Hey friend!
If you’re new here – my name is Carleigh, and I’m the founder of PlantYou.
This blog started as a dream to help people integrate more plants into their diet. As you might already know, there are so many amazing reasons to follow a plant-predominant lifestyle, from better health and longevity, to the precious animals and our planet.
I founded PlantYou in 2016 to share my simple, accessible, and delicious recipes that were helping in my transition to a plant-based lifestyle. It’s unimaginable to think we are now a community of over 4 million strong, with two New York Times Bestselling cookbooks to boot!
I’m so grateful you have landed on this page, and if you’d like to explore further here are some of our most popular links and resources:
My Story
In 2015, news broke from the World Health Organization that red and processed meat were now considered Group 1 and Group 2 Carcinogens. Like so many others, I had grown up on a standard meat and potatoes diet, with steak and pork-chops on weekly rotation in her family kitchen. The news was particularly shocking as my father was a stage 2 colon cancer survivor.
Armed with a bachelor’s degree in media theory and journalism, I began to do my own research, reading landmark and life changing books including The China Study by Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, finally enrolling in a one year holistic health coach course to become more versed in nutrition. The science was clear. The healthiest, cancer protecting and longevity promoting approach to eating was a whole-foods, plant-based, oil-free lifestyle.
Having grown up on a hobby farm surrounded by chickens, horses and many family pets, suddenly everything started to click.
The decision to go plant-based was an easy one. Figuring out what the heck to eat was not.
With little-to-no cooking skills, and a tiny bachelor apartment kitchen, I started experimenting with plants.
I noticed that most recipes online were complex and required a lot of speciality grocery items.
Determined to stay the course, I began cooking vegan meals by simply replacing the meat in my favorite childhood recipes with plants. The first recipe I veganized was pasta with bolognese sauce.
And that’s how PlantYou was born.
It was obvious to me that there was a need for truly simple and approachable recipes in the vegan space. My simple, fuss-free recipe infographics went viral on Instagram, garnering the attention of more than 4 million ‘followers’ between social media pages. In 2018, I launched my own whole-food, plant-based digital meal plan program, the PlantYou Planner, which was an instant success, that allowed me to leave my corporate job five months later.
