Don't you miss eating meat?

One of my recent posts talked about the first question I am usually asked when I mention that I am vegan.  The second most common question is, "Don't you miss eating meat"?  Answer: "No".

I previously associated veganism with individuals motivated by moral and ethical reasons.  I never really connected the health benefits with veganism.  Like many of you, I thought vegans lived a life of dietary deprivation.

I began to realize through documentaries, books, articles and other research that there was a huge health benefit by committing to the vast dietary menu of a vegan diet.  There was just too much scientific information in favor of veganism for me to turn away from what it had to offer...and thus, we made the change to go vegetarian, then vegan.

There was a brief period of time at the beginning where I told myself, "I can't have that (meat/dairy)" and I felt a bit deprived.  Then my mentality changed to "I don't want that" once I started to notice how much better I began feeling, how much more end of the day energy I experienced, how much weight I lost in the first two weeks into this dietary change, how my blood pressure/cholesterol/blood sugar reduced within a month and how my restless leg syndrome was no longer experienced.

Am I suggesting the meat caused my restless leg syndrome?  No, but my excess weight was a huge factor.  My restless leg syndrome caused me to not get good sleep, caused depression, fatigue and irritability. The medication I used to treat the restless leg syndrome was causing me to feel like a zombie, like I was in a mental fog with no energy.  I could not sit comfortably for very long, if at all.  If I was moving or walking my symptoms were not experienced.  That is why I originally purchased my treadmill as I knew that walking while I watched television would allow me to not experience the restless leg symptoms. 

When Casie and I first watched those initial documentaries ("Forks Over Knives", "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead", "Supersize Me" and "Food, Inc.") and reviewed clinical research regarding the health benefits of vegetarianism/veganism, we didn't decide to have one last meat consuming feast and then transition to our new dietary lifestyle.   Rather, we just gave it all up.   How did we do it?  Well, it just made sense to us to adopt a whole foods, plant based diet based on the clinical evidence.  We realized that how we had been attempting to eat healthy and exercising only was maintaining or worsening our weight/health conditions.   We asked ourselves, "what if we were to go full boar, eat as healthy as possible, only eat high nutrient density foods while abstaining from low nutrient density foods?".   How would our bodies respond?  We wanted to find out how healthy could we possibly get by converting to a vegetarian (which evolved to vegan) diet. 

Our results have been amazing and we are only in the infancy of this journey.  We see no reason that our family cannot maintain this lifestyle for duration of our lives.

Do I miss meat?  Surprisingly....no.  Believe me, I loved meat.  I always looked for leaner meats to eat and that probably contributed to the meat not having as good of taste as the fattier cuts.  Combined with inconsistent taste, toughness of meat, overcooking/undercooking and preparation time it wasn't that hard for us to stop eating meat.

In addition, I look at food much differently now.  I used to eat to get full and to stimulate the pleasure centers of my brain with food...and lots of it.   Food made me happy, I was motivated by food and my life revolved around it and most of that food included meat or dairy.  I now look at food from the perspective of how many nutrients is the food going to provide my body.  If a food has too much salt, fat (especially saturated fat), sugar, high fructose corn syrup, is nutrition-poor or is processed than I am not really interested in consuming the product.  Meat just doesn't have anything beneficial enough for me that I can't acquire with other foods or supplements.   It just isn't a nutritious enough of an option for me.  Nor are dairy products or processed foods.  There is too much clinical research to show that eating meat or other animal products is not in my best health interests.  

In addition to this, for Casie, it was the blood.   She didn't like the connection with meat and blood.  For me, there were a number of things like my obsessive compulsiveness that didn't really care for the pathogens in the uncooked meat, the thawing of the meat, the undercooked/overcooked end result and all the fat, too. 

But what really really converted me is when I thought about the old adage, "You are what you eat".    Well, meat is dead tissue, an animal corpse, that provides me with protein, fat, zinc, iron and other vitamins.   On the other hand, fruits and vegetables are living tissues that provide me with a vast array of vitamins, minerals and proteins.

And yes, there is also the ethical and moral issues I have with the treatment of the animals.