Ellen's Blog

When I turned 18, I couldn’t wait to leave St. Louis. The word people often used to describe the city was “provincial.” It was a euphemism for segregated. Backwards. Old-fashioned. Way behind the times. Many people my age who grew up in West County can relate. We had never driven south of Highway 55 or north of…

I have such good intentions. I really do. I want to be blogging 3 times a week. I want to show that the local newspaper publisher who replaced my 4-year old vegan column with a fishing column made a mistake by bowing to local fish restaurants and related businesses. Yeah, I get they are the…

How beyond cool is this?! http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/advice-from-a-vegan-cardiologist/ The head of a mainstream medical organization is vegan and recommends his patients do the same! What is the world coming to? In my slide shows I do when I speak around the country, I show a slide of my lipid levels from the past 20 years. I kind of…

I have stayed away from high school and college reunions because of cost and mainly time. But there was one I always wanted to go to and finally had an incredible opportunity as a speaker. When I was 18, I spent two years traveling the world with the International Cast of Up With People. Up…

At yoga on the beach this morning, a woman wearing a Bradenton Running Club shirt caught my attention, since I used to run with the club too, before my books. Afterwards, I asked if she still ran with the club. She said she stopped running years ago after several surgeries. She said the last surgery…

It seems that some of us have been making the connection between global warming (yeah, I’m calling it that*) and our diet for decades longer than others. Many vegans I know say that 40 years ago, the environment was the main reason they went vegan. Websites like EarthSave have long been a rich resource for research…

When you have 60,000 followers or so…between Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and some of those other “minor” social platforms, the idea of blogging is like comparing running to swimming. Most people can run faster than they can swim, perhaps 2 to 3 times faster. Social media is so instant. I can communicate with 30 people…

Are you ready to cut the “junk foods” from your diet? The Paleo Vegan challenge begins July 9th! My partner in crime and co-author, Alan Roettinger and I will be doing a 5-Day Give Up The Junk Challenge. Each day you will receive an email with tips, videos and more. Facebook and Twitter via the hashtag #PaleoVegan. For 5 days, we…

Write what you know, they say. And I’ve had the pleasure of knowing some runners who are much faster and run longer than I ever will. Just because they aren’t vegan doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them. Given that I haven’t known many vegan runners during my 34 years of running, I’ve learned much…