Meal Planning Tips for the Busy Athlete, with YumUniverse's Heather Crosby

By: Matt Frazier

Heather Crosby, creator of YumUniverse and author of the upcoming book by the same name, knows a thing or two about creating a healthy lifestyle.

At first glance, YumUniverse is beautiful and artsy and obviously focused on healthy, plant-based, gluten-free, whole food. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll discover that Heather has the same fascination with habit-change that I do, and she incorporates those critical concepts into her recommendations for meal planning or getting started with a plant-based diet.

Heather was our guest expert in the No Meat Athlete Academy last month, and today I’ve got a 20-minute clip from our seminar to share with you. It’s packed with Heather’s brilliant tips for simplifying your entire process around food — from planning to shopping to getting it on the table — without ever sacrificing health for convenience (down to the soaking of the nuts and seeds and cooking beans from scratch).

You can play the interview below, or listen to it on YouTube:

If you haven’t heard of YumUniverse, do yourself a favor and check it out. Heather has a TON of free how-to videos and articles about everything from sprouting to knife skills to a homemade natural oven cleaner (plus tons of great recipes for eating), all beautifully done in a way that makes me furiously jealous of actual artistic people.

If you’d like to hear the entire interview and watch Heather’s hour-long member Q&A video, plus get over 6 hours of audio content from me and our other guests, you can read more details about the NMA Academy.

See You in NYC or Chicago this Weekend (2014)?

So it’s not quite a world takeover tour (yet), but we’ll be at plant-based food festivals in two different cities at once this weekend, a first for NMA.

NYC: I’ll be speaking at The Seed, along with people like Scott Jurek, Gene Baur, Gena Hamshaw, Victoria Moran, JL Fields, and a whole mess of other leaders in the plant-based movement. My talk is Sunday at noon, but I’ll be around all weekend at the No Meat Athlete table, where I’ll have shirts and books. If you’d like to come, you can save 50% on your ticket with the code seed50.

I’ve also got 10 tickets to The Seed to give away for free! Just leave a comment on this post (before noon ET, Thursday, August 7th, 2014) saying that you’d like to be entered, and I’ll randomly choose 10 winners and send you an email if your number comes up.

Chicago: Wendy will be manning the NMA booth at the massive VeggieFest. Stop by and say hi — she’ll have lots of the coveted racerback shirts that we can’t seem to keep in stock. Tickets are free!

There’s a lot more planned in the next few months, too. I’ll be speaking (and running, camping) at the Woodstock Fruit Festival August 17-22. Then in September there’s Toronto and DC … both are in the works, with details to come.

Hope to see you soon!