Transitioning to a Plant-Based Diet

Well, this year has been full of surprises. It’s been a wild ride adapting to the pandemic, being laid off, moving to a different city, starting a new job and now figuring out a new way of eating. I wanted to write about this today because it seems like a sudden change that I’m guessing all of my family and friends would be surprised about and thinking, “she probably won’t last 2 weeks without animal products.” This is a very new endeavor, and I want to explain how it came to be.

I have always been interested in healthy eating, but I struggle to have will power to make healthy choices when I’m around family and friends. I’ve cut out dairy a few times before because it was noticeable how it hurt my stomach, gave me dry skin and built up mucous, but it’s just so delicious that I kept going back. I’ve seen and read about animal cruelty in the dairy and meat industry, but it was never taken seriously with my family and friends; they would kind of just joke about how delicious a pig looks and that bacon is life. I kind of felt like a hypocrite though, because I could never kill a cute little lamb or a big ol’ cow if my life depended on it, yet I would gladly eat them.

I’ve read a lot about veganism before but it has always seemed like a taboo religion, almost like vegans act superior to others and are annoying with their activism. Not to mention, I can only think of a couple friends I know who are vegetarian, and I only know one true vegan. So I’m constantly surrounded by meat eaters, and thus it was very difficult to think differently.

Anyways, fast forward to moving to a new city with my boyfriend, and beginning my job working at a gym. Finally, after not working for 4 months I was back to having a routine and better yet, zero excuses to not exercise. I know that when I am working out consistently, I am more likely to choose healthier options to eat. I have always liked watching recipe videos for new ideas, and I noticed that so many videos would pop up that had something to do with a “whole food, plant-based diet.” When I hear that, for some reason it seems like another trendy diet like keto so I would kind of whiz past it.

The reason I began researching obsessively about taking on a plant-based diet was because I sort of had a random shower thought. For so long I’ve been frustrated with trying to figure out my hormones and mood swings, low energy levels, sensitive stomach, dry skin, allergies, asthma and so on. I wondered what would happen if I completely cut out dairy and meat. I mean, there could be other reasons why I have all those problems, including genetic and environmental, but a lot of the health videos I was watching claimed that eating plant-based has the potential to alleviate all of them.

I started my research very, very skeptical. First, learning the health benefits of eating plant-based to get me motivated to read more. Obviously I would get a lot more nutrients if I focused on adding more plants into my diet. I learned that it’s completely a myth that “you can’t get enough protein on a vegan diet” and that “you won’t get enough nutrients like vitamin B12”. In reality, I’m already low on B12 and I was eating animal products 3 meals a day. Both vegans and meat eaters need a B12 supplement to get enough because so much gets killed off in new ways of farming (B12 comes from the bacteria in soil, and cleaning and sanitization of crops kills it). Also, the “not enough protein” thing is too silly to argue about.

I thought to myself, okay so now that I know I can survive and thrive on plants, I will continue finding plant-based recipes. Next on my research list was to learn what could possibly be so bad about the meat and dairy industry. Well I watched “What the Health,” “The Game Changers,” and also watched a speech by Gary Yourofsky. I learned that the Diabetes and Cancer associations are sponsored by meat and dairy companies. Even though so many studies show that processed deli meat is carcinogenic, and meat causes diabetes (not sugar), these companies were taking money from the very things that cause these diseases. They even put these food items on their website as a part of their food guides.

If that’s not twisted enough, the company that wrote journal articles arguing that cigarettes are good for you and make you healthy back in the day is the same company that defends the meat and dairy industry saying humans need to eat animal products to be healthy. Not to mention, big fast food chains are huge in the meat and dairy industry and have been going crazy with it; with options to add cheese, extra cheese, more cheese, and put even more cheese in your pizza crust! Double, triple, quadruple patty burger with bacon and cheese! In between those lovely commercials are a million drug ads so the pharmaceutical industry can make billions off of people who have high cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and so on. To me, it sounds like the more they persuade people into eating animal products that are proven to lead to a variety of diseases, the more money they will make from selling pills to “fix” it all.

With the coronavirus sparking so much uncertainty and shining a light on how messed up the media is (and always has been) I really started hating on big corporations and selfish people with power. I never had sufficient evidence of who is the “bad guy” because again, I’m getting all of my information from fake news. However, this information about the meat and dairy industry made so much sense to me that I started feeling quite upset about it all.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to believe, but with so much controversy over the benefits of eggs, milk, cheese and meat I think I’m just going to stick to plants because you really can’t go wrong. No one has heard of a carrot causing a heart attack. There are so many ways that you can get all the nutrients you need, and to me it’s not worth jeopardizing my health just because something tastes good. I’m willing to continue learning about new exciting plant recipes that taste just as good, if not better, and changing my lifestyle. I have yet to conquer the difficulty of being the “odd one out” in social situations, but it will just be another learning experience.

I’m looking forward to sharing my journey on transitioning to a plant-based diet and sharing my successes and failures with you all.