That’s right, we’ve decided to try a totally vegan diet for at least a week. We’ve been eating pretty healthy over the past year, no junk food, very little processed food, organic whenever possible, non GMO, grass-fed beef and free range chicken. We’ve lately tried to be much more conscious of the calories we eat every day and while that’s great, all this has not had enough of a positive effect on how we feel.
So why now? Well I was visiting one of my favorite blogs (www.raptitude.com) yesterday and read all the latest posts which included one of David’s experiments: What I Discovered When I Went Vegan for 30 Days
Reading this was like a big light going off over my head, it made sense, his approach was realistic and easy-going (just my style) and the results so immediate and exactly what we are looking for that I thought why not? Worth a try certainly!
I pondered this for a little while then told Way about it. He admitted considering it before but hadn’t for many of the reason’s David put it off for so long. So he agreed to read the post and when he was done, his exact words were “I’m in baby”!
So basically going Vegan means, no animal foods which for most people means, no meat, no dairy. Knowing that many foods have animal based ingredients in them, we decided that we best take an inventory of what we had to eat in our pantry before we could begin. We were pleasantly surprised to find very few things that we couldn’t eat on a vegan diet. There are still a few ingredients that I am not sure about but I have a handy app on my android phone that will tell me all that information. We don’t plan to be militant about it. If we eat something we didn’t know was dairy or animal, oops. We will just do our best and we figure that even if we only manage 90 or 95%, that’s got to have a great benefit and I will be very happy with that.
We will be doing some research and gathering some resources and will post them in the links section and/or in this diary section as we progress to our vegan week. I won’t waste food so nothing we currently have will be thrown out but used and we will add more vegan products as we go. I anticipate that we will probably have a week of 50% vegan then another week at 80% before we go full-time. I know many vegans say it’s all or none but we are not interested in labels or in unrealistic attitudes when faced with the few challenges that we have to work around. I’ll write more about those in future posts as we deal with them.
Suggestions, links, resources, recipes and anything else that might be helpful to us will be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
Gem
gem
Way(ne)
gemway 
Good luck and have fun with this.
I agree with not being militant about it. But I will say that while you are eating vegan, it is a perfect time to read about the ethical arguments for veganism. One peculiar thing I found was that while I was eating animal products I really could not be mentally open to any of the arguments for going vegan because I always had to harbor some reservation — some rationalization why it was not for me, or at least not right now. It’s interesting how the mind shuts things out like that 🙂
Anyway, enjoy!
Hey David!
Thanks so much for the visit and encouragement. Luckily (or perhaps not) I have been pretty open to most of that side of it, while hard to acknowledge and accept, none the less true. It isn’t my main reason for wanting to try this, feeling better and being healthier is but just as it is important to me to stay away from GMO products when possible (man what a can of beans that is, oh and don’t get me started on the cans!) it an important factor that I have always had in my mind. It is why I shop at Whole Foods here in California as I can be at least somewhat assured that not only is the meat I eat local but the animals are happy and allowed to live somewhat natural lives. I have always felt eating meat from animals that are treated badly, cannot be good for us. Is it psychosomatic that I can taste the difference *wink*