Are We Going Meatless?

That title got your attention, didn’t it?

Let me just preface this post by saying these are my personal thoughts (and Ryan is in agreement) and feelings on food and nutrition. Do not take this as advice for yourself. I’m just here to offer my opinions and experiences.

H’okay. Now that that is out of the way. Let’s move on.

First of all, no, we are not going completely meatless as of right now. Could this change in the future? Of course. But as of February 12, 2013 we are still eating meat. Albeit, much less meat than before but still not going full fledged vegetarian.

A little history about myself. I came from a “meat and potatoes” kind of family.

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We still ate fruits and vegetables, but meat was the focus of almost all of our meals. I didn’t really know much or care to know much about nutrition then so I just ate whatever was in front of me and that was that.

Once I moved to college, I lived in a sorority type house all 3.5 years (my first semester of freshman year I went to IU, I try to not remember that…) that provided all of our meals for us except for the weekends. I will admit that I ate like complete crap during college. I did not ever think about what I was putting into my body. Whatever was on the menu, I ate. It can be difficult to make a healthy dish that 40 girls will actually like (and be able to cook…oof that is a whole other post) so a lot of the meals were sub par nutrition wise and almost always included meat of some sort. We did always have salad as an option but when you have cheesy poofs….who is going to pick a salad?

Anyways, long story short I ate whatever I wanted and a lot of it.  Once we moved to Milwaukee, I started getting more and more into healthy living blogs and hence started watching more health related documentaries.

One of the very first ones I watched was Crazy Sexy Cancer, which I’m now ironically reading Kris Carr’s book, Crazy Sexy Diet.

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At first, it seemed so crazy to me that food could actually heal someone. Heal not meaning completely getting rid of a disease but meaning halting the diseases progression and letting someone live a lot longer than they imagined.

After watching that documentary, I couldn’t wait to watch more. Food, Inc, Hungry For Change, etc.

And they all were essentially saying the same thing: Eating a plant based diet is the best. Eating less or no meat is best. Now before some meat activist sees this post and gets all “Meat isn’t harmful, you meat hater!” here me out.

I strongly believe in Bio-individuality. This means that not one diet is best for everyone. Some people feel better if they do eat some meat, others feel their best when they eat a vegan diet. It’s all about what makes you feel best.

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As I started looking back at our meal plans in my Google calendar, I noticed something. We were eating less meat centric meals. And it wasn’t on purpose. For the past month or so, we’ve been averaging two-three vegetarian meals a week naturally. I put selected meals not because they were vegetarian but because they sounded good, and so happened to be vegetarian as an after thought.

With discovering this, I realized I wanted to take this a step further. I wanted to see if I would feel even better than I do now by completely cutting meat out. Could we eat a vegetarian diet for a week? Perhaps even a vegan diet?

After discussing with Ryan, who was completely on board, we decided to try a detox of sorts. This coming Saturday we will be starting a two week detox. I won’t go into the specifics on here, because we’re doing what’s best for ourselves individually, but we’re both excited and nervous. It will be difficult, but hopefully it will reset our bodies. We will be cutting out all sorts of meat for the two weeks so it should be interesting.

Does this mean we will never eat meat again? Doubtful. Does this mean we will be a lot more aware of how much we eat meat and consider more vegetarian meals? Probably. I’ll be sure to give you guys a recap of how we feel after.

Question: Have you ever done a detox? Would you ever eat a vegetarian or vegan diet?

Tagged as: detox, vegan, vegetarian