like just a balanced out the ingredients. But I’m all about in fact I just had that for lunch. I make this Dijon like a maple Dijon nut based sauce. That is amazing and I put that on like everything. But yeah, I love having a good sauce or dressing or hummus or something just because you want to eat the vegetables because it just tastes fabulous.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

So what are the ingredients in this maple, in this Dijon mustard sauce, you’re making what you put in there besides mustard.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

So I found this really great no salt, no sugar mustard. So I use that. I used to be maple syrup, but now it’s evolved because now I can get date syrup, really have it at trader Joel now. So I’ve been using date syrup and let’s see there’s cashews, I actually been blending up the nuts and just you know because cash is like the best base because it’s so creamy. But like I want to get all the different nutrients from all the different, that’s like someone that’s from brazil, that’s all the other wonderful nutrients that you get there. So a blend of nuts or seeds and then mustard, a splash of coconut caminos for the salty, the date syrup and then black pepper and what else is in there

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Is something to thin it a little bit if it’s kind of thick with the mustard and the date and the cashew, you need something like something thinner like

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Yeah, I love the cashew milk, the silk cashew milk. The unsweetened. That’s such a good nice face. I use that a lot. I use water sometimes I’ll use like an almond milk but that’s my favorite, go to right now, what do you use right now, what’s your favorite dressing right now?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

My favorite sauce for vegetables is like a coconut Thai curry sauce, you know? And then my favorite for like salads are like either either, it’s usually maybe something fruity, like an orange, a blood orange toasted sesame with peeled navel oranges with blood orange vinegar and some cashews and toasted sesame seeds and some lemon, like an orange sesame dressing. Those like my kind of my two or, or maybe a thickened tomato sauce with like soaked sun dried tomatoes in there and roasted garlic with like almond butter, almonds with them seeds and maybe some black fig vinegar balsamic vinegar mixed in. Maybe one of those kind of dressings for salads.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Yeah, it’s all about just changing it up and experimenting and using the flavors you like and then balancing it out. Just learning how to balance it out. There’s a great formula. Like, but you use the flash formula where it’s like you have,

Joel Fuhrman, MD

I don’t think the flash farmers me it must be somebody else, but I can’t take credit for somebody else’s work. But that’s okay. What’s your, I don’t remember, it could be something one of my daughters. There’s something, I don’t know, maybe it is because of people like doing stuff. It’s plain to me.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

That’s so funny. I thought it was you all these years.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

I don’t think so.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Okay.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Sounds great. So you’re also getting people to retrain their taste preferences. And so do you make them make desserts like healthy desserts too? Or they just have fruit or do you advise them, you know when you do their dietary skeleton, Do you include like a dessert recipe to or how do you or do you just have fruit or frozen fruit for dessert?

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

So I don’t even do breakfast, lunch, snack or dinner or dessert. I don’t do that anymore. It’s like just a meal. No, because it’s like, what time are you eating? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what’s composed of like if you really want to have breakfast style foods for dinner. Like let’s say you want oatmeal for dinner. There’s no reason not to. So I try to get rid of all that because it’s all just marketing. But in terms of like how I would set up a meal plan with my client. I use something called what I call the six daily three. So basically it’s six food groups that are nutritionally unique and I recommend prioritizing them in your everyday diet. So in those six and it’s like three servings of these six things. 

So one is leafy, green and cruciferous vegetables of course. So at least three servings of those everyday. And then other other categories, other colored vegetables, all the reds and oranges and yellows and all those are amazing too. And then fruit is the third category. And then legumes. So about 1.5 cups of legumes every day so that those beans, peas. How much should be a food groups. Those are all count in that category. And then the fifth one is nuts and seeds, 1 to 2 ounces of nuts and seeds a day because of all the incredible health benefits and your essential fats that are necessary. And then I used to have activity the activity as the sixth one. But I realized I could no longer lump mushrooms into other colored vegetables because they are so extraordinary. So I gave them their own category a couple of years ago. And just because the data on mushrooms. Oh my gosh. I mean I take mushroom caps. I take your I take your by the way I tell all my clients take your supplements are the supplements. I always recommend to everyone. I always have but I also take your immune biotech so mushrooms in there, I take mushroom capsules. Do mushrooms in my mushroom tea. So I think people need to incorporate mushrooms on a regular basis as well.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

I know it’s amazing that we actually have receptors on our cell walls to accept the ergo Athenian mushroom and our immune system is actually those function is dependent on elements and mushrooms. It’s kind of amazing how we’re designed to be mushroom eaters, isn’t it?

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

It’s gorgeous. Another one of those synergistic, amazing effects of living in this world. That’s incredible.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Yeah. So anyway, if so great is so before we leave, is there anything that we left out that you would feel important to impart to our listeners and then leave us with where they can reach you of course and get a hold of your services and of course we’ll get your book too.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Well thank you. I would just say that anyone that’s out there that’s plant curious or just wanting to make a transformation or transition into a healthier diet. I just want you to just think positively go on it with curiosity with a sense of adventure and like try to or ingredients or recipes that you’ve never tried before. You know, you don’t have to like be perfect. There’s no such thing as perfect. Anyway. It’s just a matter like making it as positive and fun and curious as you possibly can because every bite matters and it’s just a journey. We’re all on our own journey. So, good luck to everyone and thank you for having me here and anyone can find me in my books and everything at a plantbaseddietitian.com

Joel Fuhrman, MD

plantbaseddietitian.com That’s easy to spell and easy to remember. Alrighty well, thanks so much for joining us and of course, wishing you all the best and thanks for the great work you’re doing.

Julieanna Hever, MS, RD, CPT

Thank you. You too.