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Jan

7

Becoming vegetarian

Filed Under Diet and Nutrition | 2 Comments

Tonight, for the first time ever in my life, I chose eating exclusively vegetarian meals in a restaurant. We went to a small Indonesian restaurant in the beautiful city of Anvers, about 40km from Brussels. Indonesian restaurants are a rarity in Belgium, unlike in our closest neighbour Holland that counts hundreds of them, for obvious historic reasons.

I started a few months ago paying extra attention to my eating habits. You have to know I used to be a complete junk food, grease, cheese and red meat addict. I’m grateful to have a good metabolism that has allowed me to develop neither diabetes nor high cholesterol. The various blood tests I took during the course of the last two years have all showed the same results: I’m in perfect health. I have never been fat either. Nevertheless, I decided to start taking care of the good body that has been given to me, rather than keep abusing it relentlessly till the day it suddenly breaks.

I began by lowering my fat intake. Less cheese, less fried chicken, less French fries, less pita, no more Mc Donald’s. I have come to the point where I eat a daily average of 15gr of cheese: compared to what I used to eat, it’s a tiny portion that I savour slowly, almost religiously. I cut all other dairy products and have replaced cow milk by soy and rice milk.

Then I proceeded to increase my fruit and vegetable intake. Thanks to my vegetarian girlfriend, I slowly found new ways to incorporate these foods in my daily habits. For the fruits, I use a mixer/blender (a machine I recommend buying, although I was extremely reluctant doing the expense at first) that allows me to press fresh and tasty smoothies that I gladly drink everyday with all the pulp. I reach an average daily intake of 5 to 10 fruits thanks to this machine. By comparison, I used to eat one or two per week. Thanks to the smoothies, I discovered fruits could actually give you a very satisfactory feeling of satiety, and a lot of energy too. I know it’s obvious to many of you but try not to laugh ok? I may take it real bad. No really, I’m sensitive. Anyway, I decided eating more fruits in real form, in addition to the ones contained in my daily smoothies. For a week now, I’ve been eating 2 to 5 fruits a day, plus the smoothies. I’m very proud of being able to do and actually enjoy it. Wouldn’t you be?


As for vegetables, Nathalie began showing me vegetables could be quite tasty on pies with the right spicing. She’d actually been making delicious vegetables pies for years. So I just decided to open my mind a bit and discovered it tasted awesome. Since I’m an Indian food lover, I also started paying more attention to the vegetarian meals of my favourite Indian restaurants and discovered that in actuality, most of them were even tastier than meaty meals (alou sag, dhal tarka, …). It was a surprise. I’ve been raised in a country that places meat at the centre of every meal: you decide which type of meat you’d like to eat, then you decide what side dishes are going to go well with it. I quickly understood I had to make a shift in my thinking : meat should not be the main piece of a meal anymore. This newly acquired knowledge of Indian food made us try and learn Indian cooking at home, with good success. Eating more vegetables has been mostly a matter of forgetting the way I’ve been raised about them. Vegetables are not boring water-cooked side dishes. With the right spicing and cooking, they become the tastiest things on earth.

While making all these discoveries, two processes also took place instinctively : the decrease of the global amount of food I was eating, and the drastic decrease of meat eating. Those didn’t happen consciously. It’s only after weeks that I realized I was eating less in quantity, and more fruits and vegetables.

Right now, being a bit focused on eating properly, I’m happy to discover that I get more and more able to listen to my body needs. For instance, I used to crave for the “full” (as in “I can barely move anymore”) feeling you get after eating 3 cheeseburgers. This one has disappeared. I now get urges to eat either green vegetables, or fruits. Depending on the time of the day, the situation and what I previously ate, I can feel my body asking me to give it this or that kind of nutriment. I feel more and more connected to my own body, something I’d probably been missing for years.

Curiously, it’s only as a side effect of becoming more or less vegetarian that I started caring about the way they treat animals whose destiny is to end as a piece of meat in our plates. I’m not an activist in any way (yet) but for sure it’s a good incentive to try and stop eating meat, in addition to the health benefits of eating properly.

Yesterday, at this Indonesian restaurant, despite my newly acquired taste for vegetables, I was still a bit reluctant to not ordering meat. Each and every time of my life I ever went to a restaurant, it’s always been with the unsaid and unconscious goal of actually performing a meat eating orgy. I had to change that habit. That’s how we ordered a vegetarian rice table for two. I won’t say much about it, except that I think my tongue had an orgasm. Too bad I didn’t have my camera with me, otherwise I’d have put a few pictures with explanations of the delicious meals we were served. So that you could have had an idea of what can be done with vegetables, spices and a bit of inspiration.

I’m not a vegetarian yet as I can still feel bits of meat craving once in a while, but I might become one sooner than I ever thought.

Check my more in-depth article on the topic.

For more insight, you can check these great blog posts and informations sites :

Scott Young : How to Become a Vegetarian

Zen habits : How to become a vegetarian the easy way

Vegetarian society : Going vegetarian

Vegetarian cooking made easy

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