Ten-Point Plan to Becoming a Vegetarian
Step 4: Make all your dinners meatless.
Once you’ve found three new dinners that you love, that’s nine vegetarian dinners to choose from! That’s a different meal every night, if you like, plus two alternates – which may be more variety than you had before you started transitioning to a meatless diet! Odds are good that, at this point, you’ll be intrigued by the different flavors and textures of your vegetarian entrees and you’ll keep on creating new menus. After all, you’re not going to eat the same nine things for the rest of your life – but it’s a great place to start! With so many dinners to choose from, it’s time to ban meat from your dinner table entirely. You should feel secure that you’re not going to hungry with so many options, and inspire you to discover even more.
Step 5: Lose the lunchmeat.
Your next step, now that you’ve successfully given up eating meat during your evening meal, it’s time to turn your attention to your lunches. If you’re the sort who takes a lunch break from the office at a restaurant, look for places that offer meat-free pasta options, vegetarian (or vegetarian-friendly) cafes, and places that have well-stocked salad bars. Burger places probably won’t have much for you to eat, but spots that specialize in sandwiches usually have vegetarian options. The downtown areas of many big cities also have street vendors offering Indian, Thai, Mexican and vegan specialties.
If you eat at home or take your lunch to work, you’ll naturally have a lot more control over your meal planning. If you have a microwave at work, you can heat up a bean burrito, a frozen vegetarian meal or leftovers from your evening meals. A snack-ish meal of pita bread slices, hummus and fruit is nutritious and fun, and if you’re lacto-ovo, there’s always egg salad or grilled cheese.
Step 6: Change your old breakfast habits.
Breakfast doesn’t have to be eggs, bacon and sausage. It can be anything you want it to be! If you want cheese enchiladas or leftover vegetarian chili, go for it. A fruit smoothie with a scoop of soy protein powder is a quick breakfast that’ll give you the boost you need, or you can toast a couple of pieces of whole-grain bread and top it with peanut butter.
On weekends, when you have more time to cook and linger over breakfast, make an omelette stuffed with mushrooms, onions and cheese, or cook up a stack of blueberry pancakes. If you simply can’t shake the craving for breakfast meats, there are vegetarian sausage links – even fake bacon, made from soy! – that can help satisfy it. Just remember that breakfast is whatever you want it to be – so long as you’re getting the nutrition you need, you can eat anything you like.
Step 7: Get creative.
If you’ve gotten this far, it’s time to get serious about embracing the vegetarian lifestyle. Giving up meat in only the beginning – there’s a whole world a foods to explore, from grains and seeds and nuts to vegetables you’ve never tried before. The more foods you’re open to eating, the more creativity you can bring to your cooking.
At this point, you should be feeling pretty good about the meal choices you already have under your belt, so now is the time to start having fun and trying new things. As you thumb through vegetarian cookbooks, you’ll find recipes that use “exotic” ingredients like quinoa, tahini and spelt. Try using soy milk as a replacement for cow’s milk in recipes, and experiment with exotic spice combinations that you’ve never tried before. This is your chance to develop a broader, more interesting recipe repertoire. Enjoy yourself!
Take a trip to your local food co-op of health food store and spend awhile reading the labels on all the products you’ve never seen before. Don’t be intimidated by the unfamiliar labels and ingredients – and don’t be shy about asking the employees how to use foods you find intriguing, or for recommendations and recipes. Tell them up front that you’re new to vegetarianism, and they’ll be happy to point you towards foods you’ve probably never considered before.
Step 8: Giving up the eggs.
During the last step, you may have noticed something – you’re now an ovo lacto vegetarian! Congratulations! You may also notice, though, that you’re eating a lot of eggs and cheese. This happens to most new vegetarians, actually, because cheese is tasty and eggs are inexpensive sources of protein. But both add the amount of fat and cholesterol in your diet and, if you think back to previous chapters, the practices of high-tech egg farms are barbaric.
But experienced vegetarians know how to replace eggs in recipes, and now that you’re an experienced vegetarian, it’s time you started doing it, too. You certainly don’t have to give up eggs entirely if you don’t want to – but there are a number of ways that you can at least cut back on the amount of eggs you eat.
If you’re a fan of egg salad, try replacing the eggs with tofu – use everything else you would in your favorite egg salad recipe like mayonnaise, celery, onion and mustard, and you’ll find you’ll never miss the eggs. Tofu also works as an excellent substitute for scrambled eggs when sauteed with onions, mushrooms, garlic and little salt. For a binding agent when making a veggie loaf or vegetarian burger, try some tahini (chickpea paste, available in the natural foods or ethic section of your grocery store), mashed potatoes or soft tofu.
You may find, after some experimentation, that you don’t want to give up eggs after all. But even then, cutting back on your consumption is a good idea for a number of reasons – and you can always seek out organic eggs from small, local farms that don’t indulge in the same abhorrent practices as the big operations.
Step 9: Find new ways to build your bones.
When we’re kids, we’re all told over and over again to drink our milk. Even as adults, the milk industry keeps drumming into our heads that we have to drink milk and eat lots of dairy products to maintain strong ones and teeth. While it’s true that our bodies require calcium for good health, we don’t need to drink milk to get it.
Did you know that humans are the only animals who drink the milk of another species? Cow’s milk is ingeniously designed by nature to provide the calcium, riboflavin, fat, protein and carbohydrates that a baby calf needs to grow into a huge cow – and even calves stop drinking milk once it develops past infancy. Humans have actually evolved over thousands of years so that many of us —mostly Westerners—can drink milk without getting sick by producing lactase, an enzyme that breaks down the sugars (lactose) in cow milk. But many non-Western cultures have never developed the ability to drink milk, and a large number of people of European descent are still lactose intolerant. Drinking milk as an adult is simply unnatural – people who can do so without suffering intestinal discomfort are benefitting from a genetic anomaly.
Yet, we still need calcium. If you enjoy eating cereal, try one of the many soy or rice-based milk replacements on the market. There are a wide variety of brands and they all taste different – so if you don’t like the first one or two you try, keep experimenting until you find one you like. And make sure you add calcium-rich food to your meals like leafy green vegetables, and beans. We’ll discuss this is further detail in the next chapter.
Once you find yourself enjoying a wide variety of foods that are rich in calcium, you’ll find it a lot easier to eliminate dairy from your diet. After you become accustomed to eating calcium-rich foods drinking non-dairy milk supplements, you can move on to trying soy-based cheeses. And look for nutritional yeast at your health food store – added to tofu dishes or sprinkled on popcorn, it adds a delicious, cheese-like flavor to recipes.
Step 10: Become a savvy consumer.
When you shop for food, examine the labels carefully for animal products you need to avoid. You’ll be surprised by how many foods contain lard, dried milk, eggs and other animal by-products. It can be extremely challenging at first, but don’t be discouraged – you’ll soon find yourself becoming as familiar with the products and brand names that help you stay on course as you were with the products you used in your old life.
As you spend more and more time educating yourself about eating meat-free, you’ll discover exactly how diligent you want to be about your new lifestyle. You may find that it’s worth the effort you put into it, and you want to embrace a completely vegan way of life. Or you may find you are comfortable eating commercially made bread products that contain eggs while not cooking with eggs for your other meals. Don’t allow politics to dictate your dietary choices, seeing a began diet as ethically superior to an ovo lacto one, and beating yourself up because you still eat cheese. You can be proud of yourself for adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, and even if you don’t go 100 percent vegan you’ve still made a healthy, humane choice. Be proud of yourself!
