About Veganism, Three Months Later : The Checkpoint

About Veganism, Three Months Later : The Checkpoint

Hi everybody, Mary here.

So, since today's the 25^th of October, it means that it's been three whole months since I decided to go vegan ! Yay me !!!

Anyways, I think it's time to have a first checkpoint and see how things have been since I decided to follow this lifestyle.

(By the way, I hate calling veganism a « diet », because 1) it's NOT a restriction to your alimentation, like when you want to lose weight so you CONCIOUSLY decide not to eat something you would normally eat in order to lose weight. I eat everything I want and I'm not here to lose weight, personnally, I'm fine with my weight, and 2) there's way more than what's in your plate that makes you vegan. It's a lifestyle against cruelty towards animals, not just a « fad » or a « trend », please, thank you for understanding.)

So, here's a list of things I've learnt since I went vegan :

I've been WAY more self-aware and concious about what I was eating and what is in my body. Since my body is not a graveyard but a temple (reminding me that my philosophy teacher at uni has written a book called Your Body Is A Temple, which made one of the girls chuckle for days on end because she was thinking about something else), I realised what I actually needed and being vegan cut loads of bad food compared to my omnivorous diet.

(I'm just saying here that I was horrible and always craving on meat, to the point when my step-dad told me « Well, when you move out, the only things you'll eat will be pasta, meat and chocolate ! », which was the final push to make me vegeterian one year before turning vegan. I've been wanting to do it for a long time, but I ended up doing it as a dare. And I haven't turned my back on things since. Now, I'm even sometimes picking up on my step-dad when he eats meat, like hey, meat-addict, you're eating meat AGAIN ??? but now, he's more concious about his diet too, so I guess it's a good point, in the end.)

I've been WAY more creative in the kitchen and tried to find new recipes around every week. I even own a side-blog for my vegan recipes that you can check out here : LINK, and even if I'm just a beginner cook, and my skills aren't that developed, I actually like cooking and trying new things to avoid the boring cliché of the student eating pasta and as steak, and occasionnaly the 'peas-and-carrots' jar with some fried fish or something like that. Even in my business school, many, if not everyone eats lunch at the cafeteria. They either buy these sandwiches that barely change from one day to the other, or the classic chips and meat (sometimes with a side of veggies) they serve everyday where they can buy a hot plate.

(Which leads me to this observation : people don't really understand why I'm bringing my food everyday, I've told some people about me being vegan and they usually ask the same questions ffs just educate yourselves pretty please, and when I tell them that I actually cook my own food every week, they look at me in the eye as if I were a genuine freak. I just told them that it takes just my Saturday morning to cook everything for the week and that I would be done. They still look at me as a freak and spend the next ten minutes telling me that they don't have the time to prepare anything, that most of their food is already prepared, or that they eat the same thing everyday, and they complain about how difficult it is to find new recipes, especially with veggies. I told this girl that she could do them with curry or some BBQ sauce and then she said « Wow, never thought of this ! Might as well try it someday ! ». Really, I'm just experimenting in the kitchen, that's all...)

Also, I've been eating WAY more veggies since I went vegan. As I said earlier, my diet was really not healthy before I went vegan, I would be craving for fat food and such. But now, I've been way healthier, and it makes me feel so much better, from the inside to the outside.

(I will end this point with a little advice for vegan-wannabees : please, please don't try to vegan right away. You can't do this overnight, because your body has been conditioned to a certain type of food, and changing it in the blink of an eye won't make you feel good at first. Cut the animal products one by one until you're vegan. Explain your family, friends and loved ones that you're changing your lifestyle, and ask for acceptance. It's usually the best way to go vegan and not end in the hospital because of this-or-that deficiency that hasn't been treated.)

So, yeah ! Lots of good stuff happening to me since I went vegan, and I hope, many more to come for the future !

Okay, that's it for today, I really hope that you enjoyed this post and I'll see you very soon with a new one !

And as usual, our last word : KIDNEYS !