vegan on a trial basis
Posted by hms on Feb 06, 2010 · Member since Feb 2010 · 14 posts
Hi all. A recipe search led me here.... thought I'd poke my nose into the forums and say hello.
For 10 years I've been not-quite-vegetarian, eating a little dairy and eggs, and seafood once a week or so. It's a compromise that has worked well for me and kept me from falling completely off the wagon. Now I'm going vegan on a trial basis: I plan to stick to it for at least a month and see how I feel before committing to permanent changes. One week into the experiment, I'm feeling no pain. :)
Yes, you'll feel great! Load up on veg. and fruit. ;)b
welcome!! i was only gonna be a vegan for 2 weeks and here i am 2 years later, loving it! :D
Veggies and fruit are pretty much a given, whatever else I may be eating. Looks like the hard part is going to be replacing lost calories from the milk, cheese, and yogurt I'm not eating. I don't want to lose weight, so I need to find a couple hundred extra low-sugar, high-protein calories per day from somewhere.
Veggies and fruit are pretty much a given, whatever else I may be eating. Looks like the hard part is going to be replacing lost calories from the milk, cheese, and yogurt I'm not eating. I don't want to lose weight, so I need to find a couple hundred extra low-sugar, high-protein calories per day from somewhere.
Ah! The least of my problems. ; ) Do you do lots of cooking? Grains, pastas, avocado, nuts, and lentils.
Yes, you'll feel great! Load up on veg. and fruit. ;)b
Exactly! Keep it up u will feel great in no time and when u eat vegan food flies right through you! It's amazing!
Wonderful! You can do it! You'll be surprised how you stop craving foods like dairy and eggs...then slowly become a bit grossed out by them! You will also feel great!!! Try a bunch of recipes from this site. Make it easy on yourself and just type in ingredients you want to use or dishes you want to make right into the vegweb search spot and google, i.e., "vegan pizza". Being vegan made me start preparing many foods from scratch and now vegan cooking and baking is my favorite hobby!
I hope its fun for you too!
I cook quite a bit; usually nothing very complicated. Pasta, nuts, and cereals are part of the regular meal rotation already; avocados when they're in season (they're expensive and not so good right now); don't like lentils much but use tons of other legumes, especially chickpeas. I've taken to munching on handfuls of nuts, but the extra oil probably isn't doing me any good. Maybe I just need to eat more tofu. :)
Re. diminishing cravings: we'll see. I haven't had red meat or poultry in longer than I can remember, and steak nauseates me but I still get chicken cravings sometimes. Go figure.
A google search for "vegan waffles" is what led me here in the first place. (I made some this weekend - they were pretty good.)
Thanks for the warm welcomes, everybody.
Welcome!! Have fun looking around and don't hesitate to contact me with any questions, laura at vegweb dot com!! I think after you're around for awhile, you'll decide that we're awesome and being vegan is the best and it'll stick ;-)
Nice to meet you. After many years of vegetarianism, I took a 30-day vegan challenge myself back in September. Been vegan ever since. Best of luck.
A "handful" of nuts every now and then is good for you, but not a huge handful. LOL
I committed to a vegan diet for a week . . . almost 10 years ago. It was rough at first, but now the things I used to crave disgust me. I don't regret my choice for even a moment. Don't be afraid to try new things. In my opinion the recipes that aren't made to mimic nonvegan ones are the tastest, at least at first. I've had a few flops on the way, but not every nonvegan recipe I had made in the past was my thing either. Other than limited options for going out to eat, being vegan has introduced me to the best food I've had in my life.
In my opinion the recipes that aren't made to mimic nonvegan ones are the tastest, at least at first. I've had a few flops on the way, but not every nonvegan recipe I had made in the past was my thing either. Other than limited options for going out to eat, being vegan has introduced me to the best food I've had in my life.
I agree with this 100%. When I went vegan, I had to step back from omni foods, and not try to replace everything 1 for 1. Like, when making pizza, I just made cheeseless pizza for quite a few months. Then I tried Tofutti mozzarella slices, and loved them. I think it's incredibly important to just focus on fruits, veggies, beans, and grains for the first while, and don't concern yourself with replacement foods, like soy ground beef products. They're not the same, they won't taste the same, and it's no good to set yourself up to dislike something.
And I am also eating so well! When people ask "What do you EAT?" I say "Anything and everything without meat, dairy, eggs, or honey, and I'm eating a lot better than you!" :) We've expanded our tastes so much and have tried so many different things, because I couldn't fall back to grilled cheese when I didn't feel like cooking. Going vegan was one of the best decisions of my life!
It's been a rough week. I can eat until I'm stuffed but still feel hungry all the time; I'm exhausted, and I've developed a persistent headache. I had to cut down on some of the high-fiber low-calorie salad-y type stuff to make room for denser food, but that can't be healthy, can it? I didn't have a lot of refined flour or sugar in my diet before, and don't want to start now. Yesterday I had a piece of cake and felt great for an hour; then it was back to being hungry again. It's like all I do is cook and eat and sit around being hungry and tired.
Bleh, sorry to vent. Maybe this is just an awkward transition phase.
I'll go ahead and take that advice about replacement foods and apply it to fake cheese, but I made friends with fake meat products long ago, even as a red-meat-eating omnivore in my starving student days. (Cheap greasy hamburgers: nasty! Cheap greasy veggieburgers: innocuous at worst.)
Gee, I'm sorry it's going so rough for you. I've heard those same symptoms many time from others, so it might be a transition or "detox" you're going through. Hang in there.
Thanks... I guess some people get over it and stick around, and others don't, and disappear.
I don't think "detox" is the right description for what is going on... milk and eggs aren't toxic or addictive. It is plausible that my metabolism just needs time to adjust to new input, so I'll stick it out for a few more weeks.
It's weird how big a difference there is between "hardly any animal products" and "no animal products". I didn't quit cold-turkey, but gradually decreased over months. Felt fine in January on, like, 3 servings of dairy a week, tiny amounts of egg, and no meat; quit entirely in February, and started feeling pretty bad after 10 days. It seems like I'm missing some substance which is supplied by milk, but not fortified soymilk or vitamin supplements. Lactose? Milk protein? Butterfat? I don't know.
How much fruit are you eating? It's hard to comment without knowing exactly what you are eating, but maybe if you replaced the milk with vegatables, beans, grains, nuts, etc., you have eliminated you source of simple sugars. If eating a peice of cake made you feel better, than that is the best I can come up with on this information. Another thing, are you eating a good source of omega 3s like walnuts or flax seed? Vegetarians can become anemic when they replace meat with dairy. Its a long shot, but could you have been developing this before you took the final plunge? Eating a bunch of dark green veggies will help with that. Really, I sounds like you just aren't eating enough. Check your daily calorie intake.
Thanks for the reply. This is starting to sound like a tech support forum: "help me debug my diet".
How much fruit are you eating?
2-5 servings a day, not counting "fruits" like bell pepper and tomato. It varies a lot.
Walnuts, yes. Flax seed, no. How much is required?
That's definitely a possibility. I was deficient in something(?) a few months back, resulting in hair loss, but it seemed to resolve with a multivitamin. The timing is weird though: why would symptoms start while I was phasing out cheesy food in favor of beans and greens? B12 issues?
After spending some time on a calorie-counter website, that's one thing I'm pretty sure it isn't. (2000-2300 calories a day! I doubt I'm using more than 1800.)
milk and eggs aren't toxic or addictive.
But see, that's where you're wrong.
We're not meant to consume milk (baby cows are).
and it's VERY addictive. milk has chemicals in it.
ice cream isn't addictive? cheese?
There is a detox phase, and most people go through it.
I wish you luck, even though you don't need it.
you're doing just fine.
This is a very interesting thread for me..........I went from eating a non vegetarian diet (never was a big meat eater but I did have some) to a Vegan diet about a year ago.
I lasted about a month and I will say, I felt better than I have ever felt before.
Not sure what compelled me to go back from that but I did. I think I had a "slip" and just never really quite made it back to the vegan diet.
Now for the past 6 months to a year I have been a lacto vegetarian. I only eat small quantities of dairy but I do consume it.
My huge problem was sweets. It still is.
When I started eating a vegan diet my cravings for sugar went away completely. Looking back on that I am just now realizing that if I eliminate it completely, my desire for it will go away.
I have been debating on how to get myself back on track. This thread opened my eyes up a little more.......I am probably going to try to get back to the vegan diet.
I'm sorry it has been rough for you. It may be too that you've got a mild cold / illness that is hanging on and it just so happens to be at the same time you are adjusting your diet. Seems a lot of that is going around right now (my kids and I have been sick a couple times for several weeks at a time this winter so far).
I never did have any side effects of eating a vegan diet.
I really did feel better than ever.
Good luck to you!
I think I may just start moving back towards that goal myself.
Hi HMS,
Welcome to vegweb.com! There are some amazing recipes on this site! I just made a batch of the chickpea and sweet potato curry and it is fabulous.
I relate some to your post. I went vegan a little over a year ago after being vegetarian for about 15 years. I also did not want to lose any weight, but I did lose about 5-10 pounds in the first month. I do long-distance running and started a new training cycle right around the same time as I went vegan, so I wasn't sure which factor contributed more to the weight loss. I've noticed that I eat A LOT now. I have a really fast metabolism to go with the running, and I just try to make sure that I'm eating really filling things every day. Rather than just salads and fruit (which I also eat!) I try to make a rice/bean/quinoa/pasta dish for dinner. I have to admit I often eat the whole pot of whatever it I cook up on particular night, even though the recipe says it serves multiple people! Being over a year into this, though, I really feel that it is a lifelong change for me. I do feel wonderful physically and it's also done a lot for me emotionally because I feel my actions are more in line with my values. There is definitely an adjustment period but it's worth it!
Well, I made it through another week. Doing better in some ways, worse in others.
I'm getting used to eating 5 times a day... if I cook larger batches of everything, I can keep leftovers around for a couple of days and nibble on those, so I don't feel like I'm spending all my time in the kitchen. The headaches and hunger aren't constant anymore, but still turn up at random.
The worst part is the fatigue. I'm soooooo tired, I can sleep for 10 hours a day and it doesn't feel like enough, and I get out of breath from the stupidest little things. Iron deficiency anemia sounds likely.... I'm trying to eat more greens, but so many of my staple foods are supposed to inhibit iron absorption (nuts, beans, spinach, tofu, coffee, cocoa...) and you can only eat so much broccoli.
If it is an iron problem, I must have been running on depleted stores for a long time. I thought I had a reasonably healthy diet before (pretty much what I'm eating now, plus a few other things), and this has sort-of made me question that. Maybe if I'd spent the last year eating cheeseburgers, the transition would have been easier due to more iron/B12/fat stored up. :/
dessie - Thanks for the encouragement. I see what you mean about milk, but I think we're getting into a grey area between addiction and appetite - maybe those chemicals (opioid peptides from the breakdown of protein?) are just the body's way of telling the brain "that was good! I want more!". Personally I think that anyone lucky enough to have the lactose tolerance mutation is "meant" to drink milk, and I'm choosing not to do so (well, trying anyway) because of factory farming reasons.
mailjlynn - good luck to you too! If this is a cold it's a strange one: no fever, no nasal symptoms, just malaise. I'm a little jealous of all you people who say you feel/felt better as vegans - you make it sound so easy.
lmzeigler - I'm eating A LOT too, only it's physically difficult to eat more in a sitting, so I just eat oftener. I'm currently munching on channa masala and rice: it's like my meat and potatoes. Just curious... please ignore me if I'm being rude... but did the weight ever come back?
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