I remember as a young child at my parents’ house a meal had to consist of meat, potatoes, gravy and some veggies (usually cabbage) in the following proportions: 3:2:1:1, where meat was allotted the biggest space on the plate, then came potatoes and at the end some veggies. Regardless of the size of each component the truth is that a “proper” meal had to consist of meat. If it didn’t have meat it wasn’t a real meal. The opposite was also true, I still hear my mother say “Don’t just eat the meat, eat the potatoes (or other starch) – otherwise you’re going to be hungry again in an hour”. So we begrudgingly ate all of it. Now, I don’t remember being told to eat the vegetables, probably because there was not much there to begin with. They were too expensive to have at each meal. All I remember was coleslaw with some sort of heavy cream dressing, cucumbers would make their way onto the plate once in a while and much later, when I was in my late teens, I remember carrots, green beans and tomatoes as a regular thing at the table brought on by my mom acquiring a piece of land just 10 minutes from the house to grow her own veggies and fruit. I’d only experience the veggie abundance for a little while, since I moved out shortly after her purchase.
The moral of the story is that as a kid I’ve been told (implicitly and explicitly) that you have to have meat as part of a “healthy” nourishing meal. My breakfast had deli in the sandwiches, my lunch (which in Europe is a main meal of the day) had to have meat and my supper was again my trusty sandwich with deli. That was it, I was an omnivore going on to be a carnivore… because they instilled in me this idea that if you don’t eat meat at every meal, you somehow don’t give your body the necessary building blocks, that somehow your meal isn’t complete if you don’t include meat in it!!
Mind you, I was never overweight as a child, if anything, I was underweight. I’d be told constantly to eat more, because my frame was too bony. All those potatoes and meat combos were not doing it for me. Or was it my metabolism that was through the roof, not letting me put on too much weight, burning all those calories? Or maybe it was the fact that snacking only happened once a month, when parents got paid? Yes, we did not snack on chips, chocolate, sodas etc etc everyday, but about once a month….
Then I moved out and didn’t think twice about changing anything. What’s more, by moving to North America I found myself in the land of plenty and of convenience! I learned that I don’t need to spend hours and hours preparing the food, I can buy it already prepared and simply put it in the oven, wait 30-45 minutes and then serve it! How convenient indeed! Snacks were abundant as well. I didn’t all of a sudden become a rich person, far from it, but “food” was much cheaper on this side of the North Atlantic Ocean! My blind infatuation with this overabundance lasted about 4-5 years, that’s how long it took me to realize I was slowly killing myself with “this convenience”! All my adult life I was about 50-53kg, now I was weighting a whooping 70kg! For a while I was convincing myself that it was due to the fact that I “just” gave birth to my child. But the weight would never come off, that is until I saw my nutrition habits for what they really were – JUNK.
To make a long story short, fortunately I have informed myself on the deadly habits I’ve been subjecting my body to and understood what had to be done to reverse those 5 years of junk in the trunk. I’ve ditched all processed foods and turned to natural healthy ones. I shed my extra weight and was finally back to my original jeans. Since then another 5 years passed, my weight fluctuated a bit and today I find myself at a point where I’m overflowing with information on food, food industry and treatment of our food and I’m no longer happy with the choices I’m making mostly because I no longer know what’s in the food I’m consuming and feeding to my family! I’ve watched countless documentaries on the food industry and can no longer subject myself to the garbage they produce. So after reading on raw foodism, vegetarianism and veganism I finally decided it is time to abandon meat and most meat products and turn even more to natural foods like vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains and seeds. I’ve contemplated the idea for a while, by reading various blogs on the matter and I must admit it was slow coming. Simply put it was difficult for me to envision my life without meat. Upon learning about my conversion my geek even pointed out that he has suggested ditching the meat a while back to which I “freaked out” saying that there won’t be anything else to eat for us. I don’t recall this outburst. Needless to say today is my 3rd day without ANY meat and these are some of the meals I’ve been consuming:
Zucchini spaghetti with home made tomato sauce
Spinach salad with nutritional yeast
Creamy pepper soup
Curry Lentil crackers with Sweet pepper hemp pesto
In the end, after reading on my options I decided that this is going to be a semi-rawlacto-vegeterian diet, which means that many of my meals are going to be raw (as in not cooked) and I will forego all meat and eggs, but will from time to time allow dairy products (I just can’t see myself not eating yogurt for now).
