I’m a vegan. I am not, however, a crazy militant harpy vegan and I really can’t stand people who are because they give all us normal vegans a bad name. Sometimes I hate to even say the word “vegan” when describing myself because it’s such a loaded word and meat eaters automatically get super defensive when they hear it. I don’t think I’m better than anyone else because of what I choose to eat. I don’t want to lecture anyone about their personal choices. I don’t want to try to change anyone’s mind. I don’t want to preach and nag and make anyone feel bad. I don’t think I’m going to stop the bad practices of the meat and dairy industries by not consuming their products. Some people might, and that’s cool, but I’m not one of those.
When I stopped eating meat it was totally on a whim. My boyfriend and I had talked about trying it out before, but we were never that serious about it. One night I watched the movie Year of the Dog when he was at work, and it pretty much had me convinced to become a vegetarian. Then he came home and said one of his coworkers had been talking about how he made a bet with his friend that he couldn’t go a month without eating meat, and how he did it and loved it so much that he never went back to eating meat. So we talked about it and decided to try it. The next day we didn’t eat any meat and all the meals we ate were so delicious that we decided to go another day, and that’s basically how it started. We just took it day by day, continued to try new things, and it was surprisingly easy and fun.
Then Food, Inc. came out. We’d been vegetarian for a couple years at this point and we’d kind of talked about going vegan a few times, but we both really loved cheese and it just seemed too hard. After we went to see that movie my boyfriend decided he was going to go vegan. I was still not convinced. Cheese is damn good. Sour cream is damn good. Fuck, I never even liked milk, but I was sure as shit not ready to give it up. I hated tofu. I hated soy milk. I was not down. But then it came time to cook and I realized I’d either have to cook 2 meals or else eat vegan when we were eating together at home. So, I decided to give it a go.
You guys, I kinda hated it at first. It’s so inconvenient! There’s basically like no fast food you can eat (we’ve since discovered a few things like Taco Bell bean burritos, but in the beginning it felt like there was nothing), you have to cook for yourself a lot, you have to read EVERY SINGLE LABEL ALL THE TIME even when it’s something you think wouldn’t have dairy (or whatever) in it (one time we bought some soy cheese slices without looking and when we got home we discovered they had casein in them), when you do eat out you have to ask about a billion questions, and you start to realize that being vegan is not just about what you’re putting in your body, but also about not using any animal products at all so you have to avoid things like glycerin, which just happens to be in like every beauty product ever (toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, etc.). So basically it was a huge pain in the ass in the beginning and I had a month or two that were really bad and I just wasn’t sure this was something I wanted to continue.
But then I started to lose weight. See, when I stopped eating meat I started eating A LOT of cheese. It basically just became our replacement meat. So when I stopped eating all that dairy, and stopped eating fast food, and started cooking healthier meals at home, even without doing any exercise at all, I started to lose weight. Then I started exercising and the weight just started to melt off. Pretty quick, too. It was great and it was all the motivation I needed to continue my vegan lifestyle.
So that’s my story. I didn’t choose this lifestyle for moral reasons, I did it because I’m a lazy bitch who didn’t want to cook 2 meals at a time. I didn’t continue this lifestyle for moral reasons, I’ve stuck with it because I’m scared I’ll get fat again and I like the way my body feels. Basically, I have my own reasons for living this way and I don’t feel the need to force my lifestyle on other people. I wish more vegans felt that way.
P.S. Don’t get me wrong, I do have ethical reasons for continuing to be a vegan, but the whole point of this post is that I hate preachy people trying to shove their ideals onto others, so I’m not getting into them at this point.
