Vegitarian Bootsnall Members

I feel so much better for having gone the veg-head route. At first it was hard to fight temptation, I loved cheeseburgers and bacon and my mother's brisket, but like everything else it just becomes second nature and a part of your routine after awhile.

Go for it, you'll be glad you did!!!! If not you can always go back but remember you have to give it some time and try not to forget why you are doing it!

Why are you considering it?

RT

I've been veg for eight years now, and I don't regret it one bit. The ONLY hard part is not having the convenience of being able to eat anything, anywhere. Other than that, it's been an adventure learning all about nutrition, different foods, etc.
Some vegetarians can still eat poorly, but once you start discovering all of the wonderful options out there (for meat eaters as well) and your body feels better, you'll feel the difference when you try and switch back to food of low nutrirional value.
Hope that helps!

I did the vegi route for a long time, purely for nutritional reasons. It rocked. I learned all about new foods outside of the standard pasta, bread and dairy...it kept me on my toes for sure, esp in places where vegis are not first in mind i.e. Spain. I feel comfortable now about my nutrition that I am all about meat again. But it's nice every few months to go back to a diet sans meat.

Just another travel addict trying to get Out of dodge...

Yep. I follow Delara's style. But veggie food in India is yummy. Lots of delicious choices.

This is proof that a continuous lack of the proteins and amino acids found in red meat causes the followers of odd lifestyles and bizarre food consumption habits to be inable to spell the word 'vegetarian' correctly.

I was about to get you with the veggie spelling, but joe got there first

I'm a lacto-ovo-pesche vegetarian. This means I eat dairy, eggs and fish (and seafood). So, basically, no red or white meat. I've been a vegetarian for 7 years, since I was 14...which was basically when my mother threw up her hands and said, "Fine, I don't care what you eat." A lot of people have moralistic reasons for not eating meat, but for me it was a taste issue: I've never liked red meat (with the exception of bacon. Why bacon? No idea) and the only white meat I enjoyed was chicken breast, so it was pretty easy to stop eating it. Nowadays, I find myself liking seafood less and less, and I only eat it when I go out to nice restaurants anyway. Is this because I've just become turned off from chomping on animals altogether? Perhaps.

My problem with being a veggie is a) eating a hell of a lot of pasta because I'm not a good cook and b) having severely limited options in some countries in general, and restaurants (esp. fast food places).

On the upside, there are lots o veggies in Portland, and there were a lot on campus too, so I had/have the opportunity to try new things quite often. I've even decided that tofu isn't half bad! (And Indian became my fav food a few years ago...lots o yummy options!)

Court

"...I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson

I'm a lacto-ovo veggie (I do currently eat dairy products but no meat/fish), and so are my two kids.

Like someone else said, at first it was a difficult choice until I adjusted and learned how to feed us. In the US though more and more places offer at least a couple of specifically veggie choices, restaurants can still be daunting for a lot of people.

For my kids, they usually eat off the appetizer menu when we go out though it isn't always the most nutritious choice. But as they get older they're less and less embarassed (and confused) about asking for things to be done a certain way and are starting to branch out.

That's the biggest key for me anyway, don't be afraid of asking for "such and such without chicken" or what have you. With practice you can eat anywhere without a second thought.

My friends stress over it far more than I do. "What will you be able to eat at the party Chey??" It just stops being a big deal at some point. Get used to the 'rabbit food' and 'vegetarian is (insert language choice, usually swahili) for slow hunter' cracks.

Once you have a few years under your belt it gets easier and easier. At least for me, I stopped craving anything with meat after a while too and now many years later it's been so long that the thought of eating meat makes me shudder.

There are still a lot of people out there who think that meat is this amazing health food that you have to eat large amounts of every day and not doing so (and most especially not forcing your kids to do so) makes you strange/sick/whatever.

I've heard it all, how my kids will be stunted, not grow correctly, be weak, etc. My male veggie friends face this more than I do too, I think it's the whole machismo thing that can get tied to meat eating.

My male veggie eating friends smell better and therefore at least I like to be closer to them (I've heard others comment on it too though) so it's a trade-off.

I think you should go for it.

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Cleverly Disguised as a Responsible Adult.

I have not eaten red meat or pork since early 1987! I could never give up fish, however. I love my sushi!!

I've actually been considering going back to eating red meat now and then as I have been having so many cravings. I trust my body, as cravings are usually connected to something you need (yes, even chocolate -- another story)... But it is a hard leap to make.

Mentally it's weird, but more so it is the fact that my body does not make the enzymes to break it down anymore, so it takes even longer than usual to digest (beef take the longest) and it is not a fun few days!

By the way, I never wanted to be a proud-type-purist, so maybe once or at most twice a year I would have a bite.

Humorously, my family are generally all from Nebraska, formerly known as "The Beef State" and now known as "The Cornhusker State" for all the corn they grow -- mostly for feed for the cattle! Talk about getting grief!!

"I would rather be rich in experience than rich in money." Br1mSt0nE

Many years ago I tried the veggie route. Lacto-ovo I guess. I ate lots of eggs, some cheese, and now and again, some fish. I had minimal problems adapting taste/craving wise. Read lots of books about making sure I was getting adequate aminos and nutrients. Felt great. Lots of energy. Lost weight although I didn't really need to lose much. Didn't need deodorant. Never had a smelly fart. All was good for about 18-20 months. That was when I realized that no matter how much I exercised, my muscle mass was wasting away. I was really getting puny. And weak. I tried extra vitamin/nutrient supplements and protein powders to no avail. At about month 24, I decided to give it up and start eating some meat again. Within a few months, I was strong again. For me, it was a great experiment that just didn't work out.

i rarely crave meat but I don't think I can give it up either.. allergic to many things it cuts down my choices and more over I rarely eat anything other than chicken and lamb in the meat category...

More than why you feel the need to do it..make sure you do it right..if you want to. Have to make sure you have a balance diet and supplement with the right kind of protein/fat for muscle tone and also colour..as many veggies tend to start looking pale unless they are balancing their diet well..am not saying all are but you have to make sure you have a balanced diet...

personally i think the Indian Veggie diet is very balanced as it contains different kind of plant protein in form of legumes,grains and pulses which other cusines rarely have...but then I have never been one strictly so I don't know what's out there.

Hi Everyone,

I respect all of your choices to go veggie, but I have to offer a counter point so Live nomadic has a balanced look at it.

LiveNomadic... The only thing better than meat and potatos is meat and MEAT! Trust your Gut.

So everyone, if we go to lunch and you order a chicken salad with no chicken, I wont look at you funny, but you cant look at me wierd when I order a stead medium well.

Bowerdude
"Just give me a fork, and point me in the direction of the cow" and
"Bring it out raw, and I'll rub it in a dirty ashtray, Thats what I consider well done"
~Rob Kean, Homie, Best-Friend, Anti-Vegitarian

bowerdude: Each to his own tast, hu? I got friends who are exactely the same. It's always an amazing sight for me (veggie) to watch all that dead animal go down. But hei...

I do it as my own, small protest against the way we kill the animals. My grandparents had a farm. I started aiding with the killing of pigs and cows pretty early. I don't mind that. I actually think it's a pretty natural thing to eat meat. The thing is though, we slaughtered a cow only once in a while. Everything that could be taken out of the animal was manufactured to something or the other: brain, claws, intestines, blood. The whole family lived of the cow (and of course the veggies from the garden) for quite some time. These days it's different. People are picky (oh, no, I don't eat THAT part of the animal) and large parts of the animal aren't used to feed humans anymore - these parts are either thrown away or fed to other animals (including to some of their own species, eg. BSE). Before they are slaughtered, they live in small cages and are then sent hundrets of kilometers to the butchery. These things are just sick....
Ok, I got carried away a little here. Sorry - I'm usually not the prophetic kind of veggie. But that's why I don't eat meat. I always liked it, I don't think I live healther now without meat and I don't think it's amorale to kill animals in order to eat them. I just think it's sick the way we do it. My proposal: if you want to eat meat, you need to go slaughtering a cow first. If you can't do it, you're not allowed to eat meat.

braslvr: That's certainly true. Depending on why you work out, it doesn't matter much though. For my 179 cm I weigh too little with my barley 70 kilos - well, that is sports wise. But with Kung Fu, you can learn techniques, that out-weigh the weight difference. And it's always an advantage, if your opponent underestimates you!

www.aresthetics.ch/trav
My personal travel website

Rover, wanderer
Nomad, vagabond
Call me what you will

elAdi, your proposal is exactly why I stopped eating meat. I realized I could never bring myself to kill a cow - or a chicken, or a turkey, or a pig. Fish, on the other hand, not a problem. I started going fishing with my dad when I was about 7, I now carry my own filet knife... I'm ok with that, for whatever reason. And I also disagree with the way the animals are treated before they are killed, and the manner in which they are slaughtered. It grossed me out to learn about the chicken factory farms in the Eastern US, and how some cow feed contained parts of other cows. Yuck! So now I just don't eat it at all. Sure, I miss some things, especially my mom's homemade meatballs and Culver's Butter Burgers. But I don't think I could ever bring myself to eat anything again that I would not be able to kill.

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Eamus Catuli

Freesia, do you mean to tell me that you wouldn't kill your own food if that was the only way to avoid starvation? There are entire tribes of people who live like that everyday. I think it'd be very satisfying to kill my own food. At least then I'd know where it came from.

I've been on school field trips (I know, weird) to various sheep/cow/pig farms and I suppose I just learned at an early age, well, that's where the meat comes from. Somehow it made it easier to understand.

Here's a thought I had -- free range chickens right? So you let the little guys run free, hangin' in their little chicken yard with their little chicken friends, and then hunt them down like dogs! That scares me more than slaughterhouses where animals are purposely raised to be dinner. Is that how free range works?

Just another travel addict trying to get Out of dodge...