Six months ago I decided to become a vegetarian. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would be doing this, yet here I am, loving it the whole way through. As an ex meat lover, I would like to say that this is definitely not for everyone, especially people who enjoy lots of variation and options in their diets.
Typically, people’s first reactions when I tell them that I have become vegetarian is, “Are you okay?”, “What do you eat?” or “You look too skinny”. Yes, I am okay, I actually eat a lot and I am at a healthy weight. I have gotten a couple “good for you” responses but that is only after I explain exactly why I made this huge choice in my life.
Last August, when I first started college, one of my friends told me that she was vegetarian and of course my first reaction was “What do you even eat?”. As a meat eater I was so confused on how anyone could ever go on without eating animals. I had watched a lot of those really sad Netflix documentaries where they show the ins and outs of the food industry, very graphic videos of animals being slaughtered or chickens having breasts so big that they could not even move and even if they wanted to they could not because there were thousands of other chickens stuffed into a room. Even those videos did nothing for me, I even recall telling my boyfriend while watching it that I could still eat meat and that I wanted chicken nuggets. So now you might be asking, so what made me a vegetarian?
College food definitely played a roll in my choice due to the awful grey meat that they serve, yuck. This all happened quite gradually actually, It started off with not adding the grey chicken to my stir fry during lunch time. I then soon realized that I really did not need to eat meat with my meals, I was just conditioned to think that it was a necessity. After a couple of weeks, I had noticed that I would go a couple of days without eating any meat and not even realize it. I still continued to eat grilled chicken after a workout just to get in the necessary protein for the day. One night after the gym I made myself a huge serving of chicken in which I proceeded to eat half of and then throw the rest away. In that split second of throwing that meat away, I had one of those “AHA” moments and I haven’t turned back since. I thought to myself “this chicken forcefully gave up its whole life on this amazing planet just so I could throw it in the trash”. To this day it makes me sick just thinking about how terrible humans are to other living, breathing, creatures.
I have had a lot of people ask me how I get my proper protein and vitamins, and quite honestly I hate this question. Yes, meat has a ton of protein in it. You might be shocked to find that there is a lot of protein found in a wide variety of foods, for example, broccoli has more protein per calorie than beef. Nuts, beans, rice, fruits, and almost all vegetables are loaded with protein, but unfortunately, we are not properly taught nutrition and can become ignorant as a result. The food industry is tremendous, so tremendous in fact that they will use their money and lobbying power to brainwash the general public into thinking that the meat that we eat every day is necessary for survival and proper growth and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Just like the pharmaceutical and oil industries, the meat industry pays for us to believe that we need something that we really do not and in turn breeds innocent animals just so they can be killed and consumed. What a lovely life these animals must live on planet Earth, harmed, controlled and pumped with hormones just to be killed by humans whose gluttony blinds them from morality and whose greed blinds them from truth.
Life without meat is not unfortunate, I feel a great amount of pride with my decision to become vegetarian, even if going out to eat or dinner at a friend’s house is much more complex now. If you are on the fence with cutting out meat I ask that you try it for just a day and see how you feel. After all, it is just getting rid of one little bit of your meals, it’s really not that crazy, stock up on your veggies or have an extra serving of rice I promise you won’t regret it.