CHAPTER 4 - Where Do I Begin? - Getting Started on Your Meatless Journey
If you’ve made it this far, you’re obviously ready to change your life and become a vegetarian. But giving up meat – especially if you’ve become accustomed to making it your main source of protein – can be tough. You’ll find as you go along that it’s about more than just changing the foods that you eat – you’re going to have to adjust the way you think about nutrition, about your body and self-image, and about how your choices affect the world you live in. But it’s also a deeply personal voyage that’s yours to do in your own way, finding the path that will take you into the future in the healthiest, happiest way possible.
It may not be an easy transition, either. You may still love the taste of meat, and the idea of living your entire life without it is daunting. You may have family members who are resistant to making the change, and who’ll try to sabotage you for their own reasons. You’ll need to learn new recipes, plan new menus, and arm yourself with nutritional information that you never bothered with before. It’s a lot to think about!
It can all seem overwhelming, but with a plan, some structure and a little guidance it can be done by anyone. The most important thing is to be patient – allow yourself the time you need to develop new menus that you enjoy, try new recipes and discover new foods. Don’t think that becoming a vegetarian means that you’ll be spending countless hours wandering the aisles of natural foods stores and figuring out what to do with quinoa – unless you enjoy that sort of thing. The truth is, the easiest way to transition to a meatless diet is to eat foods easily available at your neighborhood grocery store – although you’ll definitely want to check out that health food store as you become more comfortable with your vegetarian lifestyle.
Finding a sense of purpose
To successfully change a lifelong habit like eating meat to the healthier habit of living entirely on plant-based foods, you’ll need a strong reason for changing. If you aren’t 100 percent sure of your reasons for becoming vegetarian, you’ll find it hard to resist temptation. Social pressure is often the undoing of new vegetarians – they’re completely committed when at home or eating out with another vegetarian, but give in to meat-eating when presented with a friend’s meat loaf or attending an outdoor BBQ. I was the same way – until I found a way of thinking that helped me to stick with the vegetarian lifestyle.
When I first started to become a vegetarian, I "fell off the wagon" many times. I’d be a committed vegetarian for days, then give in to some form of temptation (I still craved KFC!), feel bad about myself, then try again. And again. I kept improving all the time, eventually sticking to my vegetarian diet for weeks at a stretch. I was sure I was successful when I stayed true to my new lifestyle for three months – and then a friend took me to a seafood buffet, and I gave into temptation yet again! I knew that I wanted to become a vegetarian because I hate the idea of killing animals for my food, but sometimes animal foods are very hard to resist.
I wanted so badly to become a vegetarian, yet I kept failing. Why? How could I want to do this so much and still fail? After a lot of soul-searching, I found my reason to be a real vegetarian, and I’ve never looked back since. Once I knew, completely and with every part of my mind and my heart, why vegetarianism was so important to me, I was able to commit to it completely, and not have any desire to eat meat again!
Here’s the reason that I found works for me. Like most people, I don’t want to be hurt, killed, or receive pain, and animals certainly don’t want those things either. They feel pain, just like we do. So isn’t it wrong to inflict pain and death on animals? Just because humans have better technology, we often believe that we’re superior to other living beings and we can do whatever we want to them.
In an earlier chapter, we discussed the concept of an alien race coming to earth and believing themselves to be superior to humans. We would be nothing to them, beneath their respect – much the same way we look at cows, pigs and chickens – so why wouldn’t they think, "These humans are a low, primitive species. We can do whatever we want to them since they can’t fight back. We have complete control over them?" And if these aliens were meat-eaters, there would be nothing to stop them from herding us into pens, cutting off our feet and hands so that we can’t run or fight back, kill us in slaughterhouses and then eat us for their food. I mean, we taste great! So they kill millions of us every day, cut us up into steaks and chops, store the meat and sell it to each other in little white, plastic-wrapped packages.
It’s a horrible, horrible thought. Yet this is exactly the way we treat animals right now, because we believe we are superior to them and we have better technology. But is this really the right way to treat other living beings? Just like, they feel happiness and fear, pleasure and pain. They just want to live.
Think about that. They just want to live. Who doesn’t want to live? What right does humanity have to decide the time and the manner in which an animal’s life should end?
That’s my personal reason for becoming a vegetarian. Once I came to the realization that harming and killing animals for my food was wrong – and completely unnecessary – I was no longer even tempted by meat. I found my reason to stay committed. My journey has ended.
And I’ve been a vegetarian ever since. You need to find your own reason that strikes such a strong chord with you intellectually emotionally that you never look back at your previous life. A reason that you believe so strongly, you’ll never regret the decision, because you know that it’s the right thing to do.
If you found my "alien" reasoning quite logical, whenever you have the temptation to eat meat again, please try to remember about it 
. Whatever reasoning you choose, make it something that you believe with your whole heart. Once you do, vegetarianism will be something that you can adopt completely, for your entire life.
