For the next two weeks, I have decided to follow a completely vegan diet. I am doing this for health, not moral, reasons, so I will continue to use leather goods, and my regular beauty and cleaning products during this time. I've read various books and seen documentaries where people applaud a vegan diet for giving them more energy, allowing them to sleep better, etc. Coming on the heels of a particularly decadent (and gluttonous) bachelorette weekend and a few months of pretty high stress levels, I could sure use it and figure it can't hurt. I hope it will encourage me to be more conscious of my consumption and how food affects the way I feel. The goal of these two weeks is NOT to lose weight, though that would certainly be welcome! I eat a pretty low-meat, high veg, non-processed diet anyway, so I actually don't think this will be THAT much of a challenge, but we'll see. I'm not making this a highly public endeavor, but I thought I'd perhaps write some of my thoughts down here if they occur to me and I feel like it. Here we go:
This morning I awoke still full from this weekend (blah), so I passed on breakfast and drank a big mug of coffee with hemp milk (Tempt original). I packed lunch, which was going to consist of a veggie burger and an arugula salad with homemade dressing (olive oil, lemon, salt, pepper) until I realized that the veggie burgers in my freezer are made with whole eggs. No bueno! Off to Whole Foods today for some vegan burgers, I guess! I plan to pick up the Sunshine brand, which I eat pretty regularly even when I'm not "being vegan." I like this brand because they are tasty, made with recognizable ingredients, and free of soy. As far as soy goes, even when not vegan, I feel pretty strongly about only eating organic if it's a soy-based product, like soy milk, tofu, or tempeh. Non-organic soy products are among the worst for the environment as far as farming practices go and are usually genetically modified. That said, I know many products today have trace amounts of soy, but I'm okay with minimal ingestion of non-organic amounts because I don't eat a ton of processed foods anyway.
Based on my "oh no, this veggie burger isn't vegan!" experience this morning, I think the biggest challenge of the next two weeks will be reading labels even more carefully than I currently do, though as usual I plan to eat mostly non-labeled foods anyway. Also, I think the vegan experiment will take a bit more planning in advance than I'm used to. I won't be able to just go home and pull something random out of the fridge or freezer for dinner, because it might not be vegan. (I often eat eggs for dinner because it's easy and I enjoy it.) I'll have to make sure I have options and a plan. I'm mostly curious to see if I'll miss dairy like cheese and butter, though I'm pretty confident I'll be okay without it for two weeks.
That's all for now. Perhaps I'll be back with more thoughts later during this two weeks.
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