I haven't written in a while, that much is clear. I'm both excited and challenged by the transition upon me at the moment. My current job is ending next week and I have nothing lined up. We have moved into our house and the lack of permanency, even after a month, is starting to gnaw at me a bit. I can't shake the feeling of "I should be doing more" or "we should be further along by now".
We're in month two and half of our vegan experiment. It's been hard. We're not experimenting with our cooking as much as we did with our first-time-around-vegan-month-challenge last year. We've been super busy. We've also let go just a bit by incorporating one dairy day into each month. I find myself wondering about the purpose of it all and what lessons I'm trying to reinforce for myself. What is the benefit and learning I intended when I first devised this idea in my mind?
But most of all I find myself fantasizing about two things: a springy donut with lots of chocolate frosting and a cheese pizza. It's marginally ridiculous how much I cannot get these two dangerous foods off my mind. I wonder...have I lifted these silly things up on a pedestal? Is not eating them and desiring them making them too huge? If I allowed myself to eat it, after having learned lessons of moderation in the past two months, would I be able to enact those lessons?
I'm also toying with the idea of amending the experiment further. If we eat vegan all week and allow ourselves one dairy treat each week would the spirit of the experiment remain the same? Would that teach me more...aka reward for healthy behavior? Or would that be giving up?
It's all so ambiguous when I've set the parameters and they feel fluid. And what is my purpose in this whole thing? And what would "failing" really mean if I continued improving my health? Without a true sense of vegan purpose like "I won't eat this because it's harming animals", its hard to find my bearings sometimes. I don't want to feel like I've given up or that I've failed. But truth be told, the experiment is difficult within our social confines.
So, I'm discerning what I want to do and searching for the why.
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If you are doing the Vegan diet for health, have you considered doing a Lacto-ovo diet? Most Vegetarians I live around and grew up with are Lacto-ova, you can have eggs and milk just not the flesh.
ReplyDeleteWe have considered it, but cheese and dairy in general are huge trigger foods for me. Also, cheese is very unhealthy. So, part of why we chose vegan was to avoid any of that temptation. It's been working pretty well thus far. I've lost 13 pounds in 2.5 months and we have only ended up eating dairy a few times. I actually did give in and eat each of these things recently. Now I'm trying to find my way back. The health benefits and digestive health benefits have been enormous.
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