18 days as a Vegan

Okay, I set out to do this vegan challenge purely for my own selfish reasons. I thought it would help lean me out and I also have this issue with our food supply and how animals are treated. When I say treated, I mean how they are given antibiotics, how they are housed, and how they are treated. Yes, I’m one of the weird people who believe in energies and I seriously don’t want to eat some cows sadness. That may be a bit too much for some people. I’ve never been anti-meat. I actually (up until a few days ago) believed that people were meant to eat meat. Like, HELLO we have teeth, duh. I just think we eat too much of it and we don’t care about the treatment and care of animals.

Breakfast smoothie

Breakfast smoothie

 

Okay, so I’m on this whole vegan trip and I’m looking for recipes because I can’t be a junk food vegan. (Sidenote: Paleo was my gateway to this lifestyle, right? So, if you’re paleo, then you do NOT want crap in your body. You turn boxes, bottles and cans around to read ingredients. Have you read the ingredients on the side of a bag of vegan meat? Yeah, I’m not down with eating that stuff) On day 12-14 I found myself feeling a little sluggish. I was a bit perplexed because when I first started the vegan challenge, I felt like I was superwoman. I quickly figured out that being vegan does not simply include eating vegan approved chips and homemade guacamole. I wasn’t getting enough nutrition, so I hopped on the internet, Facebook to exact, and typed “vegan recipes” in the search box. All of a sudden I was whisked into the world of vegans and found some awesome recipes. Okay, that was very cool, but then I clicked on something from “Mercy For Animals”. Listen, if you don’t want to go vegan or at the least vegetarian, DO NOT click on ANY videos on that site.

I clicked on a video titled, “The Reason Why We Don’t Eat Eggs”. I thought the video was going to include some man or woman in glasses telling me the philosophy around why eggs aren’t good for animals. What I did not expect was to see a video with baby chicks having their beaks snatched off their faces, male chicks being killed for no damn reason, or chicks falling thru machines and being killed by hot water. The only way you can come away from a video like that is disturbed. I was in total horror. I couldn’t even share the shit on my page. Like, I was messed up for a bit.

Vegan soup

First time making Ramen

If you would have asked me if I was going to remain vegan before viewing that video, I would have said, hell no. Now, I’m all in. I’ve been doing it and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Since I looked at that video, I haven’t even been able to cook meat for my family. It makes me nauseous to even think about touching the dead flesh much less cooking it. That crap was not correct. I can’t believe we support companies that do that to beings on this planet. I’m not the PETA type. I have friends that hunt, but not for trophies. They actually take the animal and don’t waste it and they don’t do it in excess. It’s just insane what’s going on with our food.

It’s so funny the rabbit holes we all go down when we start trying to live “right”. I got sick with thyroid disease, which led me to the Paleo diet. I wanted to heal from my childhood and the Iraq War, so I went to therapy, which led me to yoga. I start practicing yoga and learn about ahimsa and living yoga off the mat, which led me to veganism. Now, I’m thinking what is next? I will write this…I encourage anyone and everyone who is on the fence about this lifestyle to try it, preferably leaning more towards raw foods because I feel amazing and more than that, I know I’m not supporting companies that don’t give a damn about my life or the lives of the animals they have in their care. What happened to the farmers who named their animals and cared for them? What happened to do us as human beings that we do not care anymore? I guess I’m getting off this ride, well…I kind of miss sushi, so we will see.

Granola Bars (they didn’t last long)

Oh, one more thing, Vegans, what is nutritional yeast and does one really need it?

Love and light y’all.