Robert·ology

A perfectly valid question many people have about vegetarianism is “why?” With seemingly everyone around doing fine on the “standard” diet, why bother with something different?

One reason is for your own health. It seems the world is on a health craze right now, but maybe that’s just how it’s always been. I find it curious that the assumption all around is that a vegetarian diet is healthier than the Standard American Diet (SAD) yet people don’t want to do much with this information.

“I know I should probably eat less meat but…” and that sentence is never finished. Never finished because there is no excuse for not doing what you know (your own words) you should be doing. If you believe something can improve your health, do it now or stop complaining about your poor health.

But is a vegetarian diet really better for you?

You’re expecting me to say “absolutely” and then pour on the stats to back up my claim, right? Well, my answer to the question is “maybe.”

Will a vegetarian diet harm you? It would be easy to destroy your health with only chocolate and candy - even if they contain no animal ingredients. If you’re eating real food, though, that won’t be the case. Will that double cheese burger harm you? I think you know the answer to that one.

Go find out what a meet free diet does for you. I won’t be able to tell you that and neither will anyone else. Find out. How bad could it be? How great could it be?

Here’s a two minute video from CNN on Angela Stokes who got rid of 160 pounds (~72.5 kg) by changing what she ate.

And if you’re interested in learning about the kind of things she did, check out this free online seminar from Kevin Gianni - a guy I’ve been following for a long time now. It starts Sunday. I’m really looking forward to it.

I thought I’d follow yesterday’s post with an example from my life. This weekend happen to contain a lot of “outside” food for me.

Saturday a friend and I picked up pizza from a place that has a new vegan cheese. Our pizza had roasted garlic, spinach, artichoke, this vegan cheese, and sauce on a whole wheat crust. I know you won’t find that kind of pizza just anywhere but in some larger or more progressive cities you could.

Then Sunday we had brunch at an all vegetarian restaurant. We shared a nice salad with some kind of creamy basil dressing (good stuff), some vegan french toast, coffee cake, and what they called a sunrise burrito. Again, you may not have such a place near you, but also, this isn’t in any way a typical weekend for me. Later that day we finished the leftover pizza.

Today I ate mostly at home. Breakfast was nice - just apples. I had a meeting at 7:00 pm and was really in the mood for a Del Taco burrito but didn’t have the time to get there so I settled for Taco Bell. It’s really easy to get no cheese there, just say “fresco style” and they substitute it with a tomato and cilantro salsa.

After the meeting, some of the people involved like to go to the Big Boy restaurant which is not veg friendly at all. I think your only options there are salad and french fries. Maybe they could make up a fruit bowl. But I’m really there for the company and not the food. I had already had some dinner before the meeting so I was pretty well set anyway. (a tip for situations where you may not have food options - eat before you go)

Even without those places I went to which have some specific vegan items on the menu, there are plenty of options for food outside of the home. You can get veggie pizzas anywhere, though their vegetable selection may not be the greatest. And if you’re OK with dairy and egg, most breakfast places can provide you with pancakes, french toast, or waffles. Surely you have a Taco Bell somewhere around you. There are four just in my little city here. The beans do not contain lard, but they do have hydrogenated oils. You knew it wasn’t health food anyway, right?

So, what kind of veg food do you like to get when you’re out?

One concern of some people - those who have no experience with it - is eating out while vegetarian. Where do you go? What can you get? Is it even possible?

You probably haven’t noticed many of the vegetarian options at the places you frequent. Or perhaps haven’t recognized them as being vegetarian. Similarly, I don’t notice all the McDonald’s I pass. These things just aren’t on my radar as veg*n fare may not be on yours unless you’re consciously looking for it.

Sure, you probably won’t find a great veg meal at a steak house, but you may. These days the choices are there. Veggie burgers are plentiful and meat free options raineth upon us.

Mexican food is a good way to go. Some places may use lard in the beans or chicken stock in the rice - just ask first. Chineese and Thai are good (watch for fish sauce), sushi, middle eastern, pizza, …more than you realize.

Expand your horizons. Have fun with it. Stop in at places you see in your travels and check out the menu. Your range of options will grow as well as your experiences.

Some people like to throw out that Hitler was vegetarian. Perhaps they wish to disprove vegetarianism, or show that it isn’t “pure”, or even link it to mental disorders. Of course, none of this makes any sense. Connections between animal abuse and violence against humans have been shown, but fruits and vegetables? I think not.

To top it off, Hitler was not vegetarian which makes any of these attempts pointless. It’s been said that his doctor recommended a vegetarian diet, and also that it was part of a public relations campaign to have him appear as ascetic and pure. Whatever the case, does it really matter? If a link between diet and mental state can be shown, it would. But such links tend to go the other direction.

The question remains: Why is this used as an argument against vegetarianism?

My conclusion: People say some crazy stuff when they’re uncomfortable.

There’s a big chance that someone you know is vegetarian. And there’s a 100% chance that someone you know of is vegetarian. All over the net you’ll find lists of well known vegetarians. No, don’t bother to go searching just yet, here are some highlights:

Susan B. Anthony (a leader in U.S. civil rights history)
“Weird Al” Yankovic (comic singer)
Hank Aaron (baseball player)
Danny De Vito (actor)
Louisa May Alcott (author of Little Women)
Tom Petty (musician)
Bob Barker (game show host - The Price is Right)
Milton Berle (comedian)
Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert)
John Cleese (comedian - of Monty Python)
Joe Namath (U.S. football player)

As you can see, vegetarians come in all shapes and sizes. A list such as this shouldn’t be viewed as supporting evidence for veg*nism, though. Just because some well known people choose to do something doesn’t make it a good choice automatically. But it’s likely that looking through such a list could change your perception of what makes a vegetarian.

There’s also a nice “safety in numbers” feeling. Vegetarians aren’t the weird, on the fringe group they were once seen as.

This has been day nine of my Vegetarian Awareness Month blog-a-thon. You can subscribe by email or RSS to get all future posts delivered right to you. And follow me on Twitter. Every post here will have a tweet there.

Today’s post is somewhat of a combination of the previous three:

• What Do You Eat
• Stay on Target
• Creatures of Habit

I say that because what I want to talk about here involves what you eat, the steps needed to stay on target, and our meal habits.

If you would be able to look at the meals of everyone you know, you’d find that they’d typically be seven to ten different meals over and over again. Think about what you have for breakfast - does it vary much? How about lunch? And some families actually say it aloud. “It’s Friday - pizza night!” You too?

So when it comes to thinking vegetarian when you’re just not used to it, it can seem overwhelming. In the end, though, it will come down to seven to ten meals that make up what you eat most of the time.

Picture this: you try out a new vegetarian meal just two or three times a week. How long would it take you to find seven that you like enough to have again? A month if you hit the right recipes for you. Maybe two months at that pace. After a couple months then, here you are with a nice catalog of meals you enjoy and - BAM! - instant vegetarian.

Seriously, though, whether or not you want to call yourself a vegetarian, it can be that simple to get there.

Of course, it’s not likely that you’ll want to have the same ten meals for the rest of your life. What you will have, though, is a nice, comfortable place from which you can reach out now and then. Create a foundation of tasty, peaceful, enjoyable meals and explore from there.

Start today. Find one vegetarian meal for dinner. It really is that simple.

Here’s a common exchange I used to have somewhat often:

“Oh, so you’re vegan?”
   ”Yep.”
“Must be hard.”
   ”Not really.”
“Well, I couldn’t do it.”

We are creatures of habit. Look at what you’ve done today. Probably 80% of it was what you did - and around the same time as what you did - the day before, and the day before that, and so on. There’s nothing much wrong with that. It’s the way we work.

However, growth requires change, and change requires effort. And when it comes to changing our habits, a great amount of effort may be needed at first.

Here’s an exchange I’m sure has occured more than once on college campuses:

“So, you get up every day at 6:00?”
   ”Yeah.”
“Must be hard.”
   ”Not really.”
“Well, I couldn’t do it.”

Of course, anyone can do that. It’s really a matter of changing habits. It takes work to get used to waking up early in the morning if you’re not used to it already. Over time it takes less work. Then one day when someone says to you, “It must be hard,” you reply with, “Not really,” because it isn’t hard anymore; it’s your new habit.

We are creatures of habit. Use that to your advantage and create yourself some habits that will get you to where you want to be.

For the matter of our food habits, that takes a great deal of effort to change at first. Food is something we think about many times thoughout the day - every day almost all the time. Meals, snacks, and drinks. The smells, tastes, sight of food everywhere. Feeling hungry, feeling full. It’s a big habit to change!

But just as you can choose to be up early every day, you can choose to make your meals of whatever you wish. You will eat the way you eat today because it was the way you ate yesterday.

This is important. It’s not because “that’s the way people eat.” No. It’s because that’s the way you eat. Your choices will be influenced by everything around, sure. But in the end, you are responsible for your own habits.

“First you form your habits and then they form you.”

Welcome to day six of Vegetarian Awareness Month. And if you’re wondering what happened to yesterday’s post, I’ll be taking Sundays off.

Here’s a tip that can - and should - be applied to many areas of your life. If you’re looking to improve your way of eating and are attempting to move toward a vegetarian diet, you may find it difficult sometimes in the very beginning. What can be done about that?

Have a Plan

Gather up some good looking recipes and plan some meals. You don’t want to wait until meal time before figuring out what you’ll be eating. Write out the meal schedule for the day - or the week if you can. Remember that you don’t need something completely different every day. Take it slowly to start and get used to it.

Be Prepared

What will happen if you really want to do a full day vegetarian but have nothing to eat? You’ll probably go right back to the old habits and eat whatever is around. There’s already enough resistance in changing habits. Make it easy on yourself.

Be sure to keep good food in the house. Make up a big batch of veggie chili and it will be ready for you when you’re hungry. Chili always tastes better the next day anyway. Have a good supply of fresh fruit around, and keep it out where you can see it. Have a basket of fruit as the table center piece. Whatever it is you like, make sure you have easy access to it.

Start Now

There is no perfect time. Take a step now and see where you end up. It doesn’t have to be one giant step either. Sometimes those first small steps don’t seem to be much but they are often the most important. So, go! Do something now!

Quite often when someone finds out that a seemingly “normal” person they know is actually vegetarian or vegan, the only thing that can come out is “What do you eat?” For me, after explaining that I don’t eat meat, dairy, or eggs, and I get that question, I’m tempted to reply with “everything else!”

People used to a meat centered diet don’t seem to realize that plant foods are clearly the majority of our food options. I’d really like to memorize an alphabetical list of all the edible fruits and vegetables so I can recite it the next time this question comes up, but it’s bound to be way too long. But what I can do is give you a few links to some great sites.

First, here’s a list of some lunch ideas. It was created with children in mind but obviously these foods can be eaten by anyone (even you). And they’re pretty simple which is good for anyone getting used to the idea. Hey, I bet you’ve had some of these veg meals before.

The Eat Air blog will show you what some actual vegans are actually eating. Some simple and some more extravagant.

Another great one is The Fatfree Vegan Kitchen. Some amazing photos there too.

And sometimes my favorite meal is fruit. Yes, just fruit for a meal can be wonderful. For a while now it’s been bananas for me but recently I’ve sort of switched to apples.

This has been day four of my Vegetarian Awareness Month blog-a-thon. There’s plenty of month left for you to experience a bit of the veg*n way yourself. Visit those links above and see if you can do one veg meal a day for a few days, or how about one complete vegetarian day? Give it a try. You’ll be fine the next day.

We’ll round off some of the history for now with what was probably the first intentional “vegetarian society” of sorts.

Think back to high school geometry and you may recall Pythagoras. Yes, the a² + b² = c² guy. Well, back around the end of the 6th century BC he and his inner circle of scholars and philosophers adopted a vegetarian way of life.

The Pythagorean diet came to mean an avoidance of the flesh of slaughtered animals. Pythagorean ethics first became a philosophical morality between 490-430 BC with a desire to create a universal and absolute law including injunctions not to kill “living creatures,” to abstain from “harsh-sounding bloodshed,” in particular animal sacrifice, and “never to eat meat.”

from a review of The Heretics Feast by Colin Spencer

So Pythagorean was the word for vegetarian before the v-word was created over 2,000 years later. Looks like this guy was no “one theorem wonder.”