Henry Firth - BOSH! Healthy Vegan

The rest is vegan history. Within months we had millions of views of our videos. Within a year, billions.

However, there was a downside. While we were eating plant-based foods – which are, inherently, healthy – the sheer amount of food we were cooking and testing was causing us problems. We’re incredibly proud of the food in our BOSH! books, but, put simply, we were eating too much! Particularly for Henry, those repeated tests to make the perfect lasagne or burger resulted in him piling on the pounds he had initially lost.

When you immerse yourself in the vegan world, you realise just how easy it is to make vegan versions of almost anything. This is a great thing, as it shows that vegan food doesn’t need to be about abstinence. But, as any dietician, or medium- to long-term vegan or vegetarian will tell you, it’s easy to be an unhealthy vegan, or to just be eating the wrong things. After all, salad is vegan – but so are chips!

We found that cutting meat out of our diet was a great thing to do – it helped us eat less saturated fat, and encouraged us to bring more fibre and nutrients into our diet. A plant-based diet reduces your impact on the planet and you know that what you eat doesn’t contribute to poor animal welfare – but if you’re not careful, you can easily end up low in key nutrients.

As well as the over-eating, our increasingly busy lives negatively affected our work-life balance. We had no time for exercise. Our hectic video production schedule meant we often didn’t leave the house for days on end. When we did leave, we filled our faces with vegan burgers, vegan fish and chips and brownies at vegan food events. Gradually we became unhealthier versions of our vegan selves, living on ‘junk food vegan’ diets. At home, there were far too many takeaways. Our meals were less ‘eat-the-rainbow’ and more ‘50 shades of beige’.

At the start of 2018, we decided to get healthy.

It wasn’t a big change. More a re-steering of the ship. We changed our course by a couple of degrees, watched our ship right itself, and found a completely new destination.

We sought advice everywhere we could, reading dozens of books, watching videos and documentaries, following courses and speaking to doctors and nutritionists. We sought out mentors. We started working with a dietician.

Our new way of eating and living focused on colourful plants, and getting the right balance of nutrients. This, as well as a small amount of careful supplementation, ensured we were getting exactly the right nutrition for our bodies.

Following our new meal plan felt great. We felt light and lean. We had successfully navigated ourselves to a place where we felt fantastic all week long, saved money, saved time on cooking, and were still able to eat the kind of meals we wanted (allowing ourselves to indulge in a vegan junk food session from time to time). We went to the gym regularly, and were better at getting up early. Our work has improved, our happiness has increased and we are healthier than we have ever been.

This is the toolkit we wish we’d read when we were starting out on our vegan journey. We wish we’d known that by following just a few simple steps and basic rules we could ensure we achieved optimum nutrition from a plant-based diet.

Our goal is to help everyone in the world eat more plants. That’s what we’re about. It’s what we’ve always been about. It’s why we started BOSH! and why we’ve written our cookbooks.

We’ve updated our mission a little bit from where we started. As well as helping everyone eat more plants, we also want our recipes to inspire, entertain and nourish, and we want to improve the health of the planet and all its inhabitants. If everyone adopted a plant-based diet, we could make a big contribution to reducing climate change.

That’s why we’re here, and it’s why we created the recipes in this book. We’re here to show the why and the how of living healthily on a plant-based diet.

A healthy lifestyle means different things to different people. But all of us will benefit from focusing on these six pillars:

sleep, move, relax, love yourself, love others, live with purpose

A long, healthy, happy life has all these bases covered. Don’t compare yourself to others, but think about how well you feel when you follow the principles of each in your own life. We’d like to share with you some simple, meaningful changes you can make to live better.

Rest is crucial for your body. During sleep our body undergoes all sorts of essential activities. Doctors recommend we aim for between 7 and 9 hours per night – any less than this counts as sleep deprivation, which can have many negative health consequences. So getting good sleep is crucial.

One of the most positive changes we made was to improve our sleep. We used to get up early to hit the gym, even if it meant getting only 5 or 6 hours of sleep. We were spending our days sleep deprived, trying to catch up at the weekends.

But after learning about the impact sleep has on physical performance, we made time to sleep properly. Now we get 7-9 hours of good-quality sleep most nights and the difference to our lives has been incredible. Even if we hit the gym a bit less often, we see more benefits from the times we do go, and we eat more sensibly during the day too, as we’re less likely to need a quick energy boost.

Being sleep deprived is detrimental to your health. It can impair brain function, memory and empathy. It negatively affects your mood and increases stress hormones. It is also more likely to cause us to make bad food choices, and since we’re tired, we are more likely to skip exercise. Being tired impairs our body’s ability to grow muscle, and conversely, makes us more likely to put on fat.

Of course, there are some jobs, such as doctors, nurses, chefs or shift-workers, which require long and erratic working hours, or night shifts. This can make a regular sleep pattern an impossibility. In this case, getting the maximum sleep possible and the best-quality sleep you can (even including naps) will help you manage your rest time.

After a good night’s sleep you’ll reap many benefits, including more energy, higher concentration and stronger learning ability. You’ll be more likely to make good food choices and your body will be better at building muscle or burning fat. Your immune system and bodily repair systems will also improve. In his trailblazing book, Why We Sleep , Matthew Walker shows that you’ll have better memory, increased life expectancy, lower stress levels and more empathy. In addition to the food you eat, sleep is one of the biggest things we want to help you with.

Create a bedtime ritual. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day – even at the weekends – if you can.

Keep your mobile phone and TVs out of the bedroom,using something else as your alarm clock. Ian likes to use a light alarm clock, and Henry likes to wake up to a motivational podcast to get him up and raring to go! We set up a charging point in the hallway for phones.