For the first part of this final food project, I chose to embark on the experiential journey of eating only foods that cooperated with a vegan diet. Although this experience only lasted for 48 hours, I still found it to be a great challenge because of my usual carnivorous eating habits. However, it was not actually the deprivation of meat that provided the biggest challenge for me, even though I was used to eating it practically on a daily basis. I am also used to drinking milk every day, and if being deprived of that wasn't enough, I had never really thought about just how many foods contained dairy. A vegan diet meant no meat, milk, yogurt, eggs, cookies, and MUCH more. Even for just two days, this experience was very challenging for me, and my mother kept having to remind me of things that I couldn't eat that I would not even have thought about before.
Two days of dieting, no matter what the diet is, are unlikely to effect the way you feel necessarily, especially if your eating habits are not really that bad to start off. Although I used to have the occasional popeys chicken or McDonalds chicken sandwich, my parents almost always cook dinner, and do a great job of making sure I have a healthy and balanced diet for the most part. As a result of this, the lack of meat and dairy in my diet may have been a huge deprivation for my taste buds, but otherwise I did not feel very different during the time that I was actually being vegan. However, the day right after my last day of veganism, I had a lot of chicken and I believe I also had a slice of pizza. Later on that day, I found that I was feeling slightly queezy, possibly because my system was not ready for such a rapid intake of meat/dairy.
There were a few benefits of being a vegan for two days. The first one is that it introduced me to a very different way of thinking about food as well as people who choose to follow a vegan diet, and I gained a new respect for those people for two reasons. Firstly, the way they discipline themselves to not eat so many tasty foods, and also because they are not enabling the food industry to continue producing disgustingly processed meat like the rest of the country is. Although I don't believe that in this case one person can make a difference, it is still good to support what you believe in, especially if that is not eating many foods that appear normal but actually have disgusting stories behind them. Also, I think that if enough people were convinced to eat on a healthy diet, the food industry would end up promoting more organic and healthy products. On the other hand, that is a lot easier in writing than it is in action.
Some of the meals that I had consisted of things like tofu, roasted vegetables, (broccoli, carrots, onions, sweet potato, etc.) quinoa, (a food sort of like rice but with more protein) and rice and beans. Although I said earlier that the experience was a challenge for me, it would have been ten times harder if my parents were not such good cooks or if my living situation was not as good as it is now. In general, this experience was good for me, and I might even consider doing something like this again, except hopefully for more than just two days. It was also pretty good for me because although I didn't really feel better necessarily, I did feel like my energy levels were good all the time even without one of my main sources of protein in my diet. It showed me that there are other ways to get protein other than eating meat.
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