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vegetarian diets

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Kelda:
i decided on my own - and pleaded with my mother for months- I was a right little activist as a kid!. My mum used to hide the local papers from me as they transported veal from a local airport. She used to think I'd try to get on the bus and get there! I remember in primary 6 (at about age 10) I did a show and tell on battery egg farming. All my classmates were aghast at the end!

BelAir:
wow, I'm impressed!
 ;D

RedAzaelia:
I've been an ovo-lacto vegetarian since I was 12 (that's 8 years now!), mainly because I'd heard about how badly the animals I'd been eating had been treated. On the same day that I started to have those thoughts, we had a broasted chicken for dinner, and I realized suddenly that I could still see the bird it used to be. That was the end of that. Thankfully, my parents were very supportive of me, and my mom and I worked together to make sure I got enough protein and nutrients...

I like to think that my whole family eats healthier in general because of my decision. There's still meat on our table a lot of the time, but now there's a lot of really great stuff to go with it that I don't remember being there before. Everyone gets a more balanced diet now (except my brother who is nearly a carnivore--I guess he's the equal and opposite reaction for my action of becoming a veggie. lol).

I think that this diet has kept me a lot healthier than I would be otherwise (I kid you not, I am sick so rarely that it might as well be never), and in recent years, it's become so much easier to be a vegetarian than it was before. Nowadays, most places you can think of to go eat have at least a salad on the menu that doesn't have meat. I find that really interesting, since right when I started up, there were several restaraunts that we'd used to frequent that I couldn't eat at anymore.

Meat doesn't even smell good to me anymore. Has anyone else experienced that?

serious crayons:
My son was a vegetarian for a year and a half, starting when he was 10. So strict that if you touched a spoon to something with meat in it and then to something vegetarian, he wouldn't eat the vegetarian thing. So strict that if he found out he'd accidentally eaten meat -- for example, anchovies in the Ceasar salad dressing at a restaurant -- he would dash into the bathroom and make himself throw up. So strict that he wouldn't wear shoes with leather and I had to special order him an expensive synthetic baseball glove.

Then very suddenly he started eating meat again a couple of months ago. I'm not sure why, but I think it was either because his older brother went through a growth spurt and he was worried it would affect his own growth or because he got a few bad grades and he was worried it was affecting his brain development.

On the one hand, I was sorry he gave it up, because I was proud of his self-discipline and ability to keep it up despite a LOT of pressure from his brother and father, who are avid carnivores (I can go either way -- I eat meat, but not a huge amount).

On the other hand, it makes life much easier for me because everyone in the family can now eat the same thing. Plus, he wouldn't eat soy because it's a phytoestrogen and he was afraid it would make him grow boobs, so I constantly worried he wasn't getting enough protein, and now I don't.

Plus, being really strict about avoiding meat is much harder than you might think. Besides the aforementioned anchovies in Caesar salad dressing, there's beef lard in lots of baked goods and gelatin in a lot of candy, for example. Last summer we went on vacation and kept talking the whole time about how we were going to stop for pie at this renowned pie shop, with all these kinds of really good pie. Finally, we got there and -- you guessed it -- almost all of the pie crust had lard in it. I think there were two kinds out of about 30 that didn't.

BelAir:
during my true "not eating meat" stint, I was never bothered by the smell of meat...  I still don't like the look of it raw, and I still mostly don't "eat meat"... but for whatever reason, the smell has always been appetizing to me.

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