Have you ever heard of a “vegangelical?” What a funny little
term. It’s applied to vegans who have placed themselves on a high horse and
snub their noses at all the “poor, confused, and ignorant” carnivores and
ovo-lacto (egg & milk) vegetarians. I don’t want to be veganelical. In
fact, I’ll be the first one to tell you that I fall off the vegan-wagon and eat
dairy (generally less than once a week), and I eat my own hen’s eggs whenever I
feel like it…and, guess what? – Insert Gasp Here – sometimes (albeit rarely), I
eat meat.
The fact is, though, as a society, we eat too much darn
meat. A good dietician will tell you that a serving is 3-4 oz of lean meat…you
know, the ol’ size of a deck of cards thing. Boy, that looks small sometimes,
right? Being consciously aware of the small portion allocated to us by these
dieticians, who can justify eating that huge cheeseburger? The same goes for
all that dairy. It was easy to be an ovo-lacto vegetarian. More CHEESE if you
please…and here I am, a fat vegetarian! But, speaking from the position of
someone who has virtually eliminated dairy, I’ve found that the change has pushed
me towards eating more produce. Frankly, I never had room for those veggies
before!
I’m making an effort to change the way I approach life. I’m
making small steps towards improving my body. Taking two steps forward, then
one step back, still results in forward progress. I’ll get there sooner or
later. I want to keep refining my program, tweaking it just here and there
until I feel comfortable and happy with it. I want to limit my soy intake,
eliminate GMO foods, drink more fresh juices, move towards buying more organic
produce, etc. They are just little steps, but like my weight-loss, little
changes can result in big improvements as time passes. If you are reading this,
then you probably want to make little changes, too – your own list of little
changes. This is a fitness journey where the map unfolds as we travel down the
path. There are struggles, and pitfalls, and mountains to climb. If you take
one step back, you have not landed back where you started; you are just one
step away from moving forward again.
4 comments:
Good post. I actually had a conversation with someone who argued with me because I buy cage vegetarian fed chicken eggs. I was shocked at her need to grill me about what I choose to eat. Oh, well to each his own.
cage free is what I meant to say....
I was reading a book by a woman who went from raw vegan to raw minimalist omnivore. She was shocked ... as a writer ... to get death threats and insults when she switched. She attributes this to lack of essential fatty acids, which makes some extreme vegans fuzzy minded. It sounded funny at first, but she supported her argument and it made sense.
We are each trying to improve, and ultimately, that is the most important thing. There is no one-size-fits-all nutritional program because she each have unique physical, mental, and spiritual needs that are met by how we nourish ourselves. I will always strive to maintain that statement as I continue to blog in the future!
...and I meant "we," not "she"....silly auto correct.
Post a Comment