About Us
In April 2018, students traveled to the Main Street Vegan Academy for a week of intensive training to become certified vegan lifestyle coach and educators. Strangers quickly became friends, especially after hearing one another’s personal stories and journeys to triumph over health issues and chronic conditions with a vegan lifestyle. Three came together with a common passion and purpose to elevate the vegan lifestyle while bringing change to our culture’s perception of what a woman’s ideal body should look like. Women come in all shapes and sizes, and there are no perfect measurements we should be striving for or beating ourselves up over.
Once the three put their heads together and started discussing their plans for retreats and body positivity messaging, they decided their efforts were best served working together, and Body Positive Vegans was launched! Through collaboration with one another, Brenda Tassava, founder of Vegan Juju; Chani Farhaven, founder of Unlikely Vegan; and Guinevere Aide, founder of Aide Your Health have committed to hosting this website, creating and maintaining body positive and vegan content, while also hosting events and retreats to further support the body positivity movement.
Brenda Tassava, VLCE
Vegan Juju
Brenda is a certified vegan lifestyle coach and educator, based in New Orleans, LA. After years of struggling with asthma and borderline Type II diabetes, Brenda became vegan in 2017 after hearing an inspirational keynote presentation at WDS by Rich Roll. With the support of a great health care team, she has resolved all her breathing issues and reversed her borderline diabetic condition. Today, she is fit and healthy, off of all prescription medications and helping others to adopt a healthy vegan lifestyle.
Brenda is a motivational speaker as well as artist who uses her own personal stories and experiences to inspire others. Growing up, she relied on food for comfort which in turn led to poor body image and yo-yo dieting. For the first time in her life, she feels that food is no longer in control. Through a vegan lifestyle, she has found stability in not only her nutrition, but also her desire to exercise and live a healthy lifestyle which in turn has brought her body into balance and to its natural state of being.
Chani Farhaven, VLCE
Unlikely Vegan
Currently living in the Seattle area, Chani has been excited to participate in activities like weekly yoga held in a body positive studio, body positive classes and workshops, hiking outings with Fat Girls Hiking, and dancing the day away with Fat Kids Dance Party. She’s been a guest on the body positive podcast, Fat Face Feelings. What makes her soul sing? Yoga, good vegan food, nature, travel, sailing, playing ukulele, new experiences, and adventures of all kinds.
Chani is a Longhorn who attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a Bachelor of Science in communication, later attending the University of Texas at Arlington receiving her Master’s degree in communication. She is a certified Vegan Lifecoach and Educator (VLCE), after training at the Main Street Vegan Academy in New York City. Chani lives with her husband and three cats in the Seattle area, working both as a marketing consultant and on her business, Unlikely Vegan, as a vegan coach, cook and educator.
Guinevere Aide, VLCE
Aide Your Health
After obtaining a degree in Business and Hospitality Management, Guinevere received her culinary diploma from CIA, with a four month intensive wine and food pairing course, then traveled the world broadening her culinary skills globally, graduating from Bangkok’s Blue Elephant Culinary School and The Kitchen in the Castle Cookery of Dublin, Ireland, while completing various culinary courses in Costa Rica, Mexico and Vietnam.
It was winter of 2008 that her own health began to take a turn for the worse. After multiple digestive blockages and surgeries, a new diet was in order. Crohn’s was taking its toll and she didn’t want to become another statistic. Her desire to help others who also suffer with chronic illness is becoming her newfound direction. At the age of 37, she now finds herself enrolled in vegan lifestyle coaching, international culinary school, rebranding, reinventing and repurposing her passion for the greater good.