4 Weeks!

After today it will have been 4 weeks since I started my vegan diet. This was sort of my unspoken goal; I wanted to see the short-term health benefits and sort of re-assess how I felt about eating. It has been a good 4 weeks, and a lot has happened - I learned how to make a couple new foods, I've felt better overall; and (an even bigger change) I've been able to step back and look at health, ethical, and moral issues surrounding the Western diet that we've fallen into. Michael Pollan's book, "Food Rules," ended up being quite a good guide to go by as I pursued this, and I'll refer to some of the rules here.


Spending more time in the kitchen has been healthy for me, in more ways than just making healthier food. I'm also not sitting and playing video games as much. :) I haven't made a lot of new foods, but that wasn't my goal - I just wanted to make sure I was well nourished without meat and dairy. I've done some experimenting with different recipes of veggie stir fry, which has been fun and delicious. I learned how to make cookies (Rule #39: "Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself."), pancakes from scratch, and still kept up with making hummus and salsa. I've also been trying to have a glass of wine every day (Rule #43). I've barely scraped the surface of the number of foods that are available, but I had to ensure I wasn't spending half my paycheck on food. If you're not aware, it's pretty easy to spend twice as much as you normally would while grocery shopping if you're buying a bunch of non-seasonal produce, unprocessed goods, and things that aren't supplemented with some chemically altered form of corn (Rule #3: "Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry." Rule #4: "Avoid foods that contain high-fructose corn syrup."). Ultimately, it's probably worth it...


I mean, I was buying less food to try to cover the same amount of time (Rule #44: "Pay more, eat less."). Simply enough, that means I'd be eating less food per day over the course of the month - I genuinely wanted to be a bit more conservative with my food and not wasteful. To help avoid that, I tried a couple different things.


Rule #46: "Stop eating before you're full." When you're not buying bulk amounts of food for a small amount of money, your food becomes much more valuable. Avoid wasting it (eg. overeating or throwing it away). As long as you'll eat it and it will not spoil too quickly, keep it. And again, don't cram your stomach to avoid having to deal with leftovers (Rule #61: "Leave something on your plate."). Save the food for when you need it.


This next one was a little harder to follow, but it forces you not to overindulge the way we do in this country: Rule #47: "Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored." If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, don't eat anything else. The idea is that you only eat when you're actually hungry, rather than when you see something you want to eat or are using it as stress relief (it can be easy for me to eat cheesecake and strawberry sauce even when I'm already full). I think it's fair to substitute something for the apple that fits yourself; for most, apples taste good, but people generally wouldn't eat one as a treat or anything. A salad, an orange, or some carrots and celery - whatever works.


Another thing I did: I'd always drink a lot of water, particularly when I started to feel hungry. Apparently, in many incidents when you feel hungry, your body is actually thirsty. I read that somewhere and decided to test its merit, and it worked well for me. I try to drink a tall glass of water before each meal to eliminate unnecessary hunger, which in turn helps me to eat less.


These few simple things helped me to eat a lot less food, and I think it's been beneficial. I've felt like I've gotten better rest, and working mornings has become a lot less painful since I feel more energized. Waking up at 6am still sucks, but once I'm up and moving, I feel fine; prior to this, I'd feel tired all day. Also, it's hard to describe, but I kind of feel less toxic and groggy. I've lost a couple pounds over the month, which is saying a lot for me since I only weigh about 150 pounds to begin with, and I guess is a pretty realistic amount of weight to lose for someone who is doing it healthily. I think I was able to shed some of my unhealthy weight. On the less pleasant talking subject, my digestive system is much cleaner. I have to go to the bathroom a little more often, but it's usually goes a lot more quickly. Also, the increase in natural sugars and soluble fibers in my diet has produced more digestive gas, an unpleasant side effect. But again, a small drawback to the benefits.


Finally, while thinking about the health benefits of eating like this, I've been able to consider the moral and ethical issues surrounding eating and come up with a diet that I think I'll be satisfied with.


Ethically and politically speaking, I think the big food corporations are far beyond what they initally were there to do: provide food for people. Now it's just business. Money. The problem is it's really hard to get around them. There are 4 huge food companies that provide most of the food that's out there. The technicalities around things like seed patents and those companies buying corn from farmers for under the cost of production are hard to avoid, particularly when you live in a place like Minnesota where local produce is out of season. During the right times of the year, however, going to farmer's markets becomes an option. I'll do what I can to get my food from farmers rather than corporations. Unfortunately, my currently limited knowledge of the politics around food companies inhibits my ability to make rational decisions based on it. As a result of that in combination with me not really knowing how much suffering takes place due to the food corporations, this is less of an immediate concern to me.


I've decided that the biggest moral consideration is this: Animals shouldn't have to die for me to eat. I love eating chicken, and I often like hamburgers and steak, turkey and ham on holidays, and pepperoni on my pizza. But come on, killing animals for us to eat isn't very nice, especially considering how unneccessary it is for us. Meat is like, the most nutritionally inefficient food, and everything that our body gets from meat can be gotten from a plant. Again, as I said a few weeks ago:
"For the vegan, the fact that he has to supplement his lack of animal product proves him omnivorous.
His recognition of this fact makes him an intelligent being.
His exercising of it makes him a compassionate one."
I still believe this (although it's arguable that we're even omnivores in the first place, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt), but I think it applies mostly to animals' lives. I've decided that the byproducts of animals (dairy, eggs, honey, etc.) are a small price for them to pay for us providing healthy and enjoyable living environments for them. With that in mind, a vegetarian diet that sticks to those products that come from animals in ideal living environments rather than factory or industrial-style farms is what I've concluded would be a good solution (this is inclusive of the health rule, #27: "Eat animals [and products from them] that have themselves eaten well.").


I mostly don't want an animal to die for me to have a meal, and if I'm going to drink their milk or eat their eggs, I'd prefer them to be well-treated and well-nourished. Seeing as I have experience firsthand how much a difference a change in diet can make, I plan to continue being much more conscious about what I eat. By no means do I want to decide what other people eat - they're totally entitled to satisfy their hunger with what Michael Pollan would call "edible food-like substances." The point is that I strongly encourage them not to.


~A