Lately I’ve been eating meat less and less and, generally speaking, have been feeling a lot better. Ellie is 100 percent vegetarian, so it isn’t much of a change in our lives. For the most part, we don’t ever have meat in the house anyway (except for training Audrey; she loves chicken). The only time I used to eat meat was at restaurants or a quick bite to eat, like a Panera sandwich or something like that. Recently I have been trying to keep meat consumption down to maybe once every couple of weeks, and that meat is almost always exclusively chicken or lunch meats.
I don’t really have that whole crusade against the animal product manufactures that a lot of vegetarians have. Honestly, and I’m not trying to belittle the cause. I approach it from a strictly “how I feel” approach. By this I mean, how does what I eat make me feel and effect what I do or don’t do accordingly. My stomach has never been very strong and stable, and a lot of things can bug me pretty easily. Soda is first and foremost one of the big culprits. Recently I bought some ginger ale and have had some Malibu rum and Cokes. The ginger ale was OK, but the rum and cokes did some damage. So basically I try to avoid it, and when I dont I know full well the repercussions. Another kind of annoying food that makes me sick is milk. I cannot for the life of me drink a glass of milk or have milk on cereal without getting a wicked stomachache. I can eat yogurt and cheese (though cheese in small portions), and feel fine, but as soon as I hit the real milk, instant problems. So to fix that, we switched to soy milk, which isn’t bad honestly.
I wanted to illustrate the above examples because I feel like milk and soda are looked at differently by society than meat. Most everyone assumes that meat is fine, and that people should be eating it. No one looks strangely at someone who can’t drink milk, or someone that can’t drink soda. So why is it that we choose to look strangely at people who don’t eat meat? I’ll tell you right now, when I eat red meat I have instant stomach problems. Sorry tacos, we just don’t get along anymore.
People make a big deal out of vegetarianism. People say, “Oh crap, what can I cook for you? Do you eat pasta? Do you eat fruits?” and so on. I understand that looking at self-inflicted dietary restrictions may throw people off and be confusing . . . but honestly, its really not that big of deal. Cook the same crap you would normally cook. Vegetarians are pretty smart people, they will eat around the meat.
I don’t want to come off as ranting, so I just want to reiterate the point of this post. Eat what makes you feel good. I am slowly figuring out certain foods that I just can’t eat. I am also figuring out foods that I can’t eat before I want to run and exercise. I am really liking a lighter food diet. Less carbs, more veggies and fruits, less/no meat. It is working for me. I eat about 1800-1900 calories a day and have not been feeling hungry at all.
Try to break out of your eating routine, try out new things and start figuring out what may make you feel lethargic and unmotivated. Changing up my diet has helped me feel better and get motivated to hit the ground running, literally.
