Today marks Day Five of my vegan adventure.It started Monday morning with a desire to lose the 30 pounds of baggage I've been packing on for the last year.
It proceeded quickly into quiet enthusiasm for a lifestyle I long eschewed in favor of cheese.
(But let's take a moment, shall we? Mmmmm.....cheeeeeeeeeeese.)
Okay, now to business. I have to admit that leading the resistance to Vegatopia was my assumption that there was no variety in the vegan diet. I thought I'd be bored to tears, feel deprived, and resent the flat, uninteresting taste of each meal.
Boy, was I wrong. This week I've eaten:
- Raw peppers and carrots (up at which I had previously turned my nose)
- Lots of pears, apples and berries
- Eggless egg salad on whole grain toast
- Lentil-tomato salad with dill
- Tofu chili from a can
- Corn puffs from a bag
- Wild rice, both with and without raisins
- Balsamic blueberries and pears
- Wine. Yummy, yummy wine
- Yam fries
Granted, some of these things aren't low-fat (the balsamic blueberry syrup, for instance, and the raisins in the wild rice). I do need to get serious about myself and cut even the vegan fat out of my diet if I'm ever going to be svelte and stunning again. But you could have knocked me over with a feather this week (well - a bucketful of feathers, given that I'm still about 30 pounds overweight) when I realized that my pre-vegan diet was actually the limited one.
I mean, I bought a butternut squash this week. A butternut squash! I have no clue what I'm going to do with it, but I've made pretty good friends with this Internet thing, and I'm sure she'll have some ideas. I keep marveling at how much I've missed out on because I so craved the cheese. My diet was getting just plain monotonous what with the chicken and the cheddar and the occasional bowl of chocolate ice cream lovingly drenched in a big old puddle of guilt.
And speaking of cravings, I started the week intent on finding a reliable supplier of dairy-free chocolate. Now I pretty much don't care. I haven't had a sugar cr
aving all week, much less a chocolate craving or any other kind of craving. That was pretty much from the get-go. Not only that, but my skin is clearer than it's been since the first wallop of puberty. I'm sleeping better. Less back pain. Fewer mood swings. Much, much, much more energy and clarity up top.And my GI tract -- oh, sweet, sweet, GI tract. Finally you love me.
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Okay, since this is a family life blog, I suppose I should say something about the family here. I've always resisted the idea of fixing two or three different meals for a single family at dinnertime. And yet, I'm really not into guilting or pressuring someone to make a lifestyle change they're not interested in. So unless the Wizard does a 180 on his own and starts eating vegan with me (a girl can dream), it looks like we might be headed in that direction.
There could be worse things. We'll probably just have to be really organized, planning meals more carefully to minimize the work and maximize the use of ingredients. It would be nice to have one or two dishes at each meal in common -- less for the work and more for the relationship that grows when people break bread together. The same bread. It doesn't seem quite as connected if each person's meal is totally separate.
And then there's the whole thing about saving the planet for our son and all his little friends. I've long known that it takes lots and lots of land and water to produce a pound of beef (much less so for a pound of chicken, but still...). Plus, we'll (temporarily) be a one-income family come February 15, and hell if veggies aren't a lot cheaper than meat and cheese. I guess that's 'cause of all the resources it takes to raise a bleating pound of protein.
But. It's now Friday afternoon and I'm not quite ready to ponder all those complex thoughts. I'm just looking forward to a weekend of exploring my new hobby. Dairy-free cornbread, here I come!
Image credits: Garden of Vegan, GI tract
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