Your first steps as a vegetarian can be daunting, but with a few tips, it is much easier to follow.
Spinach quiche, thevegetarianmanVegetarian meals as a bachelor used to be quite haphazard. I decided to explore alternatives. This is the story of that journey.
I used to eat a lot of meat, perhaps twice what I should have, even if I followed the most generous of the mainstream eating guides. I started to read up on eating in a healthier way. This lead me to learning more about the vegetarian diet and the reported benefits of it. I soon found that there seemed to be three key themes. These were:
The animal cruelty is easy enough to understand. We raise animals artificially, fattening them up, and then slaughter them to eat. This seems unfair and wrong. (But then, what about protein? I’ll cover that in the next post “What about protein“).
Okay, what about waste reduction? Yes, the inefficiency of the meat industry is well documented. The amount of grains needed to fatten up animals is excessive, with a lot of waste incurred when compared to us just eating the grains efficiently.
Lastly, and perhaps the deciding factor for me personally, was that eating a lot of meat has been found to increase the chances of one getting diseases, such as suffering from cancer or heart attacks.
After reading further into the matter, I found that the vegetarian diet was the best step I could take. I started as a week-day vegetarian until I was happy that I could be healthy on a vegetarian diet alone (see the article on Weekday vegetarians, flexitarians, ovo-lacto vegetarians, vegans and more).
So if you’re thinking of eating more vegetarian food, I would say, go for it, just remember to continue to eat healthy vegetarian food (I ate cake and poor food when I first started as a vegetarian, so avoid that by reading “Cake is not the best vegetarian food“).
-Graham
graham@thevegetarianman.com