I am (maybe, possibly, well let’s just see how it goes shall we, no strings attached here) vegan

After my post on being a confused non-vegan, I needed to take a little break from blogging. I wanted time to sort things out in my head. I came to a number of conclusions over the past couple of weeks, and the first one is that I am surrounded by amazing, supportive friends who are switched on socially and have deep empathy. Thanks to everyone who commented in support, it was awesome.

So where to from here? I’m going to try going vegan for 1 week, as I suggested to myself in that post. I’ll start tomorrow and end next Friday. After that, I will start gradually cutting out dairy, eggs and fish over the next month or two and see where I end up. I realise that I don’t need to go vegan for a week – I could simply start the gradual elimination of animal products and go from there. But I want to. I’m curious to see if I’ll feel different. I want to challenge myself to find those quick and easy yet satisfying recipes that are going to make up my staple dinners. I want to try it because my heart is there and I have nothing to lose, yet plenty to gain. Plus it makes for a great experiment to write about and since I can only really experiment on myself (volunteers are hard to come by, funny that), I have to be my own guinea pig.

Why not just stay vegan after 1 week, you might wonder? Because all the advice I’ve had is to do it slowly and I really agree with that. When I cut out all meat except chicken and fish, I did it gradually. I haven’t had steak or lamb in months and I honestly don’t miss them. When you do something gradually, you give yourself time to adjust both physically and mentally, and you’re more likely to stick with it because you’re less likely to want it. It will also give me time to adjust my shopping list and find the ingredients I want for the vegan recipes I plan to cook.

One thing that won’t change though, if I do go vegan, is the purpose of this blog. I started it because I’m interested in health and its connection to food. It fascinates me – I can spend hours researching nutrition and the effect food has on our bodies. They say you often only find out later in life what you really love to do and in my case that’s definitely true. My passion is exploring what it means to be healthy, taking recipes and cooking ideas and creating healthier versions of them. I’ll carry on doing that, no matter what my diet ends up being. If I’m only cooking vegan food, of course my recipes will be vegan. But substitutions are my specialty and I’ll always indicate where you can use a different ingredient. I don’t believe you need to be vegan to be healthy, although I do believe that more plant and fewer animal products are better for you. In fact, contrary to popular belief, you can actually be vegan and quite unhealthy! There’s a whole science out there on health and food that’s waiting to be explored and new studies are being done every day. That’s what I’ll keep writing about – that and the recipes that make me excited about food.

So if you want to know what it’s like for a lifelong carnivore to go vegan, check in here each day next week. I’ll post the truth, warts and all, because experiments only produce true results when ALL data is taken into account. And because if I stop telling it like it is, you should stop reading…